7. Looking back

Been spending a lot of time looking back on my past fuckups. A good deal of this entry has already been hand written in my journal at home, because a lot of it is stuff I want to keep private.

one thing I’ve been looking at is past fuckups in relationships, not to beat myself up about it more, but to learn. Something I started doing a few weeks ago is looking at things and thinking “what could I have done differently in THIS situation?”

sometimes it was beyond my control, and sometimes I was reacting to stupid shit other people were doing (albeit I was still able to find things I still could have done differently- like better ways that I could have reacted)

I’m friends with an ex of mine, and I asked if I could talk to him later, so that I can get some more insight on things. I’m trying hard to remember what exactly I did wrong in that one- although I know it was a lot. Like, bitchiness. I was bored with him and trying to sabotage the relationship while I was in it. After we broke up we never had a talk about it, we just carried on as friends and that was it. I don’t remember too many specific fights, but given that he’s not a fighty person, I’m 100% certain I started all of them. This will be the first conversation we will ever have about the relationship that ended over a decade ago. I remember one was about me not wanting to do anything on Valentine’s Day, and him wanting to take me out. I remember I didn’t want to go out because I still had baby weight on me and didn’t look good in any of my clothes, so instead of telling him that, I picked a fight. That’s like, the only one I remember with any amount of detail. The rest is vague ass memories. But if he was on the receiving end, he will likely remember it far better than I will.

This other one…. I used to get bitchy with him but it was usually an attitude and usually he’d give me food and I’d quit being bitchy lol at the end it got toxic. I remember getting upset that for so long he’d talk about his ex wife, and one day it was ALL day. It was like an all day bitch fest. I was planning on just ending the relationship because after months of all of that it was evident that he was still not over it, which made me feel like shit. It ended up being a fight in which he begged me to stay. Then sometime later he was buying his ex wife Christmas gifts- or planning on it. That was a fight. I didn’t like that. Especially because it was a very thoughtful gift- her favorite wine, but with a custom printed label. That seemed too…. Idk, personal? Intimate? Idk. But it was an issue for me, and he would tell me i was wrong because it was the mother of his kids and she was important to him, yadda yadda. In retrospect, I should have left then too. It shouldn’t have been a fight. Another time, he and I were sleeping in his bed, and his ex wife barged in. Their son had a soccer game that day around the corner and she decided that since she used to live there, that it was okay to just barge into the bedroom to say hello and to let us know she was only stopping in to use the bathroom. Again, I was wrong for being upset about that, according to him, but it was a fight- and one in which I tried to leave because it was too much for me to handle, and again, he begged me to stay. I found out our life goals weren’t on track with one another- he wanted to get married, I didn’t. I wanted more kids one day, he didn’t. I was willing to compromise on the marriage thing, despite it being something I didn’t really want, he was not willing to compromise on the kids thing. Now, we should have ended things there, but if we hadn’t, I’d have changed my mind on the kids thing anyway, so there’s the irony of that one. (At least, I have since then. I mean, mothering has been a blast, but I’ve been waiting until I’m “ready” for more and then one day it hit me that I’ll actually never be ready for another one, and that I’m old and tired, so I gave up on wanting any more. I probably would have still felt the same way with or without him around)

anyway, I got really toxic with him in the last 2-3 months. I picked fights about everything, almost every day. I was trying to sabotage the relationship because I felt like I couldn’t get out of it for some reason that I need to explore further into. I got ugly. REALLY ugly. I legitimately wish I could apologize to him because I feel awful to this day about the ugly things I said. I’m sure I could, but it’d probably be weird, because we haven’t talked in years and rumor has it he’s engaged now, I don’t want to do anything that’d be seen as inappropriate. But I do feel horrible for some of those things.

they were pretty much the only ones where I wasn’t being treated like absolute shit and I feel like possibly the easiest to gauge my level of toxicity as a result.

just another shitty part to the recovery process here, looking backward so I can be better going forward, but it’s heavy at times and it hurts because I’m as bad as the people who have wronged me.

I hope this conversation with my friend later provides some more insight, although it may be even more painful because, again, we literally never had a conversation about any of this. We just said “let’s just be friends” and then that was it lol. Hes also one of the many people who have been given this link, so….. hey dude. If you see this- be brutally honest, I need to hear it. Beat me the fuck up.

anyway, I’m trying.