How I lost myself

NOTE: I do actually give advice after the story, so stick with this, please. I know I can be pretty long-winded.

I’m going to share a little back story and while it certainly can’t compare to ****’s, I feel that you gotta hear things as much as possible in order to believe them and be able to move forward with any advice you take. Also realize that any advice one can give for this situation is going to be advice that you won’t be able to fully take and acknowledge right now. This will be something that you will think back to a few months or a year from now and realize how helpful we were after all.

Over a year ago, I broke up with my girlfriend at the time. I can’t even completely say that. Hrm, let’s just say, we broke up. It was an absolutely terrible relationship in which she was a horribly manipulative person, and she spent the entire short time trying to change me, implanting that who I am wasn’t who I am, and any part of “me” that I held on to just wasn’t good enough for anybody. It’s one thing for a person to convince you some part of yourself isn’t good enough for them, but to convince you that not even a small part of yourself is good enough for anyone­ – that’s just wrong.

But to me, everything was peachy. It’s difficult to word things in a way that don’t seem like I just want to make this situation sound as worse as possible, but it was almost as if I was brainwashed into believing this is how things should be, and this is the only way I could be happy. I’m not even saying she’s responsible for that, though, as I did most of that myself. Settling, changing yourself for the only people who seemed interested just somehow seemed like the only way to be happy in life, despite the fact that I really wasn’t happy in the slightest.

So after the break up, things should return to normal, right? Nope. Nope. While I did have a brief fresh air of freedom, true freedom, and I had started to enjoy myself again, socializing with friends at school, enjoying this new environment of college, and the like, I had this growing issue in the back of my mind. I had no clue who I was. I had suppressed most of myself and had been convinced what didn’t get suppressed wasn’t good enough, so I couldn’t even say who I was. When meeting new people, interactions were different each time. I had so many fronts, so many made up selves, that it had to all crash down. Seemingly at the perfect time (for her at least) the ex decided to pop back in and try being friends again. Playing on my current state of just generally being lost, and even on my guilt to an extent, she forced her way back into my life, and suddenly the exciting first semester of college was just another prison.

Throughout all this, though, I had been talking to a YouTuber friend. Skype, Twitter, Facebook, we’d been discussing the relationship and all the aspects of it. He told me how he had been through a similar thing in the past, that I wasn’t the only one going through this. Something so simple was just so comforting. Another bit of advice, one he offered in Direct Messages on Twitter, of all things, was to just focus on myself. Don’t even put energy into trying to fix or get rid of this broken relationship, just find, re-create, and/or fix myself and everything else would fall in to place. He told me that one day I will be sitting somewhere and just realize how incredible a person I am, how great life really is, and the idea of what I was going through at the time would just seem so foreign.

Despite not believing that was possible at the time, that is exactly what happened. I still to this day have moments where I realize how happy I am and just how incredible things are now, and I find it pretty silly that I let myself go through what I did in the past.

Lesson learned – despite things seeming like the end of the world, you can and will get through them. You are not alone in going through this, you’re not the only one to have gone through it, and you will be with everyone else who made it through it very soon.

My advice to you? Stop trying to get over him. It’s not going to work. And definitely don’t try dating other guys with that intent. Being a guy, I just see that as being terrible to those guys, plus it’s only going to make things worse for you. You miss him, sure. You keep thinking about him and feeling like you need him, yeah. But stop trying to get rid of that. If anything, you’re just bringing it up moreso than it needs to and being harder on yourself. Instead of trying to get over the guy, try getting over yourself. Not in a mean way, but start doing some serious introspection, start finding out who you are. Do as much soul searching as possible, and start picking up the pieces and laying your new foundation. It took quite a bit of change for me, so perhaps you need to recreate yourself almost entirely. Others just need to rediscover who they were, so perhaps you need to find out who you were before this relationship, and be that person again. But work on that. Any time you start to miss him, or those feelings come up, channel those energies in to something. If you can, try to turn it into motivation for self-creation, but if that doesn’t work, channel it elsewhere. Anything besides drinking and drugs will help you find more interests that you have, and so you can see what you enjoy, what you use to cope, and add that to your list of who you are.

Work on finding yourself, creating yourself, or re-creating yourself, and I promise you that you will wake up one day, not too far down the road and wonder why you ever missed this guy this much, and maybe even find it kind of silly that you were in this mess. You will be a much happier and stable individual, and you’ll be able to move forward with your life and relationships.