Break-ups Do Weird Things to my Psyche
By The Misfit | July 28, 2007
I woke up this morning absolutely furious because of a dream I had last night about my former boyfriend and his mom. In my dream, his mom was the one to tell me that she didn’t think he should see me anymore and even had someone there to replace me. Did. Not. Make. Me. Happy. I’m a firm believer that there’s something I need to take from it – I very rarely ever remember my dreams, so when I actually do, I try to pay attention. And as much as I hate to admit it, I think there is a very real resentment for his mom on my part – because I feel she enables him to stay exactly where he is. Don’t get me wrong, I adore his mom – she’s always been very cool to me and accepted and included me as part of the family, so I’m a bit surprised at it. But it’s there.
I also realized that it pertains to my relationship with my family, as well, because they do the same thing for me in terms of allowing me to continually move back home. I’m an adult and perfectly capable of taking care of myself – of paying my bills and supporting myself, and yet this is the 3rd time I’ve found myself living back at their house out of necessity.
Let me explain…
I’ve recently been going back to church in order to start making sense of my life. It actually started when I was still up in Georgia, but fell to the wayside when I started dating S. Since we live 3 hours apart, the only time we really got to spend together was on the weekends, so I skivved off. I felt okay doing this because before I even came back down to Florida I knew there was a reason I had to come back down here – after I met S. I knew that he was the reason. Even with where things stand now, I firmly believe that. Even if we never end up working this out, I know there’s a reason we met and started dating. I was completely happy for the first time since I was a teenager – I was content and felt safe, something I’ve never experienced in my adult dating life. The only problem was that I lost sight of what got me there in the first place. And I let things slide. When my gut was telling me something was off, I ignored it because I was happy to just be when I should have been paying attention that things needed to be addressed. S. did the same thing and sat on something for two months. We both should have had enough faith in each other and courage in ourselves to be honest. The past three weeks or so I’ve been placing the blame solely on his shoulders, which is ridiculous because I should have had enough sense to deal with it, too. I instead stuck my head in the sand and assumed that things would sort themselves out.
Only it doesn’t quite work that way.
Just like anything else, a relationship has to be worked at – it’s not something that will magically work all by itself. Just as he made the decision to exclude me from a decision process that I should have been involved in, I made the decision to think that everything would work out just fine on its own in the end.
It’s a very hard lesson to learn and something, given my dating history, I should have known.
It was by chance or fate that I was directed to a sermon online at Northpoint Community Church last week called “When Dreams Can’t Come True” which essentially deals with something I’ve said all along – that God (or the universe or whatever) does a mighty fine job of running my life so long as I keep my meddling hands out of it – it’s about accepting that I don’t have all the answers and sometimes what I think is good for me isn’t. It’s about letting go of control and trusting in something bigger than I am. I was so impressed by what Andy Stanley had to say, I actually sent a link of it to S. I tried to convey that it wasn’t about religion so much as it was about understanding that the concept I mentioned above and realizing that sometimes we have absolutely no control over the course our lives take (although I’m not convinced I explained myself properly). That’s not to say that we aren’t responsible for what we do or where we end up – our decisions absolutely effect where we end up – nor does it mean that we should simply sit back and expect that the things we want will magically appear. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a quick fix. It’s about trusting something beyond ourselves. And while some of you will scoff at this notion, I firmly believe there is a higher power out there – I’ve had enough experiences in my own life to validate that for me.
So from that point, I moved on to watching some of the other sermons – specifically the Destination series which deals with some of what I mentioned above – about our decisions having an effect on where we end up – and about taking responsibility and subsequent action to rectify that. No one can change the past, but we can work to make our future more of what it should be. And while I don’t necessarily regret any of my past decisions, I can see very clearly that they’ve brought me exactly where I am today – stuck in this stupid vicious circle and more than a little unhappy. I dug this hole, and I’ll have to take steps to dig myself out. It’s not going to be easy – I’ve screwed things up pretty good – but I’m willing to finally (hopefully) learn my lesson and do what I need to do.
One final thought – one of the reasons I like these sermons is that they don’t go on and on about how we’re all going to hell – I’ve never been a big believer in hellfire and damnation and I don’t subscribe to fear tactics in order to bully people into believing in God, regardless of what you call him/her, or going to church – the sermons deal with very real issues and actually provide steps to deal with those issues. I’ve always despised churches (of any religion) that try to beat us down because we’re not perfect, but don’t bother to provide options in order to deal with and move on from our issues. I’m sort of practical that way.
Topics: damn those misfit dreams, the misfit life | No Comments »