Recycling The Damages

The last few weeks have been hard for me. I have been anxious and insecure. I second guess everything a person tells me. I get paranoid about the smallest things. I overthink everything. Clearly, I haven’t been myself; or is this the new me that my experiences have created? I don’t think the way I have been feeling has been caused by a very recent occurrence. I have realized that what I have been feeling has been triggered by years of unadulterated hurt in my broken heart that does nothing but hurt others. 

Let me paint a clearer picture: I dated someone for over five (5) years with a mutual agreement to abstain from sexual intercourse until some later time, when we were ready. I lost the person to someone else right around the time we agreed to “be ready”.  I had a girlfriend, the one who I lost my virginity to and I was really fond of her. I met her through a friend and later found out from this friend that he had slept with her during the period that I dated her. I have also dated someone who was hurt in an unimaginable way by someone else. I basically came in and provided a space where she could cry and unplug; falling in love in the process.  Whilst I was striving to build her, she was breaking me by sleeping with the same person who hurt her in the first place. This is the most I have been hurt by a person. She was bold enough to buy me the same Valentine’s Day card that she bought for this person – she just wrote different names. Sad. 

I can sense the judgement from your eyes at the moment so let me provide the clarity to calm your infuriation. I have hurt people as well. I have told people that I love them when I clearly didn’t feel anything for them. I have been in relationships with some girls who were publicly “in love” with their boyfriends and I’d be there while they exchanged “I love you” and lie about their locations. Remember that friend that hooked me up and was sleeping with my girlfriend at the same time? I had a relationship with his girlfriend as well and we just have a “hi and bye” relationship at the moment. I still remember when I had to tell the girl that I did it to hurt her boyfriend for what he had done to me. The look in her eyes still haunts me today.

As surface as this may sound, this perfectly describes our generation now. Actually, even you reading this piece in this moment, you relate to some of these things.

You have been hurt and you have hurt people as well. Now, here’s the thing: I don’t think I have healed properly from any of the hurt I’ve  experienced or actually realized the extent of the pain I’ve inflicted on other people.  Every time I got hurt, in an effort to up my self esteem or move on, I got involved with someone else, whether I cared or not and I always felt better – temporarily of course. I had simply been covering the fresh wounds with band aids. Let me tell you why I feel this way.

How do you think I’ll feel now when I meet a person who tells me genuinely that whilst they care about me, they want to understand their body and isn’t ready to have sex? How do you think I’ll feel when my friend wants to hook me up with a girl?  How do you think I feel when my girl tells me there is a change in her schedule and she can’t make it to see me and that she loves me? All of these may appear like a repeat of the situations that I’d gone through with my exes; the origin of all of my insecurities.

So many of us are damaged. We have been hurt and we have hurt others as well. We haven’t healed. We have low self esteems, we are insecure, we question everything that people tell us. We enter relationships with the mindset that they are not going to work and that everyone is just another cheat and a liar, yet we are willing to deepen our wounds with that next “liar.”

Imagine investing your time and resources into something you know isn’t going to workout. Where are we headed? We toy with people that care about us because we aren’t even able to distinguish genuine care from deceit. We have been hurt and disappointed so many times that we are all stuck in this cycle of hurt.

We are bleeding on people that didn’t cut us and cutting people to bleed on others.

We all need help. We need to heal properly. We can start by being open and intentional about the way we feel about people. We need to normalize being blunt, not sacrificing our feelings for someone else’s reaction. We need to admit that we have been hurt and that some of our actions are influenced by those hurts. We need to show emotions when we feel them and ask sincere questions about our feelings and insecurities and about the feelings of those we care about. Life is short and we can’t continue to recycle these damages. The path to a genuine love can start with you.

Authored by Ahura Mazda

Featured Picture by UnSplash