Tear drop talkin’ bout new horizons
This is for all those individual drops out there from this same giant wave that have found themselves unhappy in a relationship.
With one year post walkin-out-the-door under my belt, and a lot of personal self-work including, but not limited to: crying in the fetal position on a carpet littered with old notebooks about herbal supplements, sending nudes to strangers, a deep-dive into religion, astrology, paganism, ancient cultures, mythology, philosophy, oriental dance classes, full moon meditations, tarot, runes, magic spell work, attempting to talk with spirits, talking out loud to myself, laughing hysterically out loud to myself, personality-types, enneagram, gene keys, human design, integral theory, stoicism, yoga, meditation, music, languages, podcasts, and a plethora of self-help books, autobiographies, and dystopian not-so-fiction novels… I’d like to summarize my findings on the experience for anyone just starting out on this journey of self-actualization.
Rule number one and I mean it- there is no exception:
Do not jump straight into a new relationship. The moment you get out of a relationship you are free from all the constraints of whatever story that co-creator developed with you. All of the sudden everything is an option and all those things that you are sad about can change instantly with no need for discussion with anyone else. A master’s degree or a doctorate. A certificate in wildlife management. A new car. A vacation to an island. Every single friend you’ve ever known that ever invited you out. Your mom’s house. The mountains. Mount Everest. SCUBA. SPACE. You begin to try to find help from everywhere else, looking for some direction. You want input from everyone else to figure out who you are. Who you REALLY are from many perspectives. The worst thing you can do is immediately allow someone else to build your story with you at this point. You are that same person you were when in the relationship with the last someone. You never developed into anything else because the deep work happens when you are alone.
Stick with the good vibes
Life has an interesting way of telling you that you are on the right path. Things feel yucky when you aren’t; you are fighting life at all corners and the littlest things upset you. It feels like an uphill battle. Once you begin to sit with yourself and you learn that you are the observer and the observed, you recognize you actually do construct your reality. When you are mad things are tough and things are tough when you are mad. But if you can find the silver lining then it isn’t such a tragedy. It is a simple fix, but only if your mind is free from any mental fog, so you have to practice everyday. You have to practice having some sort of mental control so that when you need the muscle of meditation, it is there. You need to be able to step outside your first person narrative in order to see how you are taking life too personally or too seriously This is what you relied on your partner for and whatever was the narrative in your relationship is not necessarily the same as your personal stance on the matter. You could take any inconvenience to mean that moment wasn’t the right one. If it were, this would’ve been just as easy as you’d planned it to be up until the moment your prediction was no longer correct. You’ll find that if you expose yourself to enough people, you can notice when and where you get good feelings and bad feelings. But you have to be open and the way to create that openness is to sit with yourself and receive life as if you’d planned all of it just the way it happened, even when it doesn’t go how you planned.
Sit with yourself
The only way to know who you truly are is to sit with yourself when no one else is around. Watch what you do when no one is looking and that is the person you actually are. That is when your shadows emerge. Not when your girlfriend is around nor even when your best friend is around. Those people have stories with you that feed into your main character from their perspective. But you alone with yourself… just think about that. When you can let loose and “be yourself”. Someone is still observing. It’s you. Or God. Or whatever. You still perform in front of someone if you are present. You could numb your mind with a movie where you move into those characters- which isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t truly sitting with the self. It can be jarring when you really start to peel back all the implications of being an observer and the observed. Some people put that off until the end and its far more terrifying than addressing it when you still have some friends living and maybe even some family if you are lucky.
Notice yourself in others
I recommend starting with the people you like and then working on things with the people you don’t like. The reason you like someone is a thing about yourself that you like or feel you could do, or have, or be. If you like someone because they are social its because you might like this for yourself or could see yourself as behaving in a similar way. If you like someone because they are reserved, the same could be true. It is a really good compass to use. Take the people you like and even if it is just “this person is attractive, I like them”, set it aside and figure out what it is that attracts you. What you are developing is a collage of all the personalities and aesthetics that you like. This gives you a good idea of who you are at your best. The more people you include, the better the representation becomes.
Then the difficult part comes when you have to look at those people you loathe. The worst of people in your life and those you wish to never meet. I’m sorry to inform you, those people possess characteristics that you hate about yourself. This isn’t so simple to translate though. You almost have to flip the qualities on their heads to make sense of it sometimes. If someone is naggy and needy and I dont like that, I may just be immature and need things to be my way (i.e, naggy and needy) or it may be the case that I need to be more aware of my reaction to that sort of behavior. Maybe patience is the lesson. A good deduction method is learning archetypes of some sort and reading stories about them. In ancient tales you were given a complete character: the good side, the bad side, and the ugly side. Nowadays, we love ourselves a good hero. Unfortunately, getting caught up in that character-type leads to a very diluted (and deluded) plot line. There are no good and bad people, there are people who do good things and people who do bad things and those people can be the same person.
Your friends from the relationship days may not be friends with you anymore.
One of the most gut-wrenching epiphanies I had was that my friends liked me better as the girl I was in my relationship. Turns out, that’s true because that was the only me they ever knew. They were not prepared for me to contend with my ego right before their very eyes. I had to tame the beast I’d allowed to develop in me for over ten years. A natural distrust of the world, you can imagine, after having been choked a few too many times by someone that was supposed to protect me. None of my friends could have known those deep dark secrets, so they could be no wiser to my inability to trust even them. Or the way I’d respond to criticism, just like he did: a ball of fury. How he would react to minor inconveniences: inconceivably. That is the side of you they won’t like but you are going to have to face it. Probably the scariest part of every transformation is that you have to do it alone. It’s the death of an old perspective and rebirth into a new life with new rules. Just know that you can’t take your friends with you into the depths of your shadow world, but you can meet them on the other side once you’ve dealt with your demons. If you do choose not to deal with them, and instead keep the friends that have actually befriended your demons, you’ll be chained to those fucks for the rest of forever.
Learn from childhood
I can imagine some people may not want to face down some of their childhood demons, but you can at least learn to be playful with ideas again. By that I mean: try to imagine life if you didn’t have the answer to what you want to do with the rest of your time here on Earth. After leaving a relationship, think about when you were a kid. If you have access to old notebooks or old artwork or even the area you grew up in: all of these memories help us get back on our path. The memories we stored have a lot of significance in the way they made us feel. Search for the things that made you light up as a child. That magic feeling still exists and you can follow it. It will lead you for as long as you will follow.
