Elle Rey📚

          Can I be completely honest for a second? It is hard, like really hard. It’s tough to confront your own insecurities that come forward in the midst of a divorce. The feelings of feeling broken, inadequate, unlovable and replaceable. It’s like you don’t want to give people a certain power, but when you love someone, and it feels like they just turned their feelings off like a switch then how are you supposed to feel. One minute they were in love, and the next minute they weren’t. Maybe it depends on the person. Maybe some people just hide it better. I guess it comes down to whether you’re the kind of person who has a poker face or the kind of person who wears their heart on their sleeve. Growing up I had the poker force. I can look unbothered long enough until I get home and release my feelings in a private space. However, if I’m in love then it’s another story. My emotions are clearly on my sleeves for the world to see, and I hate that. I miss the days when I could bottle everything up and hide my feelings from the world, and especially from the particular person who caused the heartbreak.

          Love can make you stupid. Love can make you overlook red flags. Love can make you miss all the warning signs. Love can have you out here looking like a clown, and when you throw our buddy “ego” into the mix it can be a real shitshow. I can clearly see that this marriage isn’t good for me. I can clearly see that it’s draining me and has been draining me for a long time now. The person that I’m with is obviously not the same person anymore, not in the slightest. It’s like he vanished, and someone replaced him with a clone. So why does it feel like a part of me is resisting? Is it because he seems fine and dandy, and it’s a cut to my ego? Or is it because it feels like I’m easily discarded after all these years? When words don’t match up with the actions you wonder if it was ever real, or if it was just drawn-out infatuation. I keep thinking about how I should be feeling, when I know that it’s not how love works. It’s not going to always follow logic, not for me anyway.

          As the days go by, I keep asking myself “What are you fighting for Caroline?” That line is from the show 2 Broke Girls. I’ll attach a video of the scene below if I can, but to add context the guy Oleg is the pervert of the restaurant. He usually hits on the waitresses and they’re pretty much disgusted by his tawdry antics. Well, one episode he mentions to Caroline that she couldn’t handle him in the sheets. Caroline replies by saying “I could so handle you in the sheets, Oleg.” And Max (the other waitress) replies with “What are you fighting for Caroline?” It’s like you know you clearly don’t want that prize, so why are you even playing the game? Lol. So every time I feel my heart ache from his actions and the way he treats me now and I feel that need to prove my worth in some way, I have to ask myself “What are you fighting for Caroline?” If you don’t want this, then why does it bother you? Why do you have a reaction to something that is clearly not for you? Logically, I understand that, but I guess heartbreak is complicated.

          Someone stated that if you never loved yourself that you can’t love anyone else. Others have even agreed with that statement by saying that they realized that they weren’t really in love after discovering that they didn’t love themselves. I don’t know if that’s true or not, and I know that there is no “one size fits all” answer to that type of question. I guess that’s why the uncertainty gets to me a little bit. What if he feels that way too? I probably wouldn’t even want to know if he did. Regardless of us not being a good fit, I can honestly say that I did love him, and my heart was in it. It would be unfortunate if it weren’t genuinely reciprocated, but I know that happens more often than we think.

          So, what’s the next step? Well, the next step is to build myself back up and not base my worth off of his actions. I need to stop beating myself up about all the time that I could have possibly wasted (and part of that stems from how the world treats women after age 30). I hate that it bothers me, but I would be lying to say that it doesn’t. Next, I need to stop worrying about what everyone might think once more people find out. I need to walk firm in my truth and hold my head high. Lastly, I need to heal this broken heart. I need to keep mourning the lasting love that I thought I had, as long as I need to. The only way out is the way through. I can’t tiptoe around the pain. I just have to feel it and go through it, and I will turn this pain into something. It will all be okay in the end. It’s a process, and even though it’s hard making sense of it all now, sooner or later I will find out why all of this had to happen. It’s going to take time, but I’ll get through this.