Emotions

I was watching a moving YouTube video this morning of one of my city's youth choirs on America's Got Talent and the beauty of it brought tears to my eyes.  It's weird how the most unrelated things can bring up past events that I may not have paid much attention to at the time they happened.

Last summer, my ex told me he was a highly sensitive person.  He had learned about it from YouTube.  He then went on to compare himself to me and how I'm not a very emotional person as if that is a flaw in me.  

I was taken aback in the moment because I’m far from an unemotional person and I didn't understand why he was comparing himself to me in this way but there were so many other things he was saying and so many ways he was contradicting himself that I didn't give it much more thought.  I wasn’t able to process it all. 

I don’t know whether or not he truly is a highly sensitive person or if he was just using that to excuse his lack of ability to regulate his own emotions or both I suppose.  And I suppose the comparison to me was to make himself feel better, at my expense unfortunately.

Over the years together, I suspect I did show less and less emotions with him. There wasn’t really space in our marriage for my emotions. Mine seemed to trigger his or he would get defensive and turn it around to focus on what he was feeling.  So I adapted to avoid triggering him. What he claimed was lacking in me was something he wasn’t willing to make space for  

So maybe this and other things that came up while we were separating weren’t really about me at all. Maybe it was about his own feelings of inadequacy and the world of comparisons he was stuck in.

That doesn’t make it any less of a crappy way to treat me and it definitely doesn’t excuse it.

This has been a really rough week and all my attempts at finding joy are failing. But I’ve been here before and so I know it doesn’t last.  All I can do is keep moving through it, pausing only long enough to do the processing that is most helpful. The sun rises every day as a reminder that the light is not far away even in the darkest moments.