Shrinking

July 6, 2020

I've been ruminating for a little while now on a couple of things, because one thing I've got a lot of right now is time.  I'm frustrated at myself for not being able to adequately say goodbye or good riddance to a time of my life that was difficult and even toxic.  I'm frustrated at my inability to reconcile my head--which knows I deserved better (more truth, more honesty, more respect, and more love)--and my heart, which is still bruised by being told all the ways I was not enough for one who perhaps was not enough for me.  The only way things were going to work at the end of the day is if I shrunk myself--quite literally and figuratively--in order to suit someone else's ideal of who I needed to be in order to be deserving of the full measure of his love.  Shrink my body, because it was too much for him.  Shrink my needs and wants to allow his to be at the forefront.  Shrink my perception of what love is and does, in order to make room for his viewpoint to fill the space.  Shrink my voice that spoke out about how it made me feel, because letting my voice be heard only incited anger and guilt in him for trying to make him feel bad about wanting me to disappear into silence.

So...I could not shrink.  Not enough, anyway.  I could not contain that which makes me me in a small enough container to coexist with what he had grown to immeasurable size within himself. The end came, as it should have.  And yet, though I absolutely would not want the small sense of self that staying together would have necessitated, I am still left with a sense of grief and loss.  I am still left with a sense of wondering why, after so many years of being each others' world, my world suddenly became simultaneously too big and too small for him.  I am wondering why I still wonder why I was not enough for him, when in reality I should be wondering why he was not enough for me--why his perception, his reimagined world in which I was only a fragment, was something I wanted to hold onto.  I am wondering why I still feel slighted and discarded when I see he has moved on and has made his world big enough to include someone else where I was too big to fit.  For me, his walls became too rigid and forced to allow for me to fit any longer, but for someone else he was able to be malleable and fit into her world and give her the honesty, respect, and love I deserved.  Deserve. Being replaced so easily, so cavalierly, even by someone who cannot give any longer what a true partner should, is brutally painful.  Someday I will learn again to stop looking toward his evolution as validation for my own sense of worth.  I will continue to work to self-define my value, rather than looking through his tarnished mirror to see myself.