twisted

I am holding on to Matthew in my mind this week. Just one sentence from April about him on Sunday and my brain won’t let it be. John, of course, seemed to know immediately that I had called Matthew on Sunday night. I’m not the best liar, apparently. I admitted to him that I called. That he didn’t answer and I don’t expect him to call back. I told him I wouldn’t drink alone again. I told him I was sorry.

I resented every word of the conversation. I hate having to apologize for my behavior. I hate having to answer to him. I hate that this is just a new platform for him to insist that we need to talk again and again but to not listen to a word I say when it is my turn to talk. I slept in the spare bedroom last night. It was the best sleep I’ve had in two months. 

I’ve learned a lot about myself lately. I am very reflective of other people’s feelings and actions. It’s a defense mechanism of some sort, probably left over from my crappy experiences with friends as a young teenager. My relationships have been almost exclusively with men who love me. That sounds almost healthy, except I’m not sure how much or how long I loved them back. I have this need to be around people who build my self-esteem – either by telling me good things about myself, or by making me feel better about myself because they are more messed up than I am. John used to fit both of those bills. Matthew does. So does Josh (my on again off again college boyfriend), and probably Seth and Joey and Derek too. Pretty much all of them fit into my life in the same way for the same reason….because they loved me, and so I figured they could make me happy. 

Twisted. I know. These are all recent revelations for me, so it’s not like I’ve been walking around deliberately turning men into puppies and cruelly giving them just enough love and food to keep them following me around. I didn’t know, and maybe it’s not as bad as it seems in my brain right at this moment. 

Anyway John used to fit both qualifications, but he doesn’t anymore. He is becoming healthier, and as he does it, he’s less willing to take crap from me. That means he spends as much time criticizing me or asking me to have discussions about how crappy I am as he does telling me things that build me up. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t like that he sees the bad things. I am not taking the criticism all that well. I exit the room when the fights start to wind up. I shut down and bury my nose in a book. I do anything to get away from it, including sleeping in another room, and I do it despite the knowledge that it will actually make things 20x worse than they are already.

I don’t know how to move past this. I’m acting like an overgrown self-absorbed child. I need to grow up. Is everyone this twisted, or is it really just me?