Reflection Time

I still think about, cogitate over, and otherwise commonly revisit the immense guilt I feel over my first marriage. I don't let it seep into my current marriage. I have practiced putting it away so many times that I can recognize when it starts rearing its ugly head and shut it down. But thoughts still creep up at the least expected moments.

For every moment I have to try and be the bigger person in my marriage and for every moment where I am the smaller person, those thoughts are there. I acknowledge there is a certain type of fixation with it, many pieces working together to play their part in a broader flaw. It's hard to let it go. Not for lack of trying and not for not wanting to. But there's obviously something I'm trying to control (?) or a lesson I need to master.

And by not being able to let go, I mean of the cringe. My cringe. The cringe of my crimes against my ex. I do not mean by 'hard to let go' in any single kind of wistful way. I mean in a hard, cannot change, cannot control, the past is unfixable kind of way. The cringe that plays on a loop in sporadic and unwelcome moments.

This is unhealthy at best and toxic at worst. It does nothing to aid my life, add to it, nor extract any type of meaningful lesson by its own action. It is, for all intents and purposes, a shallow and fruitless merry-go-round that has resulted in many, many random apologies to my ex, trips to the confessional, and just about any kind of self-lancing thing induced by guilt and more cringe. And I am working on forgiving myself, but it's there. 

Many people could put it behind them simply through embracing a knowledge and an ownership of the fact that the past is the past. And this is true for me, generally. But I'm working on it still. And I feel that coming here to say it "out loud" will forge the process, just as writing such raw and /or vulnerable things has done for me before.