First of all, I have been walking and working through the monsoon-type level damage from several years ago for the past three years. I gave up on my blog (there's no point, no one reads it) because there was no reason to talk about any of it along the way, because anything in the middle of it would have been (and was) gravely unsatisfactory and unsubstantial.
Secondly, I have not once stopped thinking about how my actions (severe and monstrously unbalanced) have affected others in the five years that have passed since that futile and utterly depraved stunt. I have thought about the people I lied to. I have thought about the friends I betrayed. I've thought about the friendships I still mourn. I get angry for trusting the wrong people. And angry for not trusting the right people. Who needs prison when you put yourself in your own mental incarceration?
I have also spent an UNGODLY amount of hours, days, nights poring first in the beginning and easing up over time about the "What Have I Done" factor and the "What The Hell Was I Thinking" vomitorium. To the effect that, although lighter now, I still cringe.
I've thought about emailing the people whose opinions I ever cared most about more than a thousand times and consistently coming to the deduction that it would a) be too soon or b) only dig up the past and old feelings, regardless of answering for those transgressions. I've also asked myself and contemplated and discerned the answer to wondering who the hell were my real friends. I seriously had no clue. Everyone was my friend, yet no one was my friend. And above it all, I needed a good counsellor and probably heavy medication.
I had somehow managed to train myself to ignore every red flag in the book. First it started with a few ignored white flags (using the color of warning spectrum), then a few yellow, then orange ones. Finally the red.
Whatever it was that started the trend, whatever place it developed into habit is irrelevant. I finally realized my fears, on one side and spectrum of my life, are what drove me. Not a sense of self. Not love. Nothing. I was person who didn't know what she stood for.
That's a long time to be lacking substance.
Thirdly, I could be easily convinced to know that no one probably thinks about it any more, doesn't care. Or for anyone who may, occasionally, have had a brief thought of it, what I was or what I meant to them and how I could go so wrong, it's in the catalogue of things that can be easily put away.
I am, however, fourthly, still too embarrassed by the way I went about it, who (one person) I went with, how long I was away for, to ever, ever tell people any more than just a simple "we split up." I don't feel the need to be so brutally forthright about all my sins with new acquaintences. But I don't make the confession of how I did it, never mind the details of the actual night I saw my house for the last time, to good friends until a good, substantial amount of time, conversation and trust has been exchanged first. Because I am still that embarrassed about it, or if not, at least very, very self-conscious.
Fifthly, I can't recall a time in my life in all the highs and lows of everything I've experienced or in being a highly and overemotional person where I was ever as relieved to be out of a situation as I was the final days of what I guess you could call that 'relationship'. The best term would have been terrifyingly, embarrassingly dysfunctional arrangement with a narcissist. I'm still relieved. And it's been a long while.
Last of all, I've prayed that I would heal, that those I abandoned would heal, and that it would become something I could refer to as being in the past. Shun it, hate it, grow it, learn it, understand it, still suffer it, it's slowly and in strides taking its place in the back seat. This doesn't mean it isn't still fresh as hell some days. It just means I can breathe a little easier, find resolve, and feel the loosening of the knot in my stomach; and still hope and pray that the ones I truly, deeply hurt know, still, how very much sorry I still am.
