The Swede is coming over tonight, though (yay!!)! I'm not sure what we're going to watch yet, but I told him since I've picked the last four movies we've watched, it's definitely his turn.
Allen and I had dinner at HuHot last night. I don't know why we've never been there before, but it was delicious. My mood went tumbling down a little bit after we got there, but after a thirty minute phone call and a ten minute bawling session on the shoulder of my best friend, I felt better. Much better. And I feel exponentially better today. I think that realizing things isn't the same as vocalizing them, and vocalizing them to the person who needs to hear them is wonderfully cathartic. Nothing that I said mattered and I know it, but it mattered to me, and at the end of the day, that's really all that's important.
I'm not anybody to be ashamed of, and while I'm not perfect, I'm a good person. There is nothing embarrassing about me. I do things differently, and I know this. I'm bi-polar, and I can't help this. I'm tall, and I'm loud, and I like to be a little bit outrageous, and I love that about myself. To feel like I'm worthless for two years and change, and to feel like I was the person who needed to be different was foolish of me, and fucking wrong of Dan to instill those ideas. Which he did, without a second thought.
I told Dan that it hurt that he doesn't consider this a great loss. But you know what? I don't, either. Dan was...well, is...poisonous and opportunistic, and, in his own words, "unduly unkind". I should have walked the very first time I wanted to, two months after we started seeing each other. But, like I told him last night, he is practically a professional at saying something that would trick me just enough into thinking that maybe I was wrong, and maybe I did matter.
Dan did some very nice things for me. I am SO grateful for my camera and the lens he bought me, as well as the spare battery and the cleaning kit. It reintroduced me to a hobby I had given up, and now I'm getting pretty good at it. He helped me when I had my cryo. He gave me enough money to get my second round of cryo done. And not to minimize, but those are extremely small drops in the bucket, and given the choice, I would have much rather had some sort of validation and legitimacy given to me, and maybe a bit...just a BIT...of actual, real feelings from him. It's easy to feign affection behind closed doors. It always bothered me that I went to all of his Army functions when he asked, and the three times I asked him to go to work things with me, he never, ever would. It's not like I was super excited to sit quietly next to him for hours on end because I had no fucking idea what I was to him, but I did it, because that's the sort of thing you do when you care about somebody.
Maybe I'm martyring myself, but I feel like I always bent over backwards for Dan. I tried to include him in everything, even though I knew he was always going to shoot down whatever it was I wanted him to do, I told other people who mattered to me about him, and I don't think any of that was reciprocal. I remember last Christmas I stepped outside in the snow storm, called Anali absolutely bawling my ass off and saying that I was going to get in my car and drive home and never look back, because I heard Dan tell his mom that he wasn't doing anything that night, he was just at home, and no, he wasn't hanging out with anybody because all of his friends had other plans. I wasn't even good enough to be a nameless friend.
I'm better than that. And I want to say that Dan is better than being with somebody that he's not ashamed of, but maybe he's not. Maybe that's all he's capable of doing, because he is, despite my initial protestations to him, broken. Thinking back, I don't think Dan deserved any of the love and respect I gave him. I don't see how he possibly could. It doesn't matter. It never did. Not to anybody but me, and that's lonely. It's the realization that you've been alone for years when you thought someone was right there with you that hurts, not really the being let go of/letting go. That part is easy...I've been letting go (just to grab back on, in fairness) for ages.
I can completely let go now. I can reconcile my blame in this, because I am culpable for some of it, but mostly, I feel like I can breathe again, and I can stop feeling so fucking sad over someone who wasn't fucking worth it.
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