FROM THE VAULT:

DON’T TELL ME HOW TO FEEL (PLEASE)

Following my broken engagement, I can’t tell you how many times someone told me I “dodged a bullet.” I started to feel like I couldn’t share what had happened without immediately receiving that response. It’s almost compulsive on the part of the listener. Like they can’t just sit with the pain of what I was telling them without spinning it into a positive. They can’t simply take the facts of what I am sharing and not create a narrative that fits their view of the world where “everything happens for a reason.” While I appreciate the sentiment and the optimism, there is one main problem: I simply don’t agree.

For months, I’ve waited to feel like I’ve dodged a bullet. I’ve waited to agree with everyone else and share their certainty about the situation. I’ve waited to suddenly believe that he would have left “no matter what” and “it’s way better that it happened before marriage and children.” But those feelings haven’t come. And I’m not confident that they ever will. Because what people don’t seem to understand is that, to me, my ex wasn’t a bullet I narrowly escaped. He was a living, breathing person who I wanted to share my whole life with. What happened to me doesn’t feel like a “blessing in disguise,” it feels like something really hard and painful that I will nevertheless survive. And I’m realizing I don’t have to accept everyone else’s narrative of the situation. I can have my own.

In many ways it would be easier to think I dodged a bullet. To fully believe that any life with my ex would be far worse than the possibilities of my current life. But I just don’t buy it. Trying to force myself to believe that was harming me because I didn’t believe it and the resulting disconnect was icky. My feelings felt incongruent with what everyone was telling me with such certainty. This made me question my own judgment. Person after person told me he would have left me at some point, no matter what. And maybe that is true. Maybe the pandemic had nothing to do with it. Maybe we were destined to fail from the beginning. I’ll never know for certain. All I do know is--in my gut--I don’t believe that.

What I do believe is that in this current version of events, he did leave. That is all I know and I don’t need to extrapolate anything else. I don’t need to convince myself that if it hadn’t happened last November, it would have happened when I was pregnant with our first kid or ten years into our (inevitably) unhappy marriage. I don’t need to create fake evidence to support a theory I don’t believe in the first place. What I do need is figure out how to come to peace with my reality so I can thrive and grow. And for me, the narrative that is most healing is that there was a confluence of events that led to him falling out of love with me. I don’t tell myself he never loved me. I don’t tell myself his change of heart was unavoidable. I tell myself that it happened to happen.

I know that my reluctance to accept the “dodged a bullet” narrative is uncomfortable to some people. Especially since I am dating someone new. How can I both love my current partner and not feel grateful that my ex left? Quite easily, it appears! Part of what allows for this dichotomy is that I am no longer the same person who got left last winter. My abandonment changed me. In many ways the person who is in this new relationship has never existed before. I am taking advantage of my current life and I have no doubt that it will be a (largely) happy one. But I don’t think we need trauma to be happy. I think we find happiness despite our trauma. You don’t have to be thankful for the hardships that allowed you to find the good stuff. You can just be thankful for the good stuff.

Living through this has made me realize how often we put our own preferred narratives on other people’s experiences. We may think our friend should be glad they lost their job because we feel glad they lost their job. We instinctively want people to have the same perspective as we do so we can all agree and move on. This helps us feel more in control and less likely to have to stay in difficult and uncomfortable emotions. But a lot of times the way an outsider feels about something is going to be vastly different than the way the person going through it feels. What can seem like a blessing to us can feel like a punishment to them. That’s why it’s so important that we ask people how they feel before making assumptions. Because, if you asked me, I would never describe my abandonment as proof I “dodged a bullet.” To me, it is proof that life is unpredictable, and I can survive hard things. And I happen to think those are more important takeaways in the long run than proclaiming my relationship was doomed to fail so thank god it failed on the early side.

The next time you go through something difficult and people share their perspective on it, take a moment to think to yourself: Is that how I feel about it? Or is my truth less clear cut? Do I personally think everything happens for a reason or do I believe life is more random? Everyone is different and how you feel one day might dramatically differ from how you feel the next. Our feelings constantly change but what doesn’t change is that they come from within. No one can effectively tell you how to feel about something. You shouldn’t feel badly if you don’t feel the way they think you should feel. There are no shoulds when it comes to feelings anyway. All we can do is check in with ourselves and check in with others. Your perspective doesn’t have to belong to anyone other than you.

xoxo,

Allison

***This blog was originally posted to my Patreon in August, 2021. I’ll be posting new (old) blogs every Wednesday!***