When someone is forcibly removed from your life, the pain lingers, even if they are the one that did the removal. I've written about this before as I've been working to revision the future without my ex, and it seems to be something I will deal with for a while — if not forever. I can imagine a happy life for me in the future, but that lingering feeling of pain as I sit in the quiet, surrounded by love, wondering why.
I know the "how," but I still do not know the "why."
What seems most prominent is just realizing I have no one to share my life with anymore. However painful that is, it immediately is crushed by the reality that my ex never was interested in the things I was interested in.
She didn't even pretend or make an effort to show interest because they were important to me.
- This harshly reminds me how many years I've walked alone, and
- that reminds me how often I spent trying to invest in her and the things she liked.
- Finally, that reminds me how much pain I've been through, holding on to hope she would one day connect with me and share her heart.
Yeah, that shadow pain sucks. It runs deep, especially when you realize just how damaging the little things can be when someone is close to you. I'm sure she was hurt by me in the exact same way. The difference here is that I tried to communicate and ask for change, to which she told me she either didn't feel comfortable connecting as I suggested, or that she didn't see the importance or relevance of doing such with me.
This all points back to us coming from two completely different worlds.
Based on my experience in dealing with people, there is a certain personality type that has a tendency to weight the priority of their relationships based on the return they get, or by what benefit those relationships bring. That may just sound like every human being in the world to a certain degree, but this doesn't focus on the physical return or benefit, but more specifically the harmony or synergy of the psyche.
Dissonance to such a mind is a violation of that individual's base morality, so much so that the person will seek alleviation from it even to the point of destroying close relationships. Their minds are, in a sense, extremely fragile, and thus require sympathetic connections. If a relationship doesn't provide this, it ends up ultimately being a liability to their mental health, and thus can only be dealt with for so long.
This reflects my ex perfectly.
Because of this, we handle conflict completely different. I see conflict or dissonance as a temporary misalignment of intellects based on assumptions and expectations, whereas my ex sees it as an antagonist that stands against her core moral beliefs.
As one can imagine, it makes compromises nearly impossible.
This difference severely changes how we have each handled the pain the other has caused. In the end, not only has she been unable to manage the pain, but also she has been unable to divorce the negative impacts she has experienced from me