I'm ready to move on

Friday, February 18, 2011

I can’t stop thinking about her. I can’t stop thinking about our fight. Now that I finally talked to her and got everything off my chest, I feel a lot better. Albeit, we never listened to one another because we were in a screaming match, but I am no longer mad. Now, I’m just left with the pain. I’ve started to miss her. The anger has subsided and all I feel is pain. What do you do when the only person who can fix your broken heart is the one who broke it?

I understand why she left me. What she said, as painful as it was to hear it, was true. I am a ghost, a whisper of the Christina I once was. I am not the woman she fell in love with. I don’t blame her for leaving me. I would have never left her had our roles been reversed but everyone is different. I would have handled the situation differently and had I decided to leave her, I would have told her directly with enough time to prepare for her new life.

I am barely hanging on by a thread. I don’t know how I got here. I don’t know how I lost myself. I don’t know when I stopped loving myself. But I know, day by day, that I won’t be here for long. Sometimes, living a day at a time is too much and I am merely surviving breath by breath.

I have vowed to stop drinking alcohol as long as I am on medication. I had been abusing alcohol to alleviate my pain and it took its toll on our relationship. I need to experience every feeling right now and feel every little thing that hurts. I need to feel it so I can acknowledge it and then let it go. I’ve been carrying so much pain for so long, I finally snapped.

Getting laid off from CBS was the straw that broke the camel’s back and afterwards, I just sunk lower and lower into depression. I had finally achieved a major goal of mine. I had moved to a city I had never before visited and knew not a soul in Philadelphia. CBS had been my salvation and my grand prize. I had worked so hard in college, completing four internships before I graduated while working as in a coveted T.A. position. I always had four jobs while in college. I was involved in school activites, attended every football and basketball game and made homecoming court my senior year.

I’ve been working since I was 16. My parents had instilled in me a tenacious work ethic and I always worked to make them proud. It was never enough though because they were always suggesting other professions or different ways for me to live my life. Every time my dad feels he is missing a resource in his life, he suggests to me a new profession simply because that is what he needs in his life and he thinks I should accomplish it. Now that I want to be a psychologist, all they continue to ask me is, why don’t you want to do TV anymore? You’re so beautiful and you’re so good at it. Why don’t you become one of their online reporters instead, they ask. It doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter that I’m good at it. I don’t want to be on TV anymore! It’s not even a challenge; TV, radio, public relations, marketing bores me. I’ve worked in all fields of communication. They’re all the same to me. The only reason I ever went into broadcasting was because my mom suggested it to me as a major my senior year of high school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I did it. Coincidentally, I happened to be talented and communications has always come easy to me. But I’m not sure that I ever really wanted it for myself.

I had been depressed before but I came out of it after a few months so I never thought that this would become something that lasted. One of the things that plagued me during my previous two bouts of depression was anorexia, once my senior year of high school and once my junior year of college. Had she not been there for me in college and forced me to eat an entire Subway foot-long sandwich for lunch, I’m not sure where I would be or look like now. Food terrified me.

It begins by accident. I am depressed so I don’t feel much, but most especially, I don’t feel hunger. I forget to eat. Before I’m aware of it, I’ve lost 15 pounds and I become obsessed with my weight because it’s the only thing I can control in my drowning sense of depression. I become proud of myself for being thin. I am determined never to do that again. Both times, I lost over 50 pounds. I used to be so thin that if someone just grabbed me, I would be marked with bruises. It physically hurt to be that thin and yet, I couldn’t stop. She helped me get over it and helped me get over myself.

I am trying to be conscious of my body and health and remember to eat. With Mom and Nick not being home often, it’s even easier to forget to eat because I have no one noticing my eating habits. I have no one to eat with so I am not responsible for cooking. This week I haven’t taken very good care of myself; I’ve barely drank water, I drank alcohol almost every day and I haven’t eaten much but salad, soup and wraps. I’ve been living off of one meal a day. Now that I am aware of how I’ve been treating myself, I yelled at her and am no longer mad, I can move on and start taking better care of myself.

Being angry with her is exhausting. I am drained. I am ready to release my anger towards her. Now, I just want to get better and work on our relationship. I forgive her. I am letting all my anger and disappointment towards her go because it is only keeping me from getting better. All that remains is pain and that will subside with time. If I continue to resent her, it will only fester and I will never get over this. I need to focus on my recovery. I need to focus on me. Our relationship imploded and no matter what, I am 50% responsible for the demise of our relationship. She wants me to get better so that we can spend the rest of our lives happily together. We can’t do that right now because I am not happy. She’s not giving up on me. She just couldn’t help me anymore than she had and realized I need more help than she could provide. While this was a painful experience, it’s time to move forward. I’m ready to move on.