Aada apologized to me that she would no longer read or write, but then contradicted herself and said, “for now, all I want is peace.” She said she wanted peace for me, too, and I believe her. I just don’t believe that she knows how to achieve peace for me and therefore cannot be a part of creating it. Just like you cannot be comforted by the same person who hurt you.
I shudder to think that Aada read everything I wrote after she said, “no more.” Because I wrote everything like the relationship was over, Aada even saying that she wasn’t going to read, so I wrote like the hurt person I was. I didn’t have to include anything positive and some days, I didn’t feel like it. But slowly, my anger melted and I became whole again.
Those entries cost me Aada, because she thought I was punishing her instead of writing for me. That wrong thought will stay with her, because she has always thought I was out to get her. That my purpose in life was to take her down. Anything loving is suspicious. If she is going to view my writing that way, I would rather have her not comment on it.
In short, she knew I had strong feelings for her and announcing she was leaving would cause inner turmoil, so she read it to beat herself up. She has finally recognized all of this in terms of not needing to read my writing anymore. I think that’s positive, because right now I am waffling between writing even more and shutting it all down.
My blog wasn’t worth losing Aada, but there’s no way I could have known that 12 years ago.
There were a lot of times when I should have slowed down that I didn’t, and a lot of things I said when I was not tracking that Aada would hear it, or hear about it. Because why would I think that she’d hear about it? Surely our mutual friends aren’t stupid enough to hurt Aada in this way. Well, they were that stupid and essentially invited Aada to read what I thought of her as an ex-friend with no possibility of changing anything in the future.
Of course it would hurt, like reading your ex-boyfriend’s journal. It was not meant to be comfortable for her because it was not comfortable for me.
She could have stepped in to change things at any point, but instead she told me that her last letter was like her blog entry that I couldn’t respond to and I just had to sit there and take it.
I thought to myself, “at what point did I say you were not allowed a response?” She never got that she had the power to change things, that I was not writing from on high.
Her not understanding this is not on me. If she acted like an asshole, I wrote it that way. If she reached out to me with love, I wrote it that way. She could have changed the story and she didn’t.
I got an email last night from a mailer daemon that said all email from my IP address was permanently deferred, so I called her work number to leave a voice mail and the AI just rang, never connecting me to a mailbox.
I got the message that messages are no longer welcome, which is good because she was unclear before. There’s a difference between “for now” and “for good.”
My self respect is returning and I’ve realized that if I needed to write about how much she hurt me, it wasn’t wise to invite her to hurt me again and to just give up. I am learning that I am okay with finality. It was lack of clarity that ate my lunch.
I feel better now that I’ve been released from Aada’s manipulations and hope she receives the peace she needs because I was manipulative as well.
I need to go back to the feeling I had when I was the one that blocked her and really tried to move on with my life. It was working, and I got sucked back in. That’s when I realized I didn’t want to go back and forth anymore. I chose together. She chose apart.
Neither one of us are wrong for our choices, but Aada’s choice particularly hurt me because she is officially a figment of my imagination.
It’s okay. She never made me real, either.
She was so emotionally avoidant that I was starving, and I still kept out hope that this relationship would turn into something, not getting a clue. I continually hurt myself by opening up to her, because she wasn’t trying to connect with me. I’d spill my guts and she’d attack.
I am learning more and more that she was not good for me, and I need to stop thinking of myself as a bad person. I do not own a hundred percent of the responsibility for our relationship going wrong, and even Aada knows it.
I am glad that she took a step to let me know that things are different this time. It’s not going to blow over.
If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. The pattern we had was exhausting and I couldn’t change it. I tried so many times over the years, and it just never took.
I am slowly learning the depth and breadth of my own horror show, turning the judgment on myself.
I put her through hell. I know I did. She put me through hell. She knows she did. We both want to stop the pain, shutting it all down.
This is what happens when one lie wrecks a system.
Stories That Are All True 