I’m not good at accepting defeat when I’m fighting based on a principle, and I rarely fight unless it’s for a principle. Typically I only fight for something that’s bigger than me, or for someone else who can’t fight for themself.
I’m someone who will take the L, if it ultimately gets me a bigger W. If I give up it means my priorities shifted or I found a more effective way to win.
Aaron Gleaves terminating me like he did has hurt me terribly. He found the perfect way to hurt me with the way my personality is and how I think. Not only do I not understand what happened, which terrifies me, I don’t see what good it did to end things like that. I need to see the point, and I really don’t.
I can successfully assign meanings to experiences sometimes. I’m dumbfounded by the way he treated me. To people like some of my therapists who are able to let shit happen and say it happened just because it happened, I envy their ability to do that. I don’t know how to most of the time. If I knew he terminated me that way because he was pissed off or hated me, that would be a starting point. But he can just be silent to me forever knowing that I’m the kind who would at least like to understand where he or I or both of us went wrong, if we even went wrong, which I’m not convinced we did, but maybe so.
I don’t feel like I have enough data to compile a solid list of useful info or tips that I learned from the painful experience. I have no clarity on what to change if anything for next time, or what lessons from it that I can apply to another part of my life.
It’s just confusion and pain. And Aaron knows how I think and that’s why doing this to me like this is especially cruel. He doesn’t need to like me, but this is what he thinks I deserve? I could only do that to someone I despised. This is why sometimes I feel like he definitely hates me beyond my comprehension. Then I get scared at the thought of me happily going to someone who hates me and spilling my guts.
Aaron Gleaves picked the perfect way to hurt me. My abusive exes would be delighted and crown him king.
Since there’s no end in sight to the torment he dropped me into, I’d like to give up and accept defeat, but I don’t know what that looks like because the pain and confusion are still present no matter what I try.
I keep thinking if I say Aaron Gleaves has won the war, that the pain will stop, but it doesn’t. I give up, I lie down, but the pain stays strong and goes on. It’s its own entity now, this pain is, it lives and breathes even when I opt out. It hides behind the bushes in the dark and jump scares me from behind doors and corners. I joke, I laugh, I cry, I ignore it, but it’s always there, ready to strike any time it wants to.
I consider sometimes that regret or remorse might be my answer. I could possibly apologize if I knew what for and how it would help, but I have no idea what to be sorry for. Going to therapy? Saying I wanted us to be friends? I only ever said that because I felt like we were. I didn’t build it up to that, it felt to me like it was already there and I was just trying to talk about it. Talking about uncomfortable things is what I do. Why would I not do that in therapy of all places?
Even knowing if Aaron is delighted that he hurt me and threw me away, might offer me some closure. I could say, oh so that’s the kind of guy he was and I didn’t see it. That’s awful, but it could make sense.
But what if he was sad to see me go? What if he was close to me too and didn’t want to dump me but felt like he had to? I wouldn’t have to hate him then would I. But I’d have to process feeling sad for his pain and I’d still be angry that he didn’t let me help decide how it was going to go. My last act as someone who thought I was his friend could’ve been to help organize our last goodbye. Painful as hell, but there could’ve been beauty in it.
People remind me that I’m free to rewrite the end and rewrite the story if I want to, but isn’t it the truth that sets us free, not the lies we tell ourselves?
My honest version of the story would be that we cared about each other. If that’s true he’ll never admit it so I’ll never know. The story he’ll use is that he was calm and properly detached and had to hurt me for my own good. I could maybe go along with that if it wasn’t insulting. After everything he watched me overcome, he suddenly needed to infantilize me and leave me standing stupidly in the woods like Edward left Bella, for my own good? As though I couldn’t possibly know what’s good for me and needed a man to show me what was best.
I’ve had therapists after him say he got too close. I don’t understand how if you care about someone and you aren’t spending time together except for in a virtual office for an hour a week, how you can ever get too close. I never drove to see him. He never called me and told me about his day. I didn’t get to hug him goodbye, and the way he avoided looking at me the last time I saw him onscreen haunts me to this day.
I wish I could make sense of it, I wish I could understand and move on. Ultimately, I can see he’s content to let me suffer, and I guess that speaks volumes about him and what he thinks of me.
Aaron Gleaves, you won. You got rid of me and I still care about you even though you hurt me way more than you ever needed to. Is that the win you wanted, or are you hurt too? This didn’t have to be something that gets made into a song, or into a blog for that matter, but damn I really wish I knew. If I understood, I might be able to take the L and the failing grade in therapy that you gave me. Maybe I’d take it with dignity and grace, and move on, processing the last of the pain as I go.
I wish I knew what to do. I wish I could make it make sense to me.