… sometimes it helps to take very grumpy photos of yourself and post them on the Internet.
And then sometimes it does not.
So I’m gonna go to the gym and work out until I puke, and then maybe I will feel better. OR MAYBE I WILL COME BACK AND I WILL POST MORE OF THESE PHOTOS!!!
GRUMPY DAY!!! It’s okay, though. This is how I grow.
I remember having a really tough time after a break-up awhile back (no, I’m not going through a break-up right now). The guy I’d broken up with was still tangentially in my life — we ran in the same circle of friends. Here is what would happen: He would tell me he wasn’t going to make a commitment to me, I would be devastated, I would begin to recover, then I would see him when that group of friends got together, then I would fall back in love with him, then I would do everything I could to get back together with him, then he would date me for a week, then he would dump me (in the kindest way possible) and I would be devastated. I was stuck in this cycle for what felt like forever, and it was brutal.
“I just need to stop ever seeing him,” I told a girlfriend. “I need to call him and tell him we need to touch base over text messages before these events to make sure we are not both going. We need to split up the events. Because I can’t recover from this when I have to see him every other week. But I feel like such a loser telling him that, like he controls my life. I can’t get up the courage to do it. But I can’t move on when it’s like this. I’m stuck.”
She smiled. “You’re so worried about yourself,” she said. “I’m not worried about you at all. As soon as you’re in enough pain about it, you’ll do what you need to do to fix it.”
That last sentence kind of changed my life. I realized she was absolutely right. That is how I operate. I maintain the status quo, even if I don’t like it, until I reach a certain pain threshold where I just can’t take it anymore. Then I make a change. That is how basically any and all progress has ever been made in the history of my life. And so sometimes when I feel grumpy — just overwhelming dissatisfaction and psychological stress — I remember that this is nothing more than the universe nudging me along, telling me there’s something that needs to be fixed.
Her words unstuck something for me. I had that conversation with that ex. He was always kind to me, and he was kind about this too. “We can do that,” he said. “I wish it didn’t have to be like that, but I understand. I don’t want to hurt you.” After that, I was able to heal and move forward. I just needed to be in enough pain to start the process.
