Shit.

“everyone says they think you’re a shit because of the way you’re handling this.”

I don’t expect my ex-girlfriend’s friends to understand. I don’t expect them to understand the nights in which I’ve laid in bed lonely, wondering when Dana was going to get better. I don’t expect them to understand the enormity of her emotional abuse, which she is very good at hiding while talking about mine. She thinks that I am abusive because I tell her how I think and feel, and I think she is abusive, because it would never occur to her to open up. Our relationship died because of all the things Dana was holding in. This is not that I don’t ever do things wrong, or that I am any less of a miserable sinner than she is. I just want to clear up the misconception that this is easy for me. Dana said something about “you said that you would have to get a new girlfriend to make me jealous.” I said that as a joke, because there is no way that anyone will ever be able to get in as close as she is… And to say that anyone could is absolutely untrue. There will never be another Dana, and there will never be another relationship like ours.

But last night was the final straw, in a house that was a very stable to begin with. I realized that living with Dana was just reinforcing my want to keep on working, but eventually we would get it right. Last night Dana told me that she did not want me to wait on her, and that feeling I was waiting on her was putting pressure on her to decide. She said that anything I did I had to remember was my choice. So I made it. I ask her to get a new apartment as quickly as she could possibly find one, because it was not good for me to live with her. That living with her just made me feel how incredible a loss I was experiencing, and to go on as just friends was torture every goddamn day. Dana says that she has chosen to separate herself from those emotions, until she can deal with them inappropriate way. I told her that my personality was integrating and I no longer have the ability to separate out like that… there’s no way on gods green earth that I don’t look at her like my wife every time I pass her in the hallway.

If there’s a reason that you’re seeing flippancy in my post, it’s because this is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. We both know that we wrecked this relationship at her own hands, and I would like to think that I have the ability to rebuild, but knowing that Dana does not want to is enough for me. So jokes about new girlfriends, and meeting new people, fall into the same category. They help me to feel like I’m not as absolutely worthless as I feel. I do not get validation or sanity from being with Dana in this house, so I have to go out and make new friends.

The other thing I told Dana is that I don’t give a shit what she or any of her friends think. There’s a reason I chose a separate place to fall, and there’s a reason why I gave her Epiphany and left. Joining epiphany was the first time that I’ve ever seen Dana actually integrate into this culture. It was the first time that I ever really saw her go out and try to make friends. To take that away from her was in conscionable, and I could not do it. I ran as quickly as possible, because I knew that there were other churches and other friends for me.

I am in self preservation mode. I will do anything to keep myself safe. To me, keeping myself safe is keeping myself the furthest away from Dana I can get. If that means that you all think that I’m a shit for it, go to hell. You cannot see inside me, you can only see inside her. And take her words for all their worth, but know that they are only one side to one story. She has it wired so that she looks like the ultimate victim in all of this, and has no recognition of how hard her depression has been on me. It is entirely convenient, and the reason that we cannot be friends. This is because her best option is to ignore everything that happened, and my best answer is to explore it.

It was a mistake to think that we could re-create friendship right after breaking up. It is only based in financial need, and not what either of us need emotionally. However we are stuck this way. Dana says that she’s paid her rent, and that makes her entitled to everything in this house as she decides where she’s going next, even if that takes a month or so. Meanwhile she is very happy for me to leave and find new places to spend the night every night. Things would only settle down if I can just remember and roll back into our friendship, but every time I do that I fall in love, and that is unacceptable. To either of us.

This is voice dictation. It might’ve come out wrong. Or maybe I’m just a shit.