I've never been particulary good about moving on. The end of most of my relationships has been me deciding I was done with something and ending it. Usually that involved a lot of self-punishing and guilt and regret after the fact. Followed immediately by a lot of distraction and none of the emotional moving on. While the former can be an excellent way to not bother with feeling any of the pain associated with that sort of loss, especially over the latter, it sure did make for one miserable, unhappy and unloveable guy. Yuck he was a mess.
Now, when you already think you're a pretty huge piece of shit that doesn't deserve anything but the pain and misery and grief that sort of situation entails, it is excellent fodder for pushing yourself down into a deeper level of self-loathing. The smile I just had at the absurdity of it all is only overshadowed by the sadness I feel in sympathy of that poor tortured soul. Today I have trouble imagining the depths that guy felt in his despair and the intensity of the anger at himself and the world of people he believed saw him as worthless if they saw him at all.
I guess I don't have trouble imagining it at all. Fortunately the above is no longer a driving force in my day to day life and, by extension, doesn't rule/ruin the relationships I get into. Now, while this may be a relatively, and by that I mean the last few years, new way of life for me, and really only the last three intimate relationships have enjoyed running their course with little to none of the aforementioned angst and grief, this whole fundamental shift in how I view my self, myself, and other people has generally made me a happier human being. That was a fucking sentence. It has had the added side-effect of making me a better person in a relationship both in that I am more self-reflective and self-caring when dealing with my shit, but also more empathetic and less personally endangered when dealing with someone else's shit. I mean if you're not so busy writing about what you've done (or will do) wrong, then you'll have plenty of time to actually be in a relationship and be a part of it.
The most recent relevation I've had regarding all of the above and the actual reason I felt any need to write any of this is that I have noticed a real and substantive difference in the end of the last relationship. Turns out, along the way, I learned how to move on. I find myself extremely surprised by this. I mean, initially I was in shock and disbelief and probably did a lot of that fun distraction to ignore the reality of it all. I mean this junk is human nature and really is the first order of business when bad shit happens in the society we have created. Then I slipped into anger and sadness, not that these two are inextricably linked nor are they mutually exclusive, but anger is the one I head towards first and most often because I'm way more comfortable with it and because I felt nice and screwed over for no reason that I was told. I've learned that lying just underneath the vast majority of the anger I feel is an uncomfortable almost to the point of my using the word profound sadness, as said before I turn to anger for lack of wanting to and/or knowing how to deal with. Fortunately, I keep using that word, some times just recognizing there's sadness at the epicenter is enough to extinguish the anger and while only imperceptibly lessening the actual sadness somehow brings about a level of permission or acceptance of it.
Those of you following along may have noticed the stages of grief. As meme generating and vomit inducing this society has made the real, effective work of psychiatrists and psychologists and their summation of the human process of moving on into a fucking joke of a cliche which makes me reticent to even mention it, since it is a valid human sociological theorem and has worked on a myriad of conditions on likely millions of people since its inception I'm bringing it up. You will go through it whether you know it or not and it doesn't give half a fuck if it takes 14 minutes or 50 years. The benefits of having modern therapy include training for that sort of thing.
Barely realizing it even happened that training is apparent in the aftermath. Instead of months and months of self-recrimination, self-loathing, self-punishment and the slow, steady decline into miserable self-imposed exile. Now while I am somewhat miserable and somewhat sad and feeling fairly unloveable and unwanted, it appears I get to skip the part where I'm worried I'll be all alone for the rest of my life because I'm an undeserving, worthless, ugly, uninteresting piece of shit of a human being. That's been kinda nice.