Another One Bites the Dust

As I was reading the text message that would spell the demise of yet another relationship, my brain started playing the song Another One Bites the Dust in my head. I don’t know if that was my way of trying to cheer myself up & make me laugh in the moment or if I instantly felt the need to face the cold hard fact that I am once again back to the starting blocks. Either way, I am profoundly disappointed that something that started off so wonderful crashed and burned the way it did.

As it was happening, I was anxious and nauseous and it felt like my world was coming to an end. And then it happened. And my world wasn’t quite as sad or devastated as I feared it would be because I also started to feel a sense of relief in the midst of the pain. Conflicting feelings are a trip. In one minute I’m laughing at the irony of this happening on National Boyfriend Day and then the next I cry and the next Queen starts up again in my head and the next……. The seesaw of my emotions would be crazymaking if I didn’t already know that there is a natural ebb and flow to the up & down, back & forth unpredictability of emotion when you lose something that mattered to you.

There’s a book called Moving On, which talks about getting rid of your baggage from past relationships. In it, you spend some time writing down significant moments of each relationship you’ve had. I began writing about each one of mine with the awareness of what each guy had done wrong. What I ended up with, however, was a blueprint of my own weaknesses. Dear Single People, we have to know and be able to articulate our own junk. Be wary of anyone (including yourself) if they can only see the wrong in the other person.

So what did I learn from this break up, you ask? I learned that I am tempted to believe that the older I get, I’m screwed so I might as well work with the only option I have. I learned that a standard is a standard whether you’re 25 or 45 and I always need to be a respecter of the standard and not my age. I learned how willing I was to neutralize my wants and needs to be amenable to his. I learned that not saying something that is important to me in an effort to keep the peace demonstrates a lack of integrity on my part. I learned that one of my biggest struggles as a single person is still comparison: “If I could just be like one of those happy couples on Instagram and Facebook”….. I learned that the ideas I wrote about in the New Normal blog are really, really great; I’m just not there yet. I learned that I make a god out of my own belief systems. I learned that being open-minded is accepting the fact that there actually could be a life awaiting me that is better than the one I have planned in my head. I learned that Habbakuk really is my hero. I learned that cream rises to the top and so does poop; in a relationship, it takes time to see which one you actually have. I learned how much I love the written word and that it is a gift God has given me to be able to write about these things and share them. As always, I welcome your thoughts.