Learning to live without Sara Jones

I kept trying to save the relationship. I didn't know what I really needed was to save myself.

Well, this is unexpected.

Sara Jones messaged me. And I read her message and gave it a thumbs-up, and went on with my day.

And I’m happy leaving it at that.

I don’t want to respond, beyond a thumbs-up.

I don’t care to engage her anymore.

It’s not that I don’t like her.

It’s not that she doesn’t matter to me.

I almost killed myself when I thought I was losing her — so, yeah, she clearly matters to me.

I’m just not interested in going back to that particular roadside attraction.

I got everything I needed out of our acquaintance-ship… and there’s nothing left for me to see.

Which feels really strange, if I’m completely honest…

I mean, for two years, I thought this girl was The Answer. And now…

Now, I feel like talking to her would just be a distraction.

It’s her fault. (j/k j/k)

But for real, hear me out:

I tried to love her. I tried to make her the center of my universe. I tried to make her want me, the same way I wanted her. And she wouldn’t.

She refused to reciprocate on that level.

And I took it as rejection, and it drove me to suicide.

And I had to spend 49 days in a mental hospital, and 59 days in residential treatment (and lots of days in between!), trying to figure out, “How do I make life worth living, if I have to live without Sara Jones?”

And trying to figure that out — something inside of me broke, somewhere in this last year. I’ve cried over Sara Jones, so intensely, that I didn’t even notice that my shower was flooding the bathroom floor, and spilling out into the bedroom…

I spent days in the hospital, and in treatment, avoiding everybody, because I was so hung up on losing Sara Jones I didn’t think I deserved to feel good around anybody else.

I journaled about her, enough to fill the Library of Congress.

I talked about her at length in therapy.

I prayed every day for a year, for God to show her how much I love her… and for Him to show me how I can live without her.

And somehow, slowly, through all the pain… I learned that I can live without her.

I hated it, at first. Because I still wanted her to be The Answer.

But I knew she didn’t want to be.

Reality kept throwing that fact in my face, every day of my recovery journey.

“Hey, Reality, do you think Sara Jones loves me today?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, but what if I do this?”

“No.”

“Hear me out, though.”

“Still no.”

“But I mean-”

“Stop, Michael. Just stop.”

I still get emotional, today, thinking back on how much I struggled with all those feelings and desires. Not because I want Sara Jones, anymore. But because I put so much effort into trying to live a fantasy…

And the whole time, I absolutely believed it was the truth.

Part of me still doesn’t understand why it can’t be the truth.

Because how beautiful would it be, if another human being could be the answer to all my problems? If she could just waltz into my life, and take away all my pain, and plant me in front of the mirror and I could finally see the man I really am, and have been wanting to be all along?

It would be such an easy answer to everything that’s ever gone wrong.

“Oh… I wasn’t broken… I just needed someone to love me.”

It sounds so promising…

And for so many years — even before Sara Jones — I wanted it to be the answer.

I thought I was so ugly, and so irredeemable, I needed it to be the answer. And Sara kept showing me, over and over again, that it never can be the answer.

Because the question I’ve actually spent my whole life trying to answer wasn’t, “Can this woman love me?”

The question has been, “Can I love myself?” (Sometimes it’s more like, “Can I even like myself in this moment?”)

And so, whether a woman loves me or not, is kind of irrelevant. I mean, in the long run, yeah… I want a woman to love me…

But her love can never be sufficient, to fill the hole in my heart that stems from me not wanting to love myself.

Which — side note — but I feel like this needs to be said. The whole, “You can’t love someone else until you love yourself” nonsense, really gets under my skin. Not because it’s fundamentally not true… but because it confuses two separate kinds of love and tries to make them all the same thing.

And learning to love yourself, and learning to love somebody else… are not the same thing.

It might be harder to love someone else, if you don’t first love yourself. But it’s not impossible. You just might make more mistakes, if you’re trying to use their love to make you feel good about who you are (or aren’t).

Anyway.

I really believed Sara was going to be the answer.

I didn’t know I was trying to solve the wrong problem.

I was trying to figure out, “How do I keep from ever losing her?” When the better question, the whole time, was, “How do I build a life that doesn’t need her?”

But I didn’t think I could “not need her in my life.” I thought she was what was making me want to live again. I thought she was making me happy, making me safe, making me want to finally heal from all my past wounds…

And I thought if she ever left me… I could never do that work alone.

And then, I lost her. And I almost died.

It almost became one more thing I could never recover from.

Then I started asking other people for help.

I told the doctors in the mental hospital that I wanted to die. I told the nurses I couldn’t figure out how to live without Sara Jones in my life.

I told them it was my fault she stopped talking to me, and I knew I’d ruined everything, and I didn’t know if I could live with the results…

But I had to try.

And I started talking to other patients.

I started opening up, and listening to other people.

I started making room in my life, for more than just the emptiness I felt, in the absense of Sara Jones.

It was horrible, at first. Every interaction brought me to tears. I spent more time hiding in my room, or writing in my journal, than interacting with the other people right in front of me.

I thought each one of them would despise me if they knew the way I’d treated Sara Jones.

I knew I was a horrible human being — and I was afraid of how they would treat me, if they found out.

But I talked to them, anyway. And I found out that some of them didn’t think I was horrible, at all. They understood how my mind could’ve interpreted everything the way it did… and why I would’ve believed I needed Sara to save me.

They didn’t say I was right to want her to save me… they just understood how a person could end up feeling that way.

That was the beginning of my recovery.

That was when I began to question just how much I really needed Sara Jones, after all.

But I still hated myself for the things I’d put her through, and for that, I needed more than what the mental hospital could give me. I needed therapy. I needed coping skills. I needed perspective.

I needed residential treatment.

The day I checked into treatment… roughly six months ago, now… I told the therapist, “I need this to work, or I probably will go home and kill myself.” And I carried that feeling with me for probably the first 40 days or so, out of my 59-day stay.

But eventually, I started to have days where suicide wasn’t the first thing I thought about when I woke up.

I started to enjoy spending time around other people.

I dare say, I started to make friends again. Not the kind you keep in touch with, after treatment is done — but the friends I made in residential treatment, made my recovery journey easier… because for once, I didn’t have to walk it all alone.

Since coming home, and starting outpatient therapy, I’ve still struggled. Sometimes I still have really dark thoughts. And I probably always will; not because I want to commit suicide, just because it’s where my mind has gone for so many years, it feels like a comfortable place to land when I get too overwhelmed.

But I went into treatment because I was afraid if I ever cut Sara Jones out of my life completely, I could never survive.

And now… she messaged me, and I gave it a thumbs-up and went on with my day.

And I’m not mad at her, today. It’s not like, “I hate you and never wanna talk to you again!” I just, legitimately don’t care if I ever talk to her again.

I was hurting so badly, before… I needed to build a life in which I wouldn’t need Sara Jones.

And now, almost one year later… I’ve built a life where I don’t need Sara Jones.

I wasn’t expecting this to ever happen.

Now that it has…

I’m kinda wondering what else I might not need.