Taking back my power

I’m taking back my power. 

I still do have a choice. 

And maybe it hasn’t really been “one step forward, two steps back” for me — maybe I’ve learned and grown more than expected from all this. 

This anger I’m feeling is the “good type of anger”, it’s my friend. It’s that anger that tells me that my boundaries have been pushed or forced in a way that is unhealthy for me; that anger that tells me when it’s time to say “Stop”; that anger that helps me get unstuck and move on. 

I still have a choice and I am making my decision — actually, I’m confirming the decision I had already made one month, two months, three months ago, all along. I always knew in my heart that it would be a lovely but temporary, self-contained love story with my genderqueer European friend. I called it a “bubble” all along, and I meant it. A wonderful, lovely bubble with so many things I miss — and will miss for a long time — terribly. With so many things that remind me daily of my genderqueer European friend. But sooner or later the pain will fade from those memories and I will be able to just retain the beauty & joy from the recollections. That is also one of my choices, one of my decisions: to keep, and eventually be able to go back to, those lovely memories; to hold those 2-3 months of this past spring/summer with my genderqueer European friend as a beautiful, lovely, and important part of my life. I don’t want to regret, to feel like I wasted those months with them or grieving after their departure. I want to be happy I did it, as I was in the moment I did. I pushed some of my own boundaries while being in the romantic relationship with them those couple of months and I did it consciously but also specifically because I knew it would be temporary, that our love story was temporary. I put up with some things that I probably wouldn’t have accepted if our relationship hadn’t been a “time-constrained bubble”, if I hadn’t known it was going to forcefully end by August 1st. I did it willingly and consciously then, but I’m not going to let any more of my boundaries be pushed with them now. I loved them to pieces and still love them and miss them but even if the geographical barriers were removed, it wouldn’t work between us because of some aspects of their character/personality that are deeply not OK for me in a long-term romantic relationship. Maybe they feel the same about me, but they still seem willing to hang on to something, to some sporadic form of romantic communication between us, to the idea of meeting up at a conference for a week next year in June. At this stage, that doesn’t work for me, and I have the right to not only say so and explain my reasons — which I’ve done with them in great detail — but also to act upon it concretely. 

Which is what I shall do.