Relational Retaliation — Or Heartbreak Warfare
There are 1,000 ways I could try to justify the way that I behaved. There are 1,000 things I could tell myself at night to help sleep better. One of my better qualities, as I ‘ve told myself, is the ability to feel everything — every emotion, every morsel of guilt, grief, and heartbreak. Put on a soundtrack of sad songs and I cannot stop myself from getting to that place — when they go low I somehow find a way to go even lower. But this is not about my guilt, it’s about the fact that I hurt someone to retaliate for the fact that I had been hurt.
I can’t pretend that it makes logic and sense. In a world of balance, maybe it does — hurting someone to make up for the fact that I was hurt. Balance the scales. An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart. There was a period of my life where I think I was looking for all of the wrong things, staying awake later than I should have and closing myself off. The result of being hurt one too many times, shedding a few hundred too many tears.
I hurt someone else because I was hurt. There was nothing I could do about the person who hurt me, those stones had already been thrown.
Sometimes you can’t control the hurt you deal to other people. However, you should try to. You can be cognizant of how you made them feel, try to soften the blow that you deal someone. In this case, I consistently knew what I was doing. I was wrong. Check-in with yourself, know where you stand emotionally. If you are not in a position to become involved with someone, try not to (this is not so easy, sometimes you think you’re in a better position than you are). If you can see that the longer you stay involved with someone, the more you will hurt then, then you might want to end that earlier to soften the blow. The world is not balanced relationally, you should not walk through it looking to hurt people.
Although we carry the past with us, that does not mean we must let it define us. We can choose to change the behaviors we no longer agree with, change the way we see ourselves, change the way we would like others to view us. There are always opportunities to change, but it cannot happen without a conscious cognizance of the past and a steadfast yearning to be different in the future.
The past, and thinking about those that we’ve hurt, is an important thing to remember, but if I let every mistake I’ve made dictate how I was going to live my life, I’d never take any chances. The fear of being wrong, of getting hurt, or hurting someone are real fears for a reason. For me, these fears are rooted in past experiences. Reflecting upon these past experiences has made me more cognizant of possible outcomes, never forgetting the mistakes I’ve made, always trying to amend my behavior in the future. Growth. The past is as much a part of our character as our present, so we must reflect when it is necessary, learn when it is imperative and let go when we must.
and now, this:
What i’m listening to:
cherry— harry styles
BOY — charlie puth
come talk to me — bon iver
On (or around) this day in history:
December 22, 2014 — freshman year of college
The problem is letting them stay, letting them settle in the bones of a relationship without hollowing out who I am. I guess that’s another thing that I can work on. I am slowly letting them in. It’s going to take some time but I believe that everything is everything that I can make it into. I can never give up though. I must keep moving to make my life into everything that I want it to be. Never settle for anything less than the beautiful life you promised yourself.