From despair to peace in Journal of life stuff

I finally reached out to Trisha again. Trisha and I went on two dates about a year ago. She was the best person I’ve met up here in New England. I got peace and closure on why she and I broke up. I offered to try again, and she said no. I was sad, despondent, depressed, a hundred other negative emotions swelled and threatened to overwhelm me, but unlike in previous years of my life, I finally have tools to at least to start to address the core problems. I looked up Jordan Peterson content on how to love myself. Criticize the man’s views all you want, but Jordan Peterson wants people to be the best versions of themselves. He cares deeply about people.

One of the very first things I found him talking about was giving encouragement to others. People need so little encouragement in life, and by and large western society does not provide any sort of encouragement from one member of society to another. But even more specifically, in the messages I sent to Trisha I asked about her rabbit (it had died), and the state of her life. I gave her encouragement. But I received none. I lost my job, she didn’t say anything. I found peace, growth, and understanding, but there was no comment.

And the reason she and I broke up? I had written an e-mail to her telling her how much she meant to me. How much hope that the future would be better meant to me. That was too much for her. Too much too soon. And, to be fair, she had a point that was completely fair and valid. It was too much too soon. There were good times between us. The dates had plenty of high lights. She is a person whose company I could enjoy.

At the same time, she never once provided me positive feedback on where I was in life. She never seemed to care. She never encouraged me. Looking beyond Trisha, there are so many other people in my life that I would have given so much for, and in the decades since I knew those people, they never once reached out to me to see how I was doing or talk to me. I’ve reached out to them. I spent 15 years of my life thinking something was wrong with me, that I was wrong, that I was the problem, that I had a flaw I needed to fix.

I have flaws, for certain, but not here. Not in these things. I love people and I show them I care about them. I encourage them. I finally am starting to see and understand that I’m not the broken one. They are. I can start to unshackle myself from the decades of assumed guilt and dread at how I’m not good enough, not sufficient, not worthy, not …whatever. I was never wrong. Even going back 10 years, I was never, once, wrong.

From despair to standing in the warm sunlight and wishing Trisha would embrace me as I embraced her. The road you know is always preferable to the road you don’t. At the end of the day, you have to walk down the road that exists, rather than the road you wish existed. From being glad I don’t own a gun, to realizing I have no reason to feel sad about my life, because I never did anything wrong (wrt relationships and their failures). There is a light at the end of the tunnel, you just have to pick your head up and look at it. It was always there. You just forgot to see it.