When Accountability Goes Only One Way

For more than 40 years, I didn’t really know how to exist inside a relationship unless I was the broken one, bowing in reliance to anyone gracious enough to let me hang around, no matter the quality of treatment.

Could you stay with me? Could you help me? What have I done to be so lucky to have someone strong and knowing and right like you?

Barf. Fangirl, fawning, degrading shit.

I knew how to engage only that way.

What I’m learning now is something different.

I don’t want to have to be broken to belong.

I am going off script. This is wildly unpopular with the patterned archetypes I have gone barreling toward at every opportunity.

I no longer agree to that—to matter less so that a relationship may continue.

I cannot abandon what I know and adopt someone else’s perspective in place of my lived experience. That is me gaslighting myself.

I cannot accept someone else’s explanation of my motives when it isn’t mine.

I can be wrong. I can fuck up. I can apologize. I can change.

But I have to remain a whole person while I do it.

And the relationships that have cost me the most have not been the ones where people hurt me or got things wrong.

They have been the ones where somehow there was always something for me to examine, own, apologize for or change, and nothing on the other side of the relationship was ever available for the same examination.

I welcome the responsibility to own my part.

I cannot own yours too.

My hunger for connection has kept me engaged in things long after I knew they weren’t feeding me.

Hunger will do that.

But if my body is asking for fiber and what’s being offered is refined sugar, eating it because I’m hungry doesn’t nourish me.

It’s not nothing. But it’s not neutral either.

I won’t keep feeding myself the opposite of what I’m hungry for and then wonder why I feel poisoned.

And feel shame for my resulting condition.

So yes. Some relationships may cost too much to keep.

Not because they don’t matter to me.

Because I finally matter too.

Have you ever been tangled up with someone like this?

Someone where every attempt to address a conflict somehow ends with you being the only person under examination?

They didn’t misunderstand. They didn’t contribute. They didn’t hurt you. They didn’t get anything wrong.

You did.

Every fucking time….Whatever else may be true, this also happened.