Little by Little.

I had one of those unfortunate moments through social media the other day when I realised that a facebook acquaintance was good friends with someone from my past. Someone I would like to forget about but yet someone who’s presence and the consequences of their actions still affect me deeply today. It was definitely a rude shock to see this person’s face pasted all over this profile and it made all of the emotions, the feelings that I had locked up so long ago come bursting out in what felt like an avalanche.

I began to understand just how raw it all was for me. Not because I still felt for this person, those emotions were long gone. But instead how much he had taken from me without even realising it. When I met him I was young and spirited and full of self-confidence. I’m not that person today. His actions towards the end of our interactions broke a part of me that I will never be able to fix or put back together. I felt a sense of being worthless, of being un-loveable in a way that I still struggle with today. He took away so much of my confidence, of my ability to love myself because all I have done since he exited my life has been question myself and my value at every turn.

He’s moved on with his life now and is married with a child. I often wonder if he ever even realises how much he stole from me, how his careless actions made me doubt every part of myself. In a way it feels like he hurt me so exceptionally, acted in such a cowardly way, left my life in pieces but then walked away without a scratch towards purported happiness. All the while leaving me a shadow of the person I was before.

I wake up each and every day now and try to reaffirm all the things that my rational self know are true. That his actions don’t define me, that I am more than what he took from me. But self doubt is a funny thing. It creeps up on you when you least expect it and even though this person is all but a memory his presence still haunts me. He made me feel so small and inconsequential that this seems to be my base mode whenever I encounter things in life.

Perhaps I am also still bitter that the universe hasn’t evened out the odds. That I still carry this burden and yet he seems to have escaped it and be utterly guilt free. What I have come to realise though is if I continue down this thought path all it will do is drive me to bitterness and sadness. I can sit here all I want and continue to question why. To wonder whether karma exists and why I still have to doubt myself because of his selfishness. But I can’t do that, it would be pointless. All I can do is remind myself that I have struggled through something that shook me to my core, it robbed me of my confidence and every morsel of worth I had for myself. That I still battle against it every day but that I haven’t stopped fighting. I haven’t given into those thoughts, I acknowledge them but also challenge them as best I can.

In some way I want him to know what he took from me. I also want him to know that I’m not who I was before, but perhaps that’s for the better. At the time my being was shattered, my belief was non-existent but yet I’m still here; broken and with visible battle scars, but I’m still here. Because of him I learnt how to love myself again and little by little I am recovering parts of myself that I thought I’d lost forever.

Sx