Holding Two Truths

Today is my ex’s birthday, and reflecting on how good of a person she is, how much she adds to this world, has also brought up grief for me. The grief of losing her as a partner.

Alongside that grief, there is also acceptance. There is understanding.

And it still hurts to sit with that reality.

The more internal work I do, the more the layers start to peel back, the more I realize how hard life with me can be for other people. I don’t mean that in a self-deprecating way, just in an honest one. I’ve had a lot of ways of coping that aren’t easy to be around.

I want to change that. I am working to change that.

But that doesn’t undo the pain of realizing it after it’s too late.

And maybe… in our individual journeys of growth, this is just how things were always going to end.

Maybe as we both found ourselves, and stopped trying to constantly be what the other person needed, more incompatibility would have been revealed.

That doesn’t make it easier to let go of the desire for it to continue.

I’m trying to breathe through it.

Because even in the grief, there is something else too…

I’m proud of her for choosing herself.

And I’m proud of both of us for finding a way to stay connected through something that could have easily broken us completely.

There’s a lot of love here.

Even if it doesn’t look the way it used to.

Author’s Note:

I want to be mindful that talking about incompatibility could come across as me not seeing my mistakes. That isn’t the case.

I know my mistakes contributed to how things evolved over time, and we’ve both acknowledged that for a long time, both of us were living without our core needs being met because of that incompatibility.

It was two humans who felt a deep amount of love for each other, slowly letting themselves deteriorate because they didn’t want it to end.