Too Much to Bear

Thank God or Nature or whoever the fuck was responsible. It's over.

More than anyone, I should be thanking myself for ending what has ended, but at the same time, I should be blaming myself for getting into this mess in the first place.

I am talking simultaneously about the relationship and the past academic semester. As with every major mistake I make, I treat these two components comprising the past semester as learning experiences. I learned never to date the paranoid. I learned to trust my own judgment, that I should never take anyone seriously who can't manage their own psyche. I learned that I should chill out in the presence of a lot of change in my life, and that I shouldn't create more drastic changes to add to the ensuing confusion. I learned that a relationship in which I am constantly scrambling to please the significant other to compensate for my inadequacies is a commitment for which I am either not prepared or for which no one should ever care. I learned that professors of higher-level classes are no more merciful than the ones I've faced previously. I learned that in order to become a professor in science or engineering, you must either be hell-bent on inflating your ego, or too intelligent in mathematical ways for any intelligence to be left in ways that would allow them to be able to communicate with other people effectively. I learned that I should have listened to myself in the first place. I learned that, when the people I doubted in the first place cause me harm, the people who I always thought I could trust will come back to me in the long run.

She told me I made her happy, and it meant nothing to me, because of the constant dissatisfaction she expressed otherwise. I explained this to one of my brother's friends, and he brought up the fact that about only ten percent of happiness is conveyed verbally. I don't think he realized how perfectly relevant that fact was to my situation. He was exactly right. You can't tell me "I love you," and then proceed to tell me twenty problems you have with our relationship, and bring up problem after problem you have with me. If you think of so many problems, I don't see how you can call anything "love." If I hear repeatedly, "this is wrong," "this is wrong," "this is wrong," then there's no love present.

Love is a feeling that skews people toward focusing on the good shared between two people. This is why first impressions are so important. I feel like love comes from luck in a lot of cases. If two random people are placed in each other's presence, they will have a certain amount in common. The odds that something they share in common is revealed right away is somewhat small. Now, the odds increase when there are more things they have in common to choose from, but in any case, these two people might have so much in common but can go through a whole conversation or party without mentioning a single commonality. On the other hand, they might happen to highlight a lot of the things they have in common, causing a spark that gets emitted when two people are already thinking about all of the wonderful things about each other. Love grows from that.

Now I don't know the opposite feeling so well, because I feel that it's no use thinking about it. This is the feeling when you think about all of the things you don't have in common with someone. It's when you think about the differences between you and someone else and the problems they cause. This can be seen as an opposite to what love is. This is the feeling that causes you to doubt your connection with someone. This is the feeling that tells you to sever the ties because you're just so different and dysfunctional together. This is what she felt for me, no matter how many times she said "I love you," and it's why it meant nothing to me when she said it. If you can't accept other people for their flaws, you'll never love.

If you take one mundane misunderstanding and manipulate it in your head until you feel like it's a sign of a much larger problem, then I'm not making you happy. It might not be my fault that you have these paranoia-driven episodes, but I'm still not making you happy. If I can't do that, I can't be content with a relationship, because you're creating anti-love by emphasizing how different and troubled we are. Your overwhelming dissatisfaction is telling you that the relationship is not a good idea, whether you want to accept it or not. I can see why some people would refuse to accept it, though, because they feel that way about everything in their life to different extents.

Some people aren't satisfied by anything, and she was one of them. I'd never satisfy her, and I knew that. Could I go on in a relationship knowing that I would never make the other person happy, even knowing that it was impossible? No. I can't. Because, like everyone else in the world, I need to be appreciated.

She needed to learn. She needed to change, and become able to accept the world for what it is. She didn't accept me for who I was, always telling me I needed to change everything about myself. I know she deserves to be happy, and I want her to be in the future. I could be more charitable and stand by her in her efforts to change and be better able to deal with the world. But am I that charitable? Do I have the effort, time, AND capacity to do that?

No.

I knew that, in making this decision, I was being selfish. But being in emotional shambles constantly was an indication that I needed an increase in my selfishness. I tried way too hard to please someone who I couldn't please, and that made me feel inadequate, thinking that she was like any special girl. Now that I realize that her standards aren't normal, I find that I am at least a mediocre human being, and not a constant failure.

It'll take me a while to bring myself back up to self-esteem. I'll know I'm back into the swing of things when I no longer feel like I'm lost, and I regain sight of who I am and what I want out of life. It's slowly coming back; I can tell, because I started drawing something in Google Sketchup out of curiosity. I always knew I was a creator of things, and I want to get back to creating things. I am now realizing that I abandoned my passion for creating things, because for all that time, I didn't feel like anything I created would be something worth creating. Now I'm starting to feel like what I can do will be worth it, if I just follow my instincts like I should have in the first place.