I know that it’s not something I should entertain with my time. Where does blame take you really? I do this one with a slight twist though by suggesting to myself that maybe there is a fine line between blame and why. In order to make any changes one has to understand the original problem. It is impossible to modify behavior when the cause of that behavior is unknown. Today was spent walking the fine line in my head between blame and “what went wrong”. Why have I made the particular choices that have taken me to where I am in my love life? I was surprisingly honest with myself too.
1. Darren-There isn’t really a whole lot of blame when people are trying to have a “relationship” between the ages of 14 and 17. There can be two inexperienced adolescents trying to organize attraction and what they think to be “love”. There can be two children trying to fill in the holes where other things should be. There isn’t really a whole lot of why beyond that I don’t think.
2. Kurt-That was all me. All of it. I was 18 years old and lacked the skills required to allow anger and sadness an appropriate outlet. I behaved in the most awful manner to someone that treated me with the utmost respect and adoration. Punishing the wrong person by withdrawing for no apparent reason and sleeping with their best friend pretty much killed that relationship. All me.
3. Trevor-That was all me as well. That was when my father issues came to light at the age of 18 with a 26 year-old, though obviously at the time I was blissfully unaware of those issues. To his credit at no point did he mislead me into thinking that we were anything other than what we were in reality. I ignorantly placed undo adoration on someone and ended up hurt as a result.
4. Anton-That was two of us. A 27 year-old man that is merely separated from his wife has no business dealing with an 18 year-old that has serious father issues…and vice versa. In my case, the age of consent meant nothing really. I was a young 18; he knew that, and he exploited it for his own emotional purposes. 18 was the beginning of a seven year search for the ability to stand on my own two feet…it was also seven years that entailed mostly poor choices leading to a lot of dead ends.
5. Rusty-That was two of us as well. He was a by-product of my drug use beginning at the age of 19 that I mistakenly thought might fix hurting things which I wasn’t able to at the time. An illusion of excitement made it really easy for me to sacrifice my feelings and self-respect. He had money, he had drugs and he was talented at painting pretty pictures to cover up how things really were. At the very least he was my age…but he was also batshit crazy. That was his part of it.
6. Nate-That was mostly me…at least up until the end. This was when the drug use pretty much stopped, and I attribute a great deal of that to his help. However, for almost three years I held onto his mistakes made at the beginning of the relationship…mistakes which I had pretended to forgive. You cannot fake something in any type of relationship with another and expect it to be successful. That was my responsibility. Although, as it turned out honesty was a concept he had difficulty with as well. Rather than come forth with the real reasons he was ending the relationship he chose to take the coward’s way out by tearing into things about me that had nothing to do with why it was ending. The dishonesty continued on as I allowed physical contact to continue on despite the fact that he had started seeing someone else (which, obviously, wouldn’t come to light until much later).
7. George-Anyone familiar with this one can agree that it was mostly him…the responsibility I had to accept was the choice to remain in a relationship with someone that was physically and emotionally abusive in every way imagineable. This one was the crux to a seven year lesson on how to stand on my own; it happened for a reason and I’ve made peace with all that reason. That’s where it all ended.
8. Current-Partially, the two of us…one of us as it pertains to one issue in particular and that one of us is not me. Never before have I been so unsure of the correct path to take in my entire life. I no longer need someone else to stand on my own, I no longer hold onto things that I say I have forgiven, I am honest (brutally in some cases), I no longer have father issues and I know the appropriate outlets for anger and sadness. I have handled these things and I have figured out who I am, where I’m going and where I’ve come from.
Though, when it comes to this issue in particular that we’re dealing with…the fine line between whose issues they are becomes finer every day, and this is what makes me nervous.
