If I close my eyes and really think about what I’ve learned in the failure of 4(!) relationships since I became separated, I’ve mostly learned that I need to cut my losses a lot sooner. You have to be, quite frankly, pretty damn dreadful to get me to dump you. Even when I do dump you, I feel badly about it, I’m not sure that I shouldn’t have given you one more chance and I keep telling myself that I’m not perfect either.
Reader, please believe me that while I am not perfect, I’m a pretty solid girlfriend and these guys did not deserve one more chance. Indeed, they did not deserve the chances they already got. In my head, up until the morning I got a response back from my goodbye text, I would have said that I was a screw-up.
Something about what he wrote made me see rather more clearly.
I am a lot. I am kind and loving and dedicated. I believe in goodness and mercy, I believe in second chances and that it’s a sin to be able to help someone and not help. I’m an all or nothing, burn the boats on shore kind of person. I don’t do things by half measures and I’m never going to be described as calm and chill. I get excited about things – about politics and star wars and lego and obscure economic points. I’m insatiably curious. I love shoes and makeup and I will scream with my last breath about human rights and feminism. I like my own company. I’m fine with nights spent knitting and staring at my fire. It does not bother me that I read philosophy as a hobby. While I have fewer friends, I will go to the very ends of the earth for my friends. I can call my friends at 7 am on a morning when I had to crawl to the bathroom and they will come.
Not a single damn part of that list is bad. Not a single part of that list is anything to be ashamed of. I’m a lot. It’s not a weakness, it’s a superpower.
Maybe there’s a guy out there. Maybe there isn’t. I’ve gradually come around the realization that unemployment and Covid aside, in January of this year, right before J. came on the scene, I liked my life. It was not perfect, but it was good. It was the sort of life, that if I lived it every day until I died, I don’t think I would tell you my life was wasted.
In a more perfect world I would tell you that I have it all sorted out. I don’t. I am coming around the the idea that I am enough.
As I grow older, I have discovered that my list of things that I ‘need’ becomes shorter. Perhaps it is because, like you, my list of ‘what I am’ has grown.
Yes you are. <3