Romanticise my life
They say you need to be the main character in your own story. Which is why I write. I like to romantic my life. I find it cute, it adds some rose tint to my pain and it gives me the narrative that I am “preparing for my life” my life of glory and peace where I live the romantic “happily ever after and there are no struggles afterwards.
Sooo…. Its high time I burst my own bubble, and yours. Marriage is, as I have said previously not the top of Everest. Your wedding day is your joy at arriving at base camp. Only when you die do you realise if you have or have not gotten to the top of Everest. So this notion that marriage and relationships will heal me and “His love will save me” is complete fantasy if you aren’t talking about God’s love saving you. No human being is meant to complete you. And if you believe that you need to remove yourself from the dating game because you are going to hurt people. I have said of myself at present I would love to be in a relationship, however my mental health is not in such a place where I can sustain a relationship. Because if that poor man upsets me when I have had an emotional day at work and an argument with my mum or something bad has happened. I am not regulated enough to control my emotions, I would fly off the handle and say something life-changingly nasty. Because that is what I grew up with seeing. I remember my dad flying off the handle when I got married the first time because the order of service wasn’t exactly to his liking. My parents had me in tears regularly. In fact I didn’t sleep on the day before my wedding because they’d said something really cruel to me about how they wanted the day to run. I was crying on the phone until 5am on my wedding day to my then fiancé about how cruel my parents were being to me. “I don’t want to get married!!” I wailed. I should have listened to myself. 8 hours later I was all smiles as I was being walked down the aisle. I really shouldn’t have been so good at lying to myself. It meant my parents got away with incredible cruelty towards me.
That is how I romanticise my life. I say all this suffering has a purpose. My parents have done incredibly cruel things, my ex husband have done incredibly cruel things and people I have worked with have been cruel and nasty too. And so I say, “Oh well, it has a purpose” What if it doesn’t? What if I simply spent the first 30 years of my life suffering and taking a mental beating from various people for no reason?
When I was suicidal, the only thing that kept me alive was the thought that if I died then, my life would have been a tragedy and if I lived I had a chance to turn it around. My advice to anyone going through that is yes, live. But go back to basics on what actually makes you feel alive. For me, that is people. People who I love are my everything. I want children even though I have a high risk of post natal depression. I want a husband even though I know I am prone to depression. Why? Not because I believe people can “heal me” but I believe that the person I need to be to sustain such relationships will need to be stronger than the girl typing now. And because those relationships are everything I have ever wanted, I am currently working on the person I need to be to get them.
That is the true romantic story of my life. Me falling in love with me. So I can love for the first time.
Grace and Courage
Annetta Mother Smith.