Pancake

I don’t understand why I feel like a pancake being flipped over all the time.

How I can feel okay and then suddenly be hit with so much shame that I want to melt away. Or disappear entirely.

Why does that happen?

Why does every mistake I’ve made in my entire life replay in my head all at once, like it’s being dumped on me in bulk? Why do I feel like the worst person to ever walk the earth? Why do I hate myself this much?

Is it because I keep fucking up?

Holding all of this inside feels like air expanding too fast, like it’s going to shred me from the inside out. Like there’s no room left and something has to give.

I think one of the reasons I miss L so much is because she didn’t see me the way I see myself. Her reflection of me softened this part when it got loud. When the shame surged. When I couldn’t separate who I am from everything I’ve ever done wrong.

And I don’t know how to do that for myself.

When I name that, guilt immediately follows, because it sounds like I only miss what she gave me. And that’s not true.

I feel like a fraud. Like I talk endlessly about how I feel, but avoid naming how I actually fucked things up.

So here it is.

I cheated on my former wife.

I justified it by telling myself that if I kept it to myself, it wouldn’t hurt her. That I could contain it. That the damage would only exist if I made it real. And then I realized what I was doing, and I told her the truth anyway.

That’s the kind of person I am.

I also spent most of our relationship immobilized. Stuck. Unable to leave the house. Unable to show up as a partner in the ways that mattered. And now, suddenly, I can leave the house. I can see people. I can move. And I don’t understand why that’s possible now when it wasn’t then.

All I can land on is this:

I wasn’t a partner. I was a dead weight. A corpse dragging her down.

And worst of all, I betrayed her. I betrayed someone I loved, and I betrayed my own values in the process. Values I still claim to have. Values I talk about. Values that feel hollow when I look at my actions.

That’s the part that makes me feel irredeemable.

Because this isn’t just about pain or trauma or being overwhelmed, it’s about choice. It’s about the fact that I made decisions without fully facing their consequences until after the damage was done. That I centered my own relief. That I was selfish.

That’s the kind of person I’m afraid I am at my core:

A selfish asshole who understands the impact of his actions only once it’s too late.

And that’s not why things ended.

It really was incompatibility.

But it was incompatibility with betrayal tagging along.

I don’t want to be the person who hurts other people. And the part that terrifies me is that it feels like my existence does that anyway. Not out of malice, but out of complexity I don’t know how to contain. I don’t know how to explain it without sounding like I’m avoiding responsibility, and I’m not. I just don’t yet have language for how caring deeply and still causing harm can coexist in the same body.

And it feels hypocritical to be so angry at the therapist who hurt me when I walk around hurting other people too. I don’t know how to hold both truths at the same time without one canceling the other out. I don’t know how to believe that harm done to me mattered when I know I’ve caused harm myself.

I don’t know how to become someone I can be proud of, not for dumb, surface-level things like being able to make friends, but for being a good person. A person who doesn’t feel like a walking accumulation of failures. A person who can live with themselves without wanting to disappear when the shame hits.

I don’t know how to hold accountability without turning it into a life sentence. I don’t know how to let the truth exist without using it as proof that I deserve to hate myself forever.

Right now, I don’t know how to hold myself the way she once held me in her seeing.

I only know how loud this feels.

How heavy it is.

And how much it hurts.