Discovering Me

Chapter One: Loss

Two days shy from being in a 19 month long relationship my world turned upside down when my boyfriend decided it was time to go our separate ways. Well at that time I believed my world was being turned upside down. Over the course of the next several days I would slowly come to realize my world was being turned right side up for the first time in a good while. My world had already been upside down and I had become so used to hanging from the ceiling that I didn’t even realize it.

You see for a long while I could see myself turning into the person I didn’t want to become. I was jealous, constantly demanding attention, snapping at little things that I normally would over look and I knew something needed to change, but I didn’t have the guts to make the change. I could sit here and tell you all the gory details of how my ex-boyfriend and I turned into people we both knew we weren’t over the nearly two years we dated, and in the writings to come I might share some of those stories. However, the honest fact is I have nothing against my ex-boyfriend and to a point I am grateful he had the courage to end the relationship and slightly jealous that I didn’t myself have the nerve to do it.

But this is the story of how I am getting to know

 MYSELF.

I call this chapter loss because I feel like I wasn’t winning at the life game. There were so many moments when my heart would yell at me to take a different path and I would ignore it. By ignoring my heart, I lost a relationship, my happiness, and most importantly myself. This is the part where life had to get ugly before it could get pretty.   

My first year away from home was and was not how I expected it to be. I lived with my boyfriend at the time, thinking that it would make the transition easier. However, I have a lot of anxiety issues and I didn’t make any friends my first year away from home and was extra needy in the attention department. My boyfriend at the time was out making friends being social and wanting to live a “college” life.  We were living two different lifestyles. I wanted to budget what we bought and be settled into our apartment by 9 pm while he wanted to hang with friends all night and buy everything that looked cool. Nothing wrong with either of those lifestyles, they just conflicted at every turn we made.

Ultimately  this resulted in both of us fighting and being unhappy a lot. 

Our first year was coming to an end and the arguing and fighting had progressed. We both agreed something needed to change. It went so far as we had both talked about taking a break from each other over the summer and not having any communication until the end of the summer. Right before summer began I nixed that idea knowing in the back of my mind that once we crossed that line we’d never get back together and that thought terrified me. I think he knew it to.

So over summer we agreed to try and only see each other about once a week and to go back to dating, in hopes that being away from each other would make us more excited to see each other when we were together. My friends, if you are not excited to see your partner and vice versa, whether you’ve been gone two minutes or two years something needs to change. I didn’t realize that at the time.

Our plans of only seeing each other once a week failed. By the end of summer, I was back to being needy, snappy, and controlling. Every day I questioned my own happiness. But I was moving back to school soon. Did I really want to give up the only person I knew who would also be there? That meant I would be alone and doing life completely on my own. That thought scared the living hell out of me, So I decided to keep fighting and holding on to a person that I felt like I needed. Don’t get me wrong I held on to this relationship for other reasons. I genuinely cared for this person and still do. You don’t just spend 19 months with someone like that and then one day wake up and not care or love them. But needing him felt like a big reason for not ending the relationship. 

Over time this relationship changed who I was and what I wanted to become. Neither of us were perfect in our time together. As I keep describing it to people, we had become to focused on being dependent on each other when we should have been focusing on becoming dependent on ourselves and supporting one another instead. 

On August 2cd, nearly two weeks before I moved back to school, life threw me a curve ball and decided it was time for me to need myself.

To Be Continued….

As always,

Thanks for reading,

Kay

*disclaimer: As noted earlier there are NO hard feelings between me and my ex. We ended things on extremely good terms. In no form or fashion do I believe he is a bad guy. We were both to different to come together as one *