I am setting some more goals for myself.  I have been sober for 7 months now, have been off Facebook for over two months and have recently left all my social media platforms.  I have lost 10 pounds since the breakup and I plan to continue on that path.  I will be focused on writing all my food down and exercising in some way daily.  I am leaving my gym I have been a member of for a couple of years.  My x got a gym membership there for his birthday from me right before our break up.  So going there is not a good option for me anymore.  I am going to join a gym a few miles down the road which has a pool.  I am more likely to go if there are water aerobics classes involved in a membership.  In addition I am going to be celibate for at least a year.  That may last even longer depending on how I feel once that year is over.  I do not trust myself to pick someone who is not going to damage me.  Sex is not a priority for me anymore.  So I have some goals and I am looking forward to a good 2018.

Sometimes heartbreak is crushing and the whole world seems to stop.

Sometimes it is just a dull ache that reminds you that something is missing.

Thankfully this time it is that dull ache and not the crushing kind.

I still lay awake at night and cry sometimes.

But I do not cry because I want him back.

I cry because I want myself back.

I’m working on that.

On Friday night December 15th, I found out my bf had made the choice to break a very serious agreement we had.  I broke up with him.  I had second thoughts right away.  I started panicking and the thought of him moving his stuff out seemed terrible and overwhelming.  I was crying like I was the one who had been broken up with.  He did not seem to feel anything about it.  Of course, that is never the complete case…we don’t know what a person is feeling.  I think both of us knew it was time to move on.  I am struggling with the break up.  This was the right thing to do.  I know that but it does not stop the pain.

So, it is now a few days later.  I got sick with a virus immediately and am still down with it.  I was lucky enough to have my housemate and friends with me throughout the weekend and my friend Nina stayed overnight with me for three nights in a row.   I was so sick I could not get out of bed without feeling dizzy and nauseated and I have lost 8 pounds.

He took his stuff over two days.  I guess I expected at least some resistance from him but there was none.  The first day he came he made dinner for the house and then he packed things and his mom picked him up.  We sat on the floor before she arrived and I told him that I was thankful for the two years we had together and I had learned much from our time.  I let him know I would miss him and that I felt we were doing the right thing even though it was hard.  I will keep his words back to me private.   Two days later he came back for the rest of his things in his other gf’s car and quickly loaded it all up.  We hugged and said we should not have contact for a while but in the future, we would hug again as friends and then he was gone.

I cannot lie.  When he drove away I was devastated.  He had been my lover for two years and though there were times he was not there when I needed him there were times he held me close and I felt everything was going to be ok.

But you know what? That is that old fairy tale bullshit kicking back in.  The real truth to all this is that I was unhappy for many months.  I loved him at one point but I know now I loved him too much.  At the end of my drinking I was black out drinking to deal with behavior in front of me that was breaking my heart.   Then I made the choice to stop drinking and over this past summer my love started to wane.  As I got better I realized what I had been doing to myself.  I had lost myself to keep him.  I cared deeply for him but I had allowed him to cross boundaries that were the core of my being.  I could not admit that and I stubbornly held on.  I just wish we could have both been honest.  It would have saved both of us pain.  I allowed things I would not normally have allowed when I was going through my recovery because I was vulnerable and not able to break it off.   So, on October 31^st I gave him an ultimatum about this behavior and he agreed to it.  He broke the agreement 5 weeks later.  Maybe that was his way of ending it.  He knew my bottom line statement was “break this agreement and our relationship ends immediately”.  There was just too much pain attached to his behavior to accept it anymore.

So, what have I learned from this?

Never lose myself again.

Never allow someone to hurt me in this way again.

Love myself fiercely and call on my friends for support and help.

Poly is not for me.

I can’t write anymore.  I am too raw and I am still hurting.  I will be healing for a while.  Send me love …I need it.

My days away from Facebook are paying off.  I am learning about myself and my own motivations when I post on social media.  Many times in the 66+ days I have been unplugged from FB I have wanted to post about something I was doing or post a pic.  I have learned however that in many instances what we post and what we see most of the time is just a carefully curated life meant to show the best.  It is a filtered, airbrushed and edited to shine for all the world to see.  In my case I was one of those people who shared everything.  I shared way too much and when I was not sharing too much I was posting pictures of myself so I could get those likes I needed so much.  I was in a bad place in my life.  I was depressed and lonely but the constant checking of my FB feed only made me feel worse.  I turned to my FB friends for advise on my breakup, my loneliness and my journey to stop the drinking I took up during my heartbreak.  The rush I felt when I would see 150 likes or 25 comments made me feel loved and not alone.  That feeling never lasted.  As soon as it passed I was working on my next post.

The thing that has struck me the most is how my carefully curated life on Facebook affected my relationship with some people.  There were people who began to not like me because I seemed so successful and happy.  There were people who assumed that when I was out on leave for some serious personal issues that I was just on an extended vacation.  What I was not posting was the mess my life really was.  My FB showed a very small piece of my life.  It showed me in costume hiding what was really happening in my life that had become very small.  It did not show the nights I cried myself to sleep or did not leave my apartment for a whole weekend.  My posts did not show the internal struggle I was going through.  I was heartbroken but my smiling pictures said otherwise.  I was struggling with the thought of continuing to live a life that seemed to be falling apart around me.

Today I am feeling better.  I am more able to focus.  There are days when my bf sits down beside me and opens up his Facebook and I have to look the other way because I immediately feel a tightness in my chest just looking at it.   I think about whether I will go back and if I did would I be able to just post occasionally and to delete most of the 1500 people on my friends list who I cannot even remember how I met.  I am scared of Facebook like an addict is afraid of mainlining again.  I don’t want to wake up and reach for my phone and my first hit of the day.   So for now I know I cannot go back.  Maybe I can someday but maybe it is best to stay unplugged and live my life instead of curating it.

As a survivor of violence I have plenty of reason to not trust the system.  I have been laughed at and treated terribly by police officers and judges in some instances.  I have seen a perpetrator scoff at the system and get off with a slap on the wrist and then return home to assault his victim immediately.   I know personally of cases where victims who were begging for help became murder victims because the police were not taking it seriously and our laws do not always help.

I have a friend who has been stalked for over two years by a man.  He has been arrested once already for stalking her and another woman.  They called it extreme stalking.  He even had placed devices on both these women’s cars to track where they were.  He was arrested last January but is out of jail and still terrifying her.  He has been sending letters to her friends and family for months.  Because he gives no return address and it is printed from a computer and he does not sign it the police have not been able to do anything.  He has also been leaving letters on her car at her place of employment.

I got one of those letters addressed to me, today at my job.  This man is dangerous.  It is obvious he is mentally ill.  I am afraid for my friend.  Some of the people who got the letters did not file reports.  I am filing one.  I want him caught.  The sad thing is this will probably not stop until he is dead.  She is not the first person he has stalked and I am sure she will not be the last.

Things need to change.  We need to help her.  I want to ask all my friends who work magic to do some work to help my friend.  If you write me personally I will give you all the information you need.  Maybe the hand of justice will finally reach him if we are able to shine the light on his deeds through some magical work.  I stand with my friend in solidarity…we will not be scared into silence.