I learned something very important today. If you refuse to dwell on something, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t important, and it doesn’t mean that you don’t care. It just means that you’ve exhausted a topic in your life and you need to let it go.
I need to stop dwelling on The Cowboy. I need to let it go.
It is important. As cheesy as it sounds, it has been one of the most important things that have happened in my life. It wasn’t for him, but it was for me. Meeting someone like that, someone who made me feel alive, someone who pushed me to demand more and deserve more, someone who inspired me in more areas than one, someone who honestly made me feel just a little bit pretty for the first time in such a long, long time…maybe ever.
But nothing is going to change. I can’t magically snap my fingers and he’ll want to be back in my life. It doesn’t work that way. All I keep doing is turning this over and over and over in my head. Looking at it from different angles isn’t going to change what happened, and it certainly isn’t going to keep my life moving forward. All it does is make me miserable.
I learned today that dwelling is why I can’t sleep and why I can’t eat. And I know it isn’t a big deal. It really isn’t. I know that. It’s a blip in my life. An important blip, but a blip nonetheless. I just have such a hard time letting things go. I let ghosts of situations in the past haunt me. Dwelling means that I passed out from pure exhaustion today. I’ve stayed awake for days at a time before, but never to the point where I literally dropped in my tracks. My body just could not stay awake for another second. Dwelling means that I forget to take my medication. I’m lucky that it’s not a huge deal to skip a day. Dwelling means that I’m shaky simply because I’m dehydrated because I’ve forgotten to drink anything all day.
And I don’t know why I dwell. I’ve always been like that. I dwell on things that don’t even matter to me, let alone on things I find important.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve analyzed. I’ve blamed myself. I’ve blamed him. I’ve blamed the world. I’ve been in denial, and then gotten angry. And what has it changed? Nothing. I’ve made positive changes in my life to start a therapy program, but regarding to him, not a damn thing has changed or will change no matter how much I think about things.
And this is just drama that I don’t need in my mind. This is the type of drama that I try so very hard to keep out. I let it take over my life, just trying to analyze everything to death, to find some kind of answer. There is no answer. This is life, and there is no answer.
Someday…someday, when I think it might be possible…someday I’ll ask him to come back in my life, and to be in it for real. To at least give me a chance, with an open mind this time, without trying to find bad things in me. To just be happy. And it makes me sad to know that there’s a 99% change that he’ll turn me down, and may even get angry or assume that I’m trying to manipulate him in some way. That 1% though? The idea that we could have a friendship again? Well, that makes me smile. Life is about the 1%!
But until then, I have to stop dwelling. It’s not a switch I can just flip like he seemed to, but I don’t like the person that I am when I dwell. I can’t dwell anymore. I just can’t. So I’m done talking about it. This post is the last word. If you really want to know how I feel about The Cowboy, just read the last several weeks of posts. It’s all there, and anyway I rewrite it, I’ll feel the same way. Hopefully, you’ll all enjoy some fantasies about him that I put to paper in the future, and I know that I’ll still mention him from time to time. But no more dwelling. There are more important things in life.
I said a version of this to The Student, just that I need to stop dwelling because I’m way too awesome for it. His response?
“And that’s exactly what I love about you.”
About Rori
Rori is the founder of Between My Sheets. She works full time as a writer, reviewer, and online educator and can be reached at rori-at-betweenmysheets.com
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Hon, you just learned one of life’s most valuable lessons and tools for your future…letting go. You are right, just because you let go of something, it does not mean that you never cared or that you don’t care now. It does not mean that whatever it was had no importance to you or that it is not still important in some way. Letting go, just means you are ready to take the next progressive step in your journey. Sometimes we must let go of things that are toxic to us, have been fully explored and exhausted, are getting us nowhere, or that we have lost interest in. But letting go because it is just that time, is the hardest to learn to do. Only we can know when that right time is to let go of something. Nobody can tell us when that time is right. So you have learned a good lesson that life does not always teach everyone. I am sure you have seen/met people that hold every single incident that ever happened in their lives close to them, feeding them, petting them as though they were some sort of trophy. These people rarely enjoy their lives to the fullest or step boldly into their futures, because they cannot let go of the past, cannot see the future because they are too busy gazing at what is behind them. You’ve done good. Hugs. ThePinkPoppet.
I do this, too. And I fell in love with a Cowboy once.
Have you ever read Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert? There’s this moment in the book where she is talking to a male friend of hers about someone she thought was her soul mate. This is what the friend tells her:
“Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means…a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it.”
I don’t know if that applies to your situation or not, but it did to mine, and it really helped me to understand what I was feeling and to let go.
Thanks, Poppet. It’s hard, but I just can’t be like this anymore. Enough is enough.
Juliette, You’re actually the second person to recommend that book to me in the past two weeks, so maybe I should read it! I don’t know if I agree with that definition of soulmate, but maybe that’s what he was to me. I don’t really know. It’s an interesting perspective in any case.