A Digression From the Everyday: (aka: This One's Important)

I woke up a new man yesterday. I didn’t really realize it until I met up with Brian at the end of the day. It was very odd, and completely unexpected, but after we shook hands and said hello, out of the blue he said, “you’re glowing.”

Now I’ve seen people glow, but I haven’t had my glow for a long time. I’m pleasant, sure, I sit there and do what I’m supposed to do, but it’s never anything very remarkable. I’ve been playing the game for a while, but I haven’t really been feeling it.

I lost my glow, I think, around October 2004. I really can’t pinpoint the event or moment that caused it, but I think that it was around this time, when I started not being me.

I have come to the realization that it destroyed me. It killed the passion I had for teaching, as well as killing a relationship. Actually, the relationship ended for numerous reasons, all of which I am now seeing clearly for the first time.

So after just a wretched year, I am now really wondering how much of it I brought upon myself. There were a lot of events that were beyond my control. I believe, though, that the way we approach and cope with life has mainly to do with how we live it. If I’m going to be sour all day and meet new people with a thundercloud above my head, I am going to be miserable.

It isn’t as though I have just decided to be happy. I am happy. As Brian noted, I’m glowing.

I’m glowing again!

The obvious question is, why? What has changed? Brian even asked me that last night and even though I think that I knew the answer, I don’t know if I explained it very well.

When I broke up in March of 2005, I believed that I had been dumped because we had grown apart and that she simply didn’t love me anymore. I don’t think that this was an unreasonable conclusion.

The problem with that conclusion is that it defers blame. Either the problem was hers, or the problem was beyond control. Love faded because it was ethereal; it accepts the fact that the very nature of love is to fade and die away. There isn’t anything that you can do about it. Love sometimes doesn’t last forever.

So, I had, I thought, successfully recovered from the break-up. Because I believed that she didn’t love me anymore it was the most painful kind of rejection. I tried to blame it on the circumstances, I tried to blame it on any other variable I could come up with. The sad cold reality was that deep down inside, I believed that I was not loved, and that hurt more than anything.

Still, I was quite comfortable placing the blame on someone else. It was nice to know that I didn’t fall out of love. It was nice to know that my conscience was clear. It was nice to know that I did the best I could.

But the fact remained that because I believed that I was emotionally and romantically correct, I became to myself a victim of the cruel reality of love and the harshness of the world. This contributed to the sourness and perpetual grumpiness that I was feeling. Everything became beyond my control. My bad mood wasn’t because I was wrong, it was simply because I was the victim of a vindictive world.

Everything about me was forced, everything was phoney. I tried to make myself glow. I tried to put on a smile and a happy disposition, but it just wasn’t happening. I wasn’t myself.

I have come to realize that I was all wrong about the reasons why my relationship ended. It wasn’t because of something beyond our control. It was completely within our control all along. I (We) got lazy. I (She) took her (me) for granted. We worked just long enough to get to the point where we knew it was love and then dusted off our hands and said, “Now that all that work is done, I can finally take a break.”

The sad cold hard fact is that we made stupid mistakes. I was paralyzed with fear and couldn’t do anything to prevent the downward spiral that was enveloping our relationship. The whole time it was happening, I was too afraid to do anything about it. I was afraid to admit that it was happening, and I was afraid to admit that something needed to be done. As a result, I did nothing, and blamed her.

The chief problem is that we were on exactly the same page all along. We both knew what the problems were, and we were both afraid. We both wanted to make changes, but we didn’t know how. We both knew that we felt that something had to change, but we both didn’t know what to say to the other person in order to enact that change.

That, I think, is love. We didn’t grow apart. We didn’t stop loving each other. The whole time that things were crumbling, we both were so in sync with one another that we both were feeling the same things. We both wanted to make the same changes.

It is a tremendous relief to know that even though we screwed everything up, that it wasn’t because we weren’t in love, it was because we were just stupid.

I can take being stupid. I can take making mistakes. What I can’t take is the idea that love just ends. That you can be so connected to someone and then wake up one day and be completely different people. The idea that love is something that just expires at a predetermined (if unknown) date is something that I falsely tried to believe. It was a belief that was just so depressing that it was enough to make me never want to try it again.

So my relationship ended and I have finally discovered the real reasons why. What’s sad, of course, is that the answers were so easy. That’s mainly because I’ve had such a long time to think about everything; it certainly didn’t feel simple at the time. Had we not been so afraid, had we not been so stupid, who knows what might have been.

So I know that I was loved, and, in a different way, still am. That’s encouraging. That, I think, is the reason why I’m glowing. I have hope again. I believe, wholeheartedly, that love can happen. I’ve admitted that it was my own stupidity and fear that was the main contributor to the relationship’s failure. That’s a nice comfort since after making the mistake once, I won’t make it again.