Friday, August 14, 2009

Bust ya windows


"I bust the windows out your car. And no, it didn't mend my broken heart. I'll probably always have these ugly scars, but right now I don't care about that part."--Jazmine Sullivan

I have always had a very strong sense of justice. Ask my Mother. As a child I used to say "That's not fair!" If something was one way for one of us children, it needs to be the same for the rest.

"Ben got a lollipop from the bank, I should get one too!"

"I got spanked for doing the exact same thing last week, Nick should get spanked too!"

"Why do Ben and Nick get to go out with Daddy and I can't? Just because I'm a girl doesn't mean I don't like golf. It's not fair!"

My Mother's response was always: "Life's not fair". That sucks.

Well into my adulthood I still struggle with this strong sense of social justice. We must be even. Not even on social justice issues, but in my personal life.

Throughout the last several months I have made it my personal mission to take the high road. Don't retaliate, don't stoop to the level of the "crazy ex" and do things that border on illegal. I struggle with taking the high road sometimes. There are days where I want to say, "To hell with the high road. She chewed up my heart and spit it out, I want to key her car!" I spend lots of time in my head fantasizing about what I would love to do if the law wasn't stacked against me.

After X and I split, it took me a really long time to get angry. "I'm not angry, I'm just hurt" was my credo for about the first month. Even after she ended our marriage via email and a few minutes after sending that email wrote a love letter to the woman she was cheating on me with telling her the deed was done and how excited she was to spend her life with her. I still wasn't angry. I wasn't angry even after she lied to me and told me that the demise of our relationship was essentially all my fault and that there was nobody else. I wasn't angry the day she called me crying from the church parking lot telling me she was confused after I called her out on her lie and I got my strength back, and pulled me down into her sad little world only for her the next day to tell me that she wants me to find a place of my own. After all the awful behavior, lies and manipulation I still wasn't angry.

Yet.

It wasn't until I had taken a trip back east to North Carolina. I had a dream. I was still working at Regus in Bellevue. I was looking out the window that looked over the Seattle skyline and the Olympic mountain range. All of a sudden starting from the south of the mountain range all the way to the north, each mountian started to explode in a huge volcanic explosion, one by one. Then the explosions were getting closer. Then Seattle started to explode and envelope in hot lava. I knew at that moment I had to get out of there. I raced to Issaquah to get X and tell her we need to get away, to be safe. She didn't want to go, she wanted to stay. I told her that I would have to leave her and take the dogs. So I did, and I ended up with my family in Colorado. We were watching the world around us fall apart on television. All of the cities around the world that were coastal exploded and the shorelines moved in by hundreds of miles. All I could think of was, "Good thing I got away when I did."

I told my aunt Mandy about my dream. She told me that it means that I need to keep moving, don't give up and keep pressing on with my life. I told my therapist and she told me something completely different: I'm running away from my anger. I haven't gotten angry yet. The liquid hot magma, the explosions and the need to escape from it is all running away from my inevitable anger at X.

The next time I saw X, I embraced the anger stage with every fiber of my being. When I didn't see her I missed her, but when I did see her the little volcano of anger spewed from me full flow. Verbal bashings aside (in all honesty she didn't hear anything she didn't deserve to hear), I have never stooped. Even though I have fantasies of walking up to her in a restaurant and throwing a glass of red wine in her face, or keying her sins into the side of her car I have never ever stooped. X seems to sit in fear of retaliation, probably because she goes through women like kleenex and she's experienced retaliation. I, however, have painfully walked this high road and left the retaliatory fantasies behind me.

My nature is to want to level the playing field, make it fair. "You hurt me, so I hurt you. You take away something from me, I take away something from you." If I did stoop and take a baseball bat to her car, or email all her coworkers and tell them that she cheated on me and is living with her coworker, it wouldn't hurt her. It would make her mad, yes, but it wouldn't hurt her. It would only hurt me and I wouldn't feel any better. How do you make things even with the person who hurt you in the most painful way? Is that even possible? Probably not.

I will probably never be "even" with X. I think my greatest satisfaction out of all this will be is that she will never have the upper hand again.

3 comments:

  1. I am the same way with fairness. I applaud you for recognizing that retaliation will only hurt you in the end. Your happiness and love of self is the only real way to "get back" at X. Living the rest of your life to your fullest potential for happiness! :)

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  2. “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
    Lewis B. Smedes

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  3. Anonymous eh? Why do I have a feeling that you're my X? Get that quote from thinkexist.com? Forgiveness takes time, it could take years. It's especially hard to forgive someone when they're so undeserving of it. If I forgive, it won't be for her, it will be for me. I'll leave you with this:

    The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.--Thomas S. Szasz

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