Score: +1.5

Big decline today. I have been having thoughts about my exes, flashes from the past that come back at me in stark contrast to reality. It’s not an accurate representation of the past, because it neglects the context and carries on only the peaks of happiness. I’m distinctly aware that my life now is far less turbulent as my life has been for most of it, so the exhilaration of the “ride” is gone. Don’t get me wrong, I would MUCH rather have the stability I have now compared to said ride. I lived from peak emotion to trough, over and over again. It has been that way for more than half of my life. Until just recently, I was unable to do anything but ride the ride and hope it all worked out. I tried various medication cocktails, and different doctors, and it all failed. I tried to kill myself just a couple years ago. So, to have those two years of stability is, frankly, amazing. I feel better and more confident than I ever have before, and I’m proud of what I do and who I am as a person. I have accomplished a lot in that short time. But it’s not the ride. These memories are reminders of what life felt like when things were out of control. I have done good things, and bad things, but it’s the good things that hurt the most from these past relationships. They remind me of the acute presence of love, the way I first understood it, as passionate and present and totally unique depending on who she was. I still remember it all very well, so it’s easy for my mind to recall something quite relevant. It saddens me, because I blame myself for things that happened, things I was responsible for and failed to do. It reminds me of how it all fell apart, and what went wrong and why. Like reliving a box score from the game over and over again, hoping somehow the numbers will change, and your team would win. But it’s already written and done. The past is over, and the part of me that used to feel that love, or lust, or whatever hybrid of those two things is dead, and empty. It’s a hollow place that these emotions bounce around inside echoing on and on into the deepest depths of the emptiness, until they fade and are gone. It’s a place that will never be full again, and I know this to be the truth, and that the emptiness is a burden I must carry as penance for the things I have done to myself to place these tragedies in my history. I will never be rid of the reminders of my past, so I must find an alternative method of coping with them. I cannot establish a trend of being crippled by recollections of things that happened that mean NOTHING to the present. Here and now, none of that has anything to do with what I’m doing. It’s not possible to forget those things, and I guess, I should not want to, because I am still responsible for everything I remember. I must own what I have been through in order to move ahead as a whole person. I know I can get through this, but the way I was feeling today was not good, and I needed to start my weekend a little early, considering I only get 1 day off. So I needed to get all that out there. It has been crushing me down the last few days as I grapple with how not to bludgeon myself over these things.