We’ve officially been broken up longer than the last time. And I’m trying to start letting go of the hope we will get back together. Since my last post, things didn’t go as smoothly as I wanted them to. Of course they didn’t, you can’t just force your thoughts and feelings to be a certain way from one point onward. I still need time to let all my emotions out, to grieve, to cry, to accept what has happened. As much as it frustrates me, I can’t control how this process unfolds. I can’t just wake up one day and decide that from now on I’m not going to be sad anymore. I guess I just got to close my eyes and take this Ride of Grief. The only thing I can do is have faith I will come out better on the other side, and I do have that faith. I’ll explain a bit more about why this is so hard for me, though, with a bit of psychology.
According to the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, inspired by Carl Jung, there are at least 16 different personality types. These are based on four letters, representing personality traits. There is introversion vs extroversion, sensing vs intuition, thinking vs feeling, and judging vs perceiving. A few weeks ago my friend the therapist made me do this short test on which one I’d fit into (I’ll put it under this post). As we predicted, I came out as an INFJ, or an Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Judging person. Those last two make up a funny combination. And by funny I mean annoying. It’s more common to have Feeling paired up with Perceiving. This means that a person makes decisions based on their emotions and has the ability to look at situations and feelings with a more or less neutral perspective. In short, they don’t judge. Combining Feeling and Judging however is tricky, because what it means for me is that I cannot let things be as they are without assigning some form of meaning to them. When I feel overwhelmed by a certain emotion, I immediately want to figure out where it came from and how I can control it, instead of just sitting back and observing it. What I’ve noticed in the last few weeks is that I try to frame periods of time into a certain category. Three days of extreme sadness and crying: I must be in the deepest of the well. One day without crying and feeling pretty alright: I must be climbing out of it. I think it’s okay to assign some meaning in retrospect, but often I start predicting and thus having expectations of what’s to come. And I shouldn’t, because nothing ever turns out the way you expect it to. I’m always trying to make sense of what I’m feeling instead of just letting those emotions be there. It’s so hard for me to just observe them and do nothing, think nothing of them. However, I still believe I can learn to do that. Meditation has already helped me a lot with it, and maybe there are other ways in which I can practice it.
While it’s no use trying to change your emotions, it can be good to take a critical look at certain thought patterns you repeat to yourself. For me personally, some things I’ve been telling myself lately are that I haven’t lost myself in this relationship, and that it’s my fault it’s over because I broke up with him. That’s all not necessarily true. I think I did lose a small bit of myself while being with him, and that’s only natural. I have cared for him as much as I cared for myself for two years, and that meant that sometimes, I ignored my own needs. And that’s okay, people sometimes do that for each other in a relationship. But in our case, I feel like I did that way more than he did. At some point, that starts affecting your self worth. I resent him for not caring for me like I did for him, but I also resent myself that I put up with that for so long. (Side note, he probably sounds like a bad guy right now, which he absolutely isn’t, he just didn’t have the mental capacity to fully be there for someone else because of what he was dealing with on his own.) So to solve that, I have to find the things that make me feel like me again. Seems like I was onto something in that last post after all. As for the my-fault-story, that’s not totally accurate either. I reached out to him, made it clear I wanted another shot at us, but he made a decision to not take that chance. He’s totally entitled to that choice, but I got to stop painting him as a saint in my head. He could have chosen to try to better himself with me in his life. I understand he didn’t, but I should see it as what it is: him not choosing me. That doesn’t mean I have to be mad at him, so I’m not. It just means I have to accept that both of us made the decision to not be together, not just me.
Right now, I’m going back to doing things day by day, trying to have as little expectation as possible of how I should be, how the day should be or how my emotions should be. Two days ago I finally dragged myself out of my house to go cycle to one of my favourite spots of nature outside my city. I took my new camera and experimented a bit with lighting and such. I was gone for three hours, and when I came back I felt tired but light. My mind was quieter. I felt better than I had in days. That doesn’t mean that now I’m on a straight path to happiness again, but it was a good day. That’s all I need to think about it. I’m not there yet, but I will be okay.
“When it comes to fixing our biggest problems, there are no shortcuts.” – Once upon a Time (S6E1)
Jung Personality Test: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
Tea Time With Amber 