Ms. Exhausted

  Dear Ms. Exhausted,

You have fought for so long, tried so hard, battled windmills and invisible foes, accepted the unacceptable, and done for others your whole life.  It must be exhausting.  Throw in dysfunctional relationship after bad relationship, where giving it all and twisting yourself into someone else's expectations, followed by periods of intense revenge scheming and passive aggressive bad behavior, and you have the recipe for a complete breakdown.

Except you can't allow yourself that luxury.  You can't sit at home and wail about your last failure, or continue to toss and turn night after night, because you have responsibilities.  You have to get up six days a week and work to care for yourself, your kids, your animals, your employees.  You have to keep going, even if the only way to do that is with excessive amounts of coffee in the morning and borrowed downers at night.  

Your strength comes from the knowledge that to give up is to fail.  And you cannot fail.  Even this last breakup was not a failure, it was a blip in your story.  Of all the things that you learned, and there are too many to even sum up, you learned that trying to make something work that simply cannot work will never work.  There is a lot of regret, for accepting talking to a therapist instead of your boyfriend, for being fake and dishonest with him, for knowing you weren't right for each other and lacking the courage to face that, for allowing him to put you in your Barbie box and agreeing to be available when he wanted to play with you.  Your biggest regret is that you wanted him to need you, this man who needs no one and nothing, and then the one time he did truly need you you failed him miserably.  Dramatically, unnecessarily and permanently.  You can argue that you were exhausted, but in reality you wanted to hurt him, to make something that was not about you about you.  That isn't love, that isn't even close.

 You can argue that your life is exhausting, you can argue that you were put in a bad situation with no support, you can argue that you were making a point.  But go back to the beginning and stop arguing...stop trying so hard, battling windmills and invisible foes, accepting the unacceptable, and doing for others your whole life. Make your life less exhausting by not trying so hard ever again, and in time you will sleep knowing that you learned what love is and isn't, and maybe even someday you will forgive yourself.