Sometimes the right decision can feel like the wrong one. Even if you have the best intentions, and the most pragmatic approach, you can still be left feeling sad and anxious about it, wondering if you made the right choice. There might not even be a right choice at all, merely the assumed better of two undesirable ones.
I was reading an essay the other day that featured a case study about a married couple. Having been together for over a decade, one partner ended up cheating on the other. The other partner then had to make an unenviable decision to work on the relationship and rebuild the trust, or to end it completely (i.e., divorce). Regardless of our own opinions on the matter, neither of the options were particularly right, but a choice needed to be made, for the only thing worse than either of those options is the dangerously attractive third route of doing nothing and remaining in limbo, trying to continue as though nothing has happened. That third route is the choice most people make when they feel stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it’s where I found myself recently. For the record, they divorced, which was the right call.
The choice I needed to make was with myself. It was the consequence of a situation that had nothing to do with my own actions; I had been put in an unfortunate position and was ill equipped to manage it in a healthy way. Put simply, it was either to keep living in a fantasy land or to move on from something that had already ended. Put even more simply, I needed to come to terms with letting someone go, and in turn, let myself live free from them.
I was stuck at the end of a road, looking left and right, and not wanting to turn in either direction. I remained indecisive as my life began to fall apart. I didn’t eat, drink, sleep. I couldn’t work well. I stopped feeling anything. That’s what my last few posts have been about, and in reading them back now, I can see that I was just trapped and looking for a way out. Being stuck meant I wasn’t making any progress at all. Sure, I was avoiding the difficulty of facing my reality, but I was also suffering for it physically and emotionally. Making these types of decisions is tough, but the important first step for me was when I realised that this was one of those times where there wasn’t going to be any immediate satisfaction, nor would there be any happiness, from the initial outcome.
I am well aware that I have attachment anxieties, it’s a topic I’ve written about a lot here. I hold onto my feelings and have a hard time letting them go. Yeah, I am much better at managing them now, and over the last few years I have become far more in touch with how I am genuinely feeling, and I can communicate them more effectively too, but I still struggle. I can talk myself down from the ledge but I haven’t stopped stepping out.
For someone with my attachment issues, the position I was in was a nightmare. I knew I needed to separate myself from someone for both our sakes, but it was an unfavourable decision shrouded in all my deepest fears and anxieties. I’ve been in that place before, but the stakes seemed higher this time. In my uncertainty, I held back from deciding. It’s like I was waiting for more information to give me the certainty I needed, hence my last post about truth, but there was no more information to be found. I knew everything already, I’m not an idiot, I’ve had enough relationships to understand these things. All I had to ask myself was “Which decision will make you feel the least bad?” and the answer was obvious.
What would make me feel the least bad is moving on because at that point, there were quite simply no other options. Things were going in one direction, and they were unstoppable. My struggle is that if I let someone go, I worry that the feelings go with them, but I wonder if that needn’t be the case. I still care deeply about lots of people who are no longer in my life, and I know that there are a lot of them out there who still care about me. It’s merely a changing dynamic, and I prefer consistency, but I also know that change is no bad thing. I remember how I’ve cried at breakups, only to look back in the future and wonder why I cried so much. I believe wholeheartedly that I will one day look back at this moment and wonder why I devoted so much of myself to it. I don’t want to admit that because it hurts, but I know it’s probably true. It hurts to think that I wasted my passion, time, and energy on something that failed but therein lies my problem – nothing has failed and nothing was wasted. The extent of my feelings for the situation proves to me that I actually succeeded in finding something that was worthy of my passion, time, and energy in the first place. All the dreams I had for a future that is no more, they wouldn’t have been possible if I didn’t feel them in the moment, and to be honest, that’s great.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with one of my friends about loving someone, and she admitted to me that she’d never felt the things I described about anyone before. She seemed sad about it, and I felt guilty, but now that I’m looking back at it, my attitude has changed. The elation of finding something that has the power to fundamentally change who you are and how you see the world is unmatched, and the notion that some people can’t or won’t experience that makes me feel sad on their behalf.
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I am alone now with the dog for a month. It will give me time to find myself again, as an individual in his own lane. I will continue to practice healthy boundaries, and I will come to terms with the decision I made and commit to it as best I can. I’ve been on a lot of dates in the last year, but none have really led anywhere. The two that could have gone somewhere were ruined because I was still holding onto something else, but now I have let go. It would be nice to date authentically as myself without any attachments or distractions, I don’t think it was fair of me to be seeing people while I had no intention of being fully with them but I’ve managed to apologise to one of them and from this point on, whoever I am with will have one hundred percent of me.