Things change

Things change, baby.

Almost seven months after the break-up, I'm calling my ex my friend, because he is. I'm going on dates and trying to feel single again. As predicted in May, I'm no longer in the noisy despair stage: pain happens, but the main mode is numbness and quiet indifference.

So a lot has changed in a way. Has it?

Depression makes you wary of trying to define yourself by your behaviour. I am not my depression. It is a part of me, but I don't want it to define me. I want my good traits to define me, but depression makes it hard sometimes to define those.

When I was X's girlfriend, he would often complain about my tendency to "fish" for compliments. I did. I needed an exterior eye to correct my deformed inner one. I am acutely aware that my vision of myself is flawed. But see, I am flawed too. And this break-up has made me realize some things that I always feared to articulate, in case they would be self-fulfilling prophecies.

I was always scared that "the real me" would be repulsive to others (friends, family, boyfriends). And then I met X. He loved me despite my defects. I told him about my depression, my eating disorder, my insecurities and yet, he loved me.

Until he didn't.

I entirely accept what happened, and in a way, this acceptance is my problem. Because if a man tells me that I am too dark, too heavy, too difficult, he will be telling me what I already feel, what I already know. That ultimately, my good qualities cannot compensate for the bad ones. When X told me he felt trapped, I understood that I was the problem. When, you know, it's always more complicated than that.

So as I gingerly dip a toe in the murky waters of flirtation and seduction after years of coupledom, I've consciously or not defined what is palatable and what is not. It's OK for me to complain laughingly about feeling under the weather and then switch the topic to something general. It's not OK to say what I really feel. Because that would be scary. And in the end, it's my own fucking responsability, no one else's.

At the moment, someone must have given me a Love Magnet, because I am being propositioned all the time. My stock is up. Yet something holds me back-and that something is the fear that once again, I am misleading these people into something they may not want to handle. I told X about my problems, but he didn't believe me, as he later admitted. Damned if I show my true colors, damned if I don't.

It's exhausting to live with demons on your shoulder. We all have those, although they may differ. Jealousy, greed, anger, sadness. Pick your poison. It's so exhausting to pretent they don't exist.

I knew I wasn't going to react to this break-up the way it was expected of me. My anger was short-lived. My bitterness almost non-existent. My affection and respect for my ex did not dissolve into ether, they morphed into something else.
I came to see myself as a list of pros and cons, the way X saw me, with the column of cons outweighing the pros.

Sometimes I still do.

And I want that to change.