The First Step

Hello all,

    If you read my last post you know that I am currently going through a breakup. After nearly three years, my fiance and I mutually decided to break-up. As of Friday (1/23/15), he left and went back to Maine, and I am here in West Virginia alone. The idea of being alone sounds really frightening, I was worried about it, and sometimes it still bothers me. I'm not used to being alone, especially since I've been in a relationship for five out of six years. You can imagine this is going to be an adjustment for me.

    Fortunately, work is somewhat my savior. My ex-fiance left Friday and I worked Friday through Sunday night, which kept my mind off my empty apartment. To ease this new transition, I will be rearranging my apartment, switching bedrooms, packing up his leftover items into boxes and putting them in the closet of my guest room.

    Now I know this all sounds like a drag, and it kind of is. I know my ex and I made the right decision by breaking up, however that doesn't mean the decision to break up was easy. The right thing to do is usually never easy. Instead of focusing on the downer part of this situation, I am trying to look at the bright side of things. I will be able to focus on me for a while. Allow myself some time to heal and some time to deal with my issues that have come along in the course of my depression and anxiety. I've read several articles about "self-love," how you can't really love someone until you love yourself. Now I certainly loved my ex; we shared some really good times together, so I am not 100% convinced that you can't love someone unless you love yourself. However, when you don't have self-love, self-confidence, and have faith in yourself that leads you to put the responsibility on your loved one to fill those voids for you. Sadly, I put those roles on my ex. I left it up to him to make me feel confident, to feel beautiful, and those are things only I can control. That was very unfair of me to put such an impossible task on his shoulders.

    I am going to start learning to believe in myself, to love myself and to feel confident in my own abilities. I also need to let go of things I can't control, to let go of striving for perfection. I have spent many years convincing myself that I am not allowed to make mistakes, and that mistakes are signs of my own personal flaws-not just a part of being human. I need to be easier on myself and be okay with giving my best. My counselor explained it to me in this way: strive for excellence not perfection. He told me that perfection is trying to take away all the bad traits, all the flaws (which I have spent many years doing) until one gets to 0 imperfections, an impossible task. Whereas striving for excellence is a matter of adding onto the good traits one already has.

   This is going to be a long process, it took me probably 20 years, at least, to get to this point. I want to turn that around and convince myself that I am good enough. I want to accept my flaws and embrace them, and ultimately I want to be happy with myself. That way I can live my life to the fullest, as cliche as that may sound.

    Like the Dalai Lama once said, "We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves."