2 years on
a follow up to “alone”
One of the questions that is at the forefront of my mind right now is why I’m writing this. I feel somewhat that writing this continues to force recollection of a marker of my past to which I still give too much power, and that I might be better off just treating today like any other day and moving on with my life. Today IS really just any other day. I‘ve often forgotten that this week 2 years ago was one of the most defining of my life, and just continued living normally. But those little voices in my head just won’t let me completely forget, and they urge me to reflect and write about it. So, I’m going to embrace those voices, this time.
I thought it would be a good marker of growth to post this a year on from “Alone” (https://jakoblmueller10.medium.com/alone-7e320fc12955), reflecting on another year of being single. However, I promise this will not be the deep-dive into my relationship that “Alone” was. Instead, I want to sieve through my thoughts about relationships and being “on your own”, while talking through the ways in which I feel I’ve grown this year.
I would characterize my first year post-breakup as the most alone I’ve ever felt. I struggled with the toughest feelings of insecurity and anxiety that I’ve ever dealt with. I felt like I wasn’t good enough, and questioned pretty much every relationship I had. Year 2 has been both similar and different. It would be misleading to say that I don’t experience loneliness every single day. That doesn’t stem from being single, but from my nature to be mostly isolated. Part of me finds comfort in my alone time, but I also crave connection, and being alone makes me more susceptible to thoughts questioning myself and my growth. However, I would be foolish to characterize those lonely feelings as the primary emotions that I’ve experienced this last year. While my life hasn’t been eventful by many people’s standards, I would argue that this last year has brought some of the biggest moments of joy that I’ve experienced in my life, and has helped me learn to take life less seriously. Being around more people has really helped me stop thinking as much, and has made me more accustomed to letting go of things that are of little to no importance.
Have I changed to a degree where I can say that I’m not the same person that I was yesterday, or last year on September 24th? No. I change slowly. My habits and tedencies are hard to escape. My thinking patterns are repetitive. While that is part of my lifelong frustration with myself, part of my problem is constantly characterizing my patterns as an issue that needs solving. Phrasing my habits as something I need to escape adds to the narrative that I am living in an unhealthy manner and must change if I want to derive life’s benefits.
Pema Chodron’s Book “When Things Fall Apart”, has really helped me in the last year. One chapter, in particular, provided a key outlook that I’ve been trying to incorporate into my daily thinking. Pema talked about loving-kindness, not only to all other beings, but also to ourselves, illustrating that to have loving-kindness we have to accept all aspects of our experience. While my first year post my break-up was filled with frustration about my situation, my lack of friends, my personality, and my lack of ambition, my second year has included more of what will really help me grow, acceptance of my current situation. While beating yourself up for your “problems” can be motivational and beneficial for some, and create positive change, it feeds into the self-critical instinct that we all have, and into the narrative weight that we attach to our “problems”. Her suggestion is that we make an effort to put it down, and accept our situation, with all of it’s imperfections and frustrations. Embrace it. Thank it.
This is an outlook that I never really applied in the first year after my breakup, or even before. To be fair, it’s still not a philosophy I apply to myself as much as I want to. I embrace it in many of my Medium posts in some way or another, but have failed to completely do it in practice. Maybe because it just seems too difficult, and feels like it invalidates my emotions. As someone who has struggled to feel throughout his life, I have an inherent desire for feeling, even if that feeling is isolation or sadness. I’m sure that’s part of why I struggle to break the habits that isolate me, because I’m at least feeling something. Trying to accept situations that frustrate me and the imperfections within myself is healthy for me, but my emotions pull me towards continuing to feel self-pity.
Based on this push-and-pull, I’ve come to accept, more than I did in the past, that it is currently and has been my nature to change slowly. So, in turn, my adjustment to putting myself out there in a romantic or sexual way is going to take time as well. I’ve ventured out more than I have for a long time, I’ve talked to people, gone on a couple dates, but just haven’t found myself completely ready to jump into a relationship or situations in which I’m too emotionally or physically vulnerable. Much of that probably stems from a fear-based approach to relationships, and issues trusting people with my feelings or body in the past. When I’m ready, I’ll be ready, and I’ll know that I’m ready. I have faith in that.
I’m again feeling that I’m at that stage in my life where I’m not really seeking a relationship, and, like I said, some of that feeling might be motivated by fears of the pain it could cause, but much of it is also based on general satisfaction with the friends I have and the path I’m on. I have so much going on every single day of my life, and while most of that (at least right now) is because of classes, I almost feel as if there’s little to no time in my days for a devoted relationship.
But, with the right person, I know all of that can change. And I also know that there are different kinds of “relationships” and that branching out into any one of them is a step in the right direction for me, because it allows me to learn more about myself and grow. The worst thing I can do is put too much pressure on myself to be in a relationship or create expectations around how any of my friendships/relationships will turn out. Again, accepting each moment as it comes and embracing it is something I want to practice more, and on the relationship front I’ll have a chance to do that.
I have a massive tendency to look to the past and, among other things, see what I can learn. This has been evident throughout this piece, and I’m sure through many of my others. While I don’t necessarily want to find myself living in the past, I also don’t want to fight it, run from it, or think of it as something I’m ashamed of. My past is a part of my life and a part of who I am, just as it is for anyone else. The idea of growth only exists because we have an idea of what we were in the past.
How we perceive the past, however, is subject to change. Instead of looking at it and letting it weigh you down, we can all look at it and thank it. Our pasts brought us to this moment, and we’re alive! For that we should be grateful. Are there habits we can change? Sure. Are there ways we can become better people? Absolutely. But one thing that the last two years has taught me is the best way to recover from events that present you with a lot of emotion is to accept them as part of your story and thank them for teaching you as you move along your way.
I’m not sure if she said this verbatim, but one of my dad’s previous girlfriends said something like: “I look at every day and moment as a learning opportunity”. Learning from something requires an acceptance of what is and what has been. It requires a lack of attachment to judgement, and an understanding of what factors are at play. In doing some self reflection, I hope that I continue truly learning and accepting myself more. If the last two years have taught me anything, it’s to make my best effort to do that more often.
