Compliments

Don't care about all the pain in front of me, I just wanna be happy. - Happy, Leona Lewis 

I have been carrying a burden, a burden of words. Words can weight somebody down and hurt more than a punch on the face. Words can kill. And I have heard some words during the last two years that reverberate in my head once in a while. Most of the hurtful words I heard – and, mind me, I heard quite a good share of them – have been erased from my mind because the turmoil of emotions that I felt at that time drowned them in my memory. Good and bad sank in the storm of my divorce. I feel pain when I cannot remember the first months of my child’s life but I am grateful that some of the horrible stuff went away too, erased and drained through that loophole that protects ourselves from further damage. Once in a while I recall some lines, here and there, but most of it is a blur that I cannot even believe I went through. Sometimes I feel so detached that it is as if some actress played my role in the movie of my life. I do not even feel that woman was I at some point.

But going back to painful words, there are two sentences that I just cannot erase and that have been torturing me for the last few days. Maybe writing, dissecting and sharing them will conjure them out of my system. I just can hope. They were: You were the worst wife ever, which I heard around a month ago from my ex-husband and You are a wonderful person but you have wasted yourself away all these years making bad choices which was delivered to me in the wee hours before Saturday´s dawn by an old acquaintance. I know how wrong these two sentences are but, only because of that, they are not less hurtful. I do not feel I have to justify myself to these people for my past actions but I feel they are so blind to their own actions and interests that they are unable to see, much less feel, how their words can produce so much pain. In the first case though, I will even consider they totally are aimed to be painful. In the second case, it has not been the first time somebody tells me something like that, usually paired with an “I told you so.” It also interesting that this kind of comment usually comes from older male friends/acquaintances that, at some point, wanted to get into my pants. That gives them what they think is a right of opinion over my actions, cannot even imagine what they would say if they actually got to sleep with me at some point. I guess desire gives some people wings in the worst way imaginable. But regardless of the people that pronounced them, I try to look at them from their perspective. And then I see how tainted those statements are and I cannot even believe why I feel such pain. Reality is in the eye of the beholder and if the people that said things like the ones above really believe them to their ultimate implications, those people do not deserve a space in my life, not even an thought, much less my pain.

These two years have been a learning experience, a trip I never wanted to take. I did start it without knowing where I was going, not even happy with the decisions I had to make, the measures I had to take. I am still not happy, I wish I was able to do things differently. But nevertheless, these two years are a reflection of life in general, of how sometimes you are taken to places where you do not want to be and how facing and embracing them is the only way to get through with that hard job that is living. I have also learnt for all the lovely people in your life, there’s always going to be a couple of assholes. And that the only person that you always have left is yourself, that sometimes you are the only one that can make the compliment, look in the mirror and praise that being that looks at you with your same eyes. You have to love yourself more than anything, not in a selfish way, just giving yourself a break and a tap in the shoulder once in a while. I always believed I was not good enough; I spent my life looking for somebody to tell me that I was beautiful, drinking thirstily from other people’s compliments and never feeling half full. Only when I started believing I was beautiful myself, my glass spilled over. And, even if my beliefs are still fragile and the assholes still come barrelling through, I will stick to myself and don’t deprive my pretty self of all the love that I deserve.