Amends, At Times Ends
It’s important to know when you can’t fix something any longer, when it’s time to cue the epilogue.
Starting things is difficult — the first step, the first word. The start of a relationship, once you’re past the vetting dates and conversations soaked in undertones, is innocently challenging. You go from being wholly entitled to all of you, to voluntarily sharing. You have to learn to take and accept just as you learn to give and accommodate. It’s an exciting phase with soaring feelings, seamless possibilities, and it’s a marker of change.
You find yourself altered. It’s not necessarily a confrontation with individuality, you don’t have to dismiss values and principles. You do learn to be more sensitive and understanding to the pain points of someone other than you. It’s only natural to be led by the river current if you’re not consciously swimming the other way. We often delay drawing the line to the compromises we make, we expand our boundaries to hold more of how the other person feels. This is okay if it feels okay. It’s not if you feel like you’re being crowded. In any case, there’s a shift from being solo to being involved.
You leave behind part of yourself to grow differently, make way for what is new. It’s a difficult balance to achieve in that we often part with more than we find reasonable. You lay a version of yourself to rest and look onwards.
In the course of a relationship, you encounter many facets of a person — their goodness, kindness, reliability just as well as their insecurities, flaws and misgivings. It goes both ways, both people open to each other, peering. You falter, fix and proceed, on repeat. But sometimes, you falter over and over without a fix and then eventually, someone will start closing, cleaning out their desk and ready themselves to leave. It’s not easy to play either role at this juncture, to be the one leaving or the one watching.
The end of a relationship is obscure much like a stormy sky — full of clouds that can’t be defined and a grey color formed of so many others. It doesn’t feel safe and it’s difficult to navigate. All the good and bad come at once and then in turns. It’s confusing, you think of all the attributes, niceties and the things that someone has gone out of their way and done for you. Then you think of all the times you’ve suffocated yourself to make things easier for them, when you’ve absorbed the bitter acid spewed at you in anger, when you’ve held up neon signs exclaiming your boundaries only to have them stripped from your hands, prodded with their very ends into submission. You look back to see the things you’ve said, the errors you’ve made, the hurt you’ve caused without intention and you hold yourself responsible for the fall of it all.
You fantasize it plausible that had you behaved exactly as they expected of you, things would be okay. That somehow, you would be this whole other person while being truly yourself. Then you begin to question how much of the things you’ve already participated in were true to your sense of self. A struggle to understand the differences between who you were, who you became, and who you are going to be now, ensues.
You realize that you’ve done more than you’ve been allowed to take credit for. With the deciding authority now absent, you take it. You did a lot right. Wrong was done unto you. They were a good person, but they did things with knowledge of their ripe potential to cause you hurt. They did things with the purpose of delivering pain. It’s outrageous. It’s also convenient. It’s untrue.
After wading your way through the tall, tall grass of the green of good and yellow of bad interspersed but forming a homogeneous field, you understand that you have to take accountability for what you did, and that you can’t force your narrative on the other person. You come to accept that things really are over, that the person and the role they played is now gone. The role you played is no longer in sanction. Things are different and they must be accepted as so.
The same relationship is experienced differently by both.
You can’t rid yourself of the care and concern you carry for the other person, you shared something true and cherishable, even if it didn’t end on a sweet note. At the same time, you realize that you must take responsibility for caring for yourself. You’ve got to put your shoes back on. It’s okay to cry, it’s okay to feel bad, it’s okay to grieve the way that helps you accept things for what they have become.
The effort is split — you have to nurse your ache to normalcy, and you have to restore parts of who you were before the storm, embrace the parts that went through the storm or decidedly put them to sleep. You have to allow yourself to feel sorrow for the person you didn’t want to be but were, to let that instance of you feel accepted for the circumstances that made it, and to let it rest outside of that time, but not carry it with you.
You start over with this new rendition of yourself. While yes, admittedly, starting things is difficult, it’s worth it to feel yourself grow in the way you want.
