I’m struggling this morning.

So this morning I was thinking about addiction to a feeling.  I use to love the feeling of falling in love.  That has to be the most powerful drug our body creates.  There is always the flipside to that addiction and that’s the recovery from it.
In my version of falling and being in love it’s all consuming.  The feel of another’s hands on me, being able to touch them and know your touch has that same effect on them.  The eye contact and that restless feeling that if you don’t let it out it will burn you alive.
Yeah, so I am learning that is lust….that is not love….that is just lust.

Anyway, the recovery from love is an odd road for me.  Years ago I was recovering from someone and I remember that feeling when I finally started to feel normal again.  I felt like I could finally breath again after feeling such hurt for so long.  In order to get to that place I needed to bury all the good times we had together, only remember the last part of our time together when it was complete shit and let the images run through my head on a  loop until it drove me absolutely crazy and I had to pray to a God I didn’t believe in to replace it with something else. I had to replace that love with another.
It didn’t work. It was distraction while time weaved its magic.  I tried this multiple times, but at some point I realized that there was no going back to the woman I was before I was burned.
Years, it took years for me to finally let go of what we had.  The bullshit part was it was just the beginning of us that I missed. Looking back, that part was probably shit too because we were trauma bonding but oh good lord it was all consuming.  Those late nights learning new things about the other person and waking up the next morning next to them and the smell of them on your skin.  That’s the addiction part for me.  Most of the relationship towards the end was trying to get back to that part, get that hit that would allow you to be able make it through the day.

Now it’s been a decade or so and I have lived a hundred lives since that time and I know that wasn’t love, that was lust.  —-So my heart just jumped in and reminded me that that it was love too.   Yes heart, it was love after the lust ran its course and I was strung out.
—-Brain jumping in and playing “Dear John” by Taylor Swift loudly to shut down anything the heart is tossing out.
My daughter and I were talking about the rerelease of Speak Now Taylor’s Version and she quietly asked, “Do you think DJ will hit differently with everything that has happened with Jon (my recent ex)”
I told her that no because that song belongs to someone else.  There was NEVER a time I was listening to that song that it didn’t remind me of the man not named John.  That song got me through years of recovery from him.  I needed to be reminded  how shitty it was and that song was always followed up with “Mean”.

So now I’m letting myself take apart the relationships from my past in a High Fidelity-esq way so I can heal from all that has happened.
I’m allowing myself to remember the beginning and that woman I was allowed to be before the words and sneers shut me down.
Before the indifference made me take all that I was and put her in a box and shove it down so no one else would see how beautiful I could be.

I’m learning to take my own matches away before I burn my whole world down.