#lookingback

I was reading through old journal entries and found one from a conversation I had with Mandy weeks after our break-up. She told me that the only reason we didn't work out is because she had too many issues, too many fears, that the pressure was too great. Apparently she's worked through all those issues and fears, and I'm left carrying the weight of all that she did to me. It's just becoming too great to bear; each passing day finds me more wearied, more stretched-thin, closer to the breaking point. I fear a mental breakdown is in the works; I wouldn't be surprised if I just collapsed from heart failure. Perhaps it would be a blessing; to put it simply, I'm just done with life. I'm ready for it to be over. There's no reason--absolutely NO reason--to suspect anything will get better. Westerners like to be optimistic, and it's treated as a virtue; but really it's just a cover-up for naivety. Optimism may make you happier, but it doesn't exactly run in tandem with reality. Reality is that when you open your heart to love, you open yourself to be wounded, sometimes irrevocably so. I'm almost certain that I won't recover from what she did to me; the darkness, the shadows, the coldness in my heart doesn't abate nor relent. 

It's been exactly a year since my five-year friendship and pursuit of the Wisconsinite reached a Dead-End. I poured my heart and soul into her, holding nothing back. The last year has been so difficult; the hurt, pain, and anger I've felt has been indescribable. Even now the pain lingers; her face, her words, her laughter, it all haunts me. She's still there in my dreams, and throughout the day suffocating memories, debilitating memories, assault me. A sound, a name, a scent, a familiar face: these are all triggers. There are times I wonder if I have a mild case of PTSD--lots of the symptoms are regular occurrences. The effort to make sense of everything, to decipher why this happened, and to rebuild in the wake of it all, is so damned exhausting. Each passing month finds me more wearied, more stretched-thin. This feeling of brokenness, of being disassembled and not yet put together again, is Old News, but not in the way you want. My heart feels like a cold stone wrapped in wet tissue paper. I keep telling myself, "Give it more time," but time keeps passing, and things don't get any better.

It isn't just depressing; it's scary as hell.
What if I never recover from this?
What if what happened a year ago was the Last Straw?

God knows I've spent the last ten years living a delicate balance between just Holding On and Hoping. The disappointments stack atop one another; what if the weight just got too great, and I've collapsed, crippled in Heart and Mind? It's something that happens; this isn't just the stuff of movies and novels.

She's moved on.
She's found someone, and she's happy with him.
I'm just a memory, the guy who wasn't a "right fit."
Everything we believed in and dreamed together,
    all of that is just rubble on the bottom of the Sea of Memory.

The fact that she's allowed to just move on and be happy while I continue to be burdened (to put it lightly) by the pain she's caused only adds to the hurt and the helplessness. Hopeless. That's really how I feel. I have wept and screamed in my desperate prayers for healing, but he hasn't budged. I ask myself why he favors her over me. The only thing that makes sense is that I'm just not good enough to warrant his attention. She's his Prized Daughter and I'm the Black Sheep. I wasn't good enough for her, so he took her away from me; I wasn't good enough for ministry, so he worked behind the scenes to thwart all my efforts; and now I'm just not good enough to be healed, so I'm just left broken and cast off. And in such a situation, what hope do I have? I know these thoughts run contrary to the gospel, but they won't stop running through my head. They're seeded deep into my mind. I thought Mandy was the answer to my prayers; I believed her when she said, "Can't you see it, Anthony Jordan? Can't you see how He's been preparing us for our life together? How He's been working in our lives to bring us to this point?" Those words haunt me. Up to the day she decided she didn't want me in her life, she told me she loved me, that she could see God at work behind the scenes, that I was the one meant for her, the answer to her prayers. It was too good to be true, and there's your first clue. How far did I fall that God abandoned His plans for us?

She told me, quite adamantly, that her decision had nothing to do with me not being good enough. But consider the source: this is the same person who consistently found laundry lists of reasons I wasn't good enough. Every time she broke my trust, she had reasons, areas where I just didn't live up to her lofty requirements. After she told me that her decision had nothing to do with me not being good enough, she gave me reasons why I wasn't good enough. Arbitrary reasons, of course, as if she drew them at random out of a top-hat. The one that struck me the most was her telling me, "You just didn't lead us very well." She had nothing to substantiate that claim; she couldn't give me any concrete reasons as to how I failed to lead us well. And it came as a real surprise, since she'd always praised my leadership. She had a tendency to find deficiencies in my faith: "You don't go to church multiple times a week" or "You don't love Jesus enough," and things like that. Her criticisms struck at my biggest struggle (growing up legalistic can be a bitch), and they hit me like well-aimed arrows landing in the chinks of my armor. Those criticisms, one-by-one, reinforced the haunting fear that I have not been and never will be good enough. I worked eighty hours a week to move up there, sacrificing my time, my money, my energies, and my social life; she just wondered why I wasn't finding time for an extra church event or two a week. I constantly prayed for her and for us, I put her spiritual well-being at the top of my concerns, I read book after book to learn how to love her and lead her well, and I guarded our purity; we weren't perfect, and my leadership wasn't perfect, but I'm thankful we didn't even fool around. "Everyone leads with a limp," she told me, but that doesn't make any limps excusable. I wasn't good enough. God gave me so many chances to get it right, and I just never did. He cast me aside and has given her someone who isn't such a screw-up. 

Fast-forward to a year later, and her criticisms remain engraved into my psyche. The lack of healing, the conviction that I'm the Black Sheep who will never get anything right and who will forever be "passed over" and out of God's favor, these are wearing at my faith, making it frayed and torn. I fear that what I considered to be God's Answered Prayer will become the catalyst to a dead or absent faith. A God who doesn't care is just a hop-scotch-and-jump away from being no god at all. I don't foresee my faith coming to quits, as I'm still very much a believer (some would say that's my biggest weakness), but I've seen it happen again and again. No one is immune. 

A year ago as I lie on the sofa at John and Brandy's feeling sick to my stomach and sick to my heart, I told myself, "In a year, everything will be okay." Hence another disappointment. Things are far from okay. I wish I could go back to January of last year and delete her text message the moment she sent it; I would spare myself so much pain, and I imagine I would be a much happier man than I am now. But you can't change the past, and you can't change the future; what happens happens, and we've just got to deal with it. Some people get lucky; most people don't. That's just how it goes. Maybe I'm naive to expect any sort of healing; maybe this is just the beginning of yet another long chapter of disappointment and pain. There have been so many of them, year-after-year, so it's not a leap to imagine that history repeats itself (it tends to be a rule).

I do know that I haven't given up hope.
I'm still fighting, I'm still praying.
I'm still daring to believe that things will get better.
Maybe this time next year things will be looking up?