What Is This All About?

What is this all about?

I don't know what has come over me but I'm feeling compelled to unblock him from Facebook. I don't want to talk, but I just want to snoop.

Nothing good will come of this. So I won't. But this compulsion hasn't hit me in almost a year. Why now?

Fears

I’m concerned that I can attribute some of my recent progress to being with someone else.  I worry this makes the steps forward I’ve made “artificial” and if she and I should ever split I would crumble and regress.

Wrong

I thought that being with someone else would help me think of him less.

It hasn't really.

Despite understanding theoretically that 13 years of deep rooted programming doesn't just rectify itself in a few short months, in actuality it's... a little upsetting.

Mother's Day has been an interesting time each year since my abortion. I'm in my 30s, so people often wish me Happy Mother's Day.

This year it didn't hurt.

Reminder to any of you out there facing a difficult decision: sadness and regret are not the same thing.

Sad Things.

I found a list of names. If things had been different and I had a girl, we would have called her Alice.

Hats

Throughout the healing process it hasn’t been the assaults, sexual coercion, and the emotional torture that has been difficult to understand. 

No, no.  It’s been resolving that reality to the person who was, on rare occasions, undeniably kind to me and charming to others.  The one who was loved by the family dog.  The one who helped out his grandma and had a really sweet relationship with her. 

It’s so much easier to think of them as monsters, and I’d argue that it is probably a necessity in the early stages of the recovery process.

But they're human.  And somehow that’s a difficult pill to swallow.

Reminder:  It’s been 74 weeks of no contact.  

I am still here carving out a future of my own.

And I can breathe freely now.

Every day I remind myself that I should mourn for the past I lost to him and not the future I think I’ve lost without him.