The sensible ex-girlfriend

I have suffered from closet crazy ex-girlfriend syndrome for 10+ years. Well, now we all know what a classic crazy ex-girlfriend is- an obsessive stalker, she will go to any extreme to be revengeful or pitiful or whatever it is that goes on in her crazy head. Some of us may even find Rachel Bloom’s TV show on the subject worth relating with. In the TV show she is ultimately diagnosed to have a borderline personality disorder. However, we don’t necessarily need a major psychological illness to turn into a crazy ex-girlfriend. Crazy ex-girlfriend-ness comes in various forms. In my case, it was living in my head and didn’t necessarily come out in ways that others could see. It lived quietly in the closet of my head, but oh boy, it sure managed to destroy me from within. Ate up my mind, day after day and night after night. Since I was 17, I met one ‘perfect’ guy after the other. Until I met my perfect therapist and realised how imperfect I have been with my dating choices. In a brief moment of realisation it struck me that every perfect guy has been nothing but just pieces of what the previous perfect guy lacked. These ‘perfect’ guys have been mere building blocks of self esteem damage. Well, nothing to do with them personally, perhaps they have nothing in common. They are after all so diverse and so many! I’ve met them all, from pilots to professional poker players and I’ve been through it. Date after date after date, scratching the wound of my low self esteem over and over and over until it was bare and open and beyond healing. Their commitment issues, their lack of courage that could never get them to tell their parents that they want to be with someone from a different religion/background, their disbelief in themselves, their pessimism towards relationships had all somehow been my issues in the last several years.

I now choose to do things differently. Discard this burden of their issues I have been carrying for 10+ years. So teenage fling who went to study abroad and claimed he loved me as much as his ‘girlfriend’, Facebook stranger who ghosted away after asking me out on a date, person I met at a party who didn’t want to get into anything serious after he was done with all the ‘business’, serious boyfriend who dated me for three years and fell ‘out of love’ when I asked about commitment and guy who had a ‘gut feeling’ things would fall apart despite finding me incredibly attractive, I no longer own your problems. They are yours to deal with, your commitment issues, your fears, your gut feelings, your disinterest in me, your ignorance that made you ghost away. It is yours. Dwell in it, get rid of it. Your future girlfriends and dates and career and family relations may or may not get affected by them. But they will certainly not affect me anymore. I take no responsibility of them, thank you very much. I choose to let the closet crazy go. I choose forgiveness. I choose sensibility. I choose joy. I choose to be only and only responsible for my feelings alone. Who else can I bother to change other than myself anyway?

All that said, it’s not easy to forgive a whole bunch of guys/men, but i’ll do it. I’ll let it pass even if it has to pass like a kidney stone. Not for their sake, but for my own. I don’t even know what they are upto- flying their planes, making their money from gambling, probably married, probably with a hooker, probably have kids, probably have cats. Aside from the impression that social media gives me, little do I know about what they really are. Loving husbands? Wife-beaters? Lonely cat dads? Struggling alcoholics? I’ll never know. But all that I know and all that matters to me is they are forgiven. I choose to forgive them out of empathy, because I know that only hurt people can hurt people. Now I know that such a thing can be very powerful in general, but I recently got some scientific backing and learned that radical forgiveness has the power to bring your brain to functioning like that of monk who has been practising for 40 years! As for me, I should consider myself to be lucky enough to have found my fix. I know I have been hurt, but now I am healing, with every progressing day, in my own song singing, happy EMDRed ways and I promise to enjoy this journey of healing, forgiveness and hope. The journey towards being a sensible, independent and secure single girl, not the crazy ex-girlfriend :)