To change, just choose.

I woke up with a blog post literally writing itself today. It's coming up on a year of when I moved out from my home and the , I realzied something recently. I never wanted her to change: I wanted her to choose me.

I left becuase I didn’t feel wanted. Judging by the person she chose pretty soon after I left, she made a decision. Maybe she didn’t want to be queer. Maybe she didn’t want me. She gets to choose, it’s her life.

But the painful part was that she wasn’t honoring that as her choice. She blamed me and who I was and everything about me for her ambivalence, ambivalence that was there long before we began dating and stayed the whole time. I recently heard someone say, “I never should have married him.”

I try not to think that way, that I never should have begun dating someone who wasn’t really choosing me, but I can see now, from a distance of almost a year, that onec I realzied it, I should have left earlier. Unfortunately, it was only from leaving that I realized this, so I think we truly can only see what we can see when we can see it. Hindsight is 20/20, right.

She blamed me for trying to change her, and she said she felt unloved and unwanted. The sad truth of it is, I wasn’t trying to change her. I loved her completely for who she was and who she was becoming. I didn’t want to change her, I wanted her to change her ambivalence about me. I wanted her to choose me.

When we choose a partner, we also choose whatever comes with that, including the identities associated with that person. Maybe it means mental illness or a diffcult family histroy or infertility or some other challenge of some kind. If someone isn’t up to that challenge, it’s so easy to blame that person to make it easier for us to justify abandoning that person. Abdnadon is a strong word, but I use it intentionally. If it stings, that’s ok. The truth does often hurt. Choosing to abandon something or someone is usually not easy--it goes against what we are told to do. I felt like I was abandoning something and someone, which is why it took me so long to leave. But I’ve come to see, I wasn’t really leaving anything--because I wasn’t even wanted. There was literally no thing to leave. No real relationship. No real commitment. No real investment in me. I wasn’t abandoning something real, just what I had created in my head. And since I had created it, I could also leave it and create it anew with someone who genuinely wanted to be part of a whole with me, and everything that comes with it.

Same goes for jobs and other experience of relationship in my life. Anytime two people or me and an idea come together, there’s a relationship. It can either go well or not go well, dependingo n the mutual investment on both sides.