Mistakes of the old year

I've been doing this heavy duty introspection stuff for the last few months, in a way entirely seperate from therapy. I've been trying to figure some things out about what happened to me last year. I finally have at my disposal an entire years worth of my private journal. I can look at everything from October of 2003 when all of this started up to this December when we would have been together for a full year.

I've finally come to some conclusions.

I hurt you tremendously in June and July, and some more again in the next few months. And a part of me enjoyed it. The place I was in last summer was in some ways scarier than where I was in January and February when the panic attacks started. Last summer I came down off my meds and started dealing with everything from a very raw emotional place.

I was so fucking angry this summer. Every time I thought about your need to help me in April and May, your refusal to abide by my wishes that we not communicate and that you give me the emotional space that I needed, I was just overcome with rage. I could not understand how you could profess to love me and refuse to give me what I needed. All I craved back in the spring was some distance from you so that I could use the quiet to find out where I was and what I wanted.

Eventually I just had to shut you out entirely. But then you would send me an e-mail, a letter...something expressing you feelings about it. And I would become enraged. I would quickly fill an e-mail with as much anger and spite as I could and send it in your direction.

And I felt good doing it. I felt like I was justified. In my mind I told myself that you had made me feel like utter shit in the Spring and that made it okay to be as hurtful as I could to you. I was trying to hurt you. I was doing things very deliberately and systematically. I would time my responses to your emotional outpourings, hoping that you were on the edge of your seat waiting to hear back from me. I did it to hurt.

And from your responses, it seemed like I was being successful. So, I kept at it.

At some point, I grew tired of the game and pulled back out of the game. Let things settle down.

None of this was concious at the time, but I can see it in what I've written. I never thought I could hate someone I loved as much as I apparently did last summer. I am very clear in my journal. I still loved you, but I was paying you back in some fucked up way.

Looking back at it I find it hard to believe that was me. It doesn't seem like the me that was there last October. It certainly isn't who I am now. But for a period of about 6 months I became someone completely different.

And it wasn't just with you. I changed at work. I changed at home. I drank more than I can remember...spending my days so angry and then getting drunker than I've ever been to get to sleep at night. Trying as hard as I could at night to shut the anger off so I could rest up for another huge dose of anger the next day.

And none of that was your fault. You (I can see now) were simply trying to reach out to me in that time, trying to help. Yes, there was some arrogance in your attempts. There was a presumption in your insistence that you could "help" me in any way, because I felt (and still feel to a degree) that it was my own issue I was working on, something that was completely seperate from the relationship. And since you couldn't let it go, I had to let you go and hurt you as much as I could in the process.

For that and so much more, I'm sorry.

The timing was wrong, I said to myself in October of this year. It didn't work because we were in two different places.

No, I don't think it worked because for all our similarities we were really too fundamentally different to make it work between us. There were things you wanted and things you wanted to say that I didn't want and that I didn't want to hear and certainly didn't want to say as much as you could.

I'm not a guy who is ever going to be comfortable with a "lovey" romantic relationship. I'm the kind of guy that simply wants to be comfortable with another person. I just want to simply be...not try to be something that I'm not.

I tried to make it work. And you tried too hard to turn it into something very serious far too quickly for me. (Not an attack, just proof positive that we were too different).

I'm sorry for not recognizing it sooner. I'm sorry for dragging you down into the middle of my breakdown.

Well, that's the lesson I learned in 2004. Not exactly a heartwarming tale, but there it stands. The Truth.

I perhaps should not have posted this here, in such a public place, but this is my outlet. This is my place to share and this is a significant revelation for me.