Lessons Learned

I’ve been thinking back to a year ago a lot lately. I think that has to do with how traumatic last January was for me. It was truly not the best month of my life.

At this point last year I was still convalescing from the accident. You remember, don’t you, the one where I was hit by a car driven by an inattentive woman? Yes, I thought you did (or do now that you clicked that link up there and reminded yourself). To this day I still watch much more carefully for traffic. To this day if I see a moving vehicle anywhere within my line of vision I will try to wait for it to go away before walking across the street or parking lot (makes shopping difficult, let me tell you, not to mention attending sporting events where traffic is thicker than flies on cow manure) or at the very least I’ll keep an eagle eye on the offending vehicle the entire time even if it’s more than a block away. Cautious is my middle name now when it comes to walking where there are vehicles nearby. Also, I’m big on hand holding while walking now. I’m not sure how that protects me, or maybe it’s just that I figure if I get hit at least I’ll have company. Anyway, a little more than a year has passed and neither the scars on my foot nor the scars on my psyche are completely gone yet.

At this point last year I did not yet know that I was about to be devastated by the man I love. I hadn’t yet received the Dear Jane email, didn’t yet know the depths of which I could feel betrayal. To this day I haven’t regained 100% in BJ. Little by little I trust him more and more, but I feel my caution and my distrust. I do not want to be one of those people, and never have been one in the past, who snoops and tries to check up on their significant other. So far I haven’t, but I’ve been tempted. I have been oh so tempted, but so far I’ve refused to succumb to the temptation. What I do however is listen ever so closely to the things he says and doesn’t say, watch ever so closely to what he does and doesn’t do, read in more than probably should be into the least little thing. I have yet to reopen my heart 100% to him, and sometimes I wonder if I ever will.

What happened last winter helped me give up on my thoughts of ever finding a happily ever after. There will never be a happily ever after in my life. What happened last winter made me stronger in some ways. It has also made me more cynical. I no longer really believe in lifelong love. I no longer believe that I will ever have anyone in my life who will mean the words in the vows one takes when one marries. I no longer believe I will ever have someone in my life who I can count on to be there for a lifetime. What I now believe is that I can appreciate the good things about having someone in my life for the length of time they are willing to stay in my life. I believe that I have to just have my own independent life and let others have their lives and if our lives happen to intersect for a while then we can enjoy it for that time. I will never find another person who shares enough of my dreams and with whom I share enough of theirs to think that we will ever have anything more than at most a few years together, and then we will move on and go our separate ways. In some ways that makes me sad. In others it makes me feel better because it makes it okay to not get too close, to not let my guard down, to not let others all the way in, to be the way I am.

Yep, I learned some hard lessons last January. I still fight against some of them. I’m starting to give up the fight though, after a year. As Dan Fogelberg sang, “Lessons learned are like bridges burned. You only need to cross them but once. Is the knowledge gained worth the price of the pain? Are the spoils worth the cost of the hunt?”Lessons learned