THE SABOTAGE OF EMOTIONAL PASSIVITY
It’s no wonder breaking up with your partner or friend is hard- doing so disposes little pieces of you in the process.
Goodbye to your Sunday afternoons snuggled up in bed together, watching corny rom-coms with a hot mug of tea.
Goodbye to your weekly dinner date of dirt-cheap dumplings in that dingy Asian restaurant down the road.
Goodbye to those late night chats where you would both solve the worlds problems or forecast your fated husband to the finest detail.
Goodbye to that accomplice you wouldn’t consider your weekend plans without.
In fact, say goodbye to you.
Or rather, goodbye to the person you have become.
When you lose someone dear from your life, you lose parts of yourself. Without consciously doing so, we invest so much of our person into our lover or the friends we keep that we begin to define ourselves almost exclusively by their inclusion in our lives, leaving us with a severe crisis of identity in the fallout.
Think about someone important that you have loved and lost in the past. You would have invested almost everything into them… your love, time and effort – effectively shaping your life to cater and conform to their schedule, interests and emotional needs.
So, you take on their friends, their unusual obsession for weekend lawn bowls and their insistent need for company all at the expense of the things or people that used to bring you joy- and BOOM- before you know it, you’re a new person with a new identity that cannot be separated from your beloved companion.
You’ve lost yourself.
So, are investments always safe? The answer is no. The nature of investments is uncertain and fluctuating… based on factors outside of one’s means- a fact rarely monitored by those anchored strong in an emotional commitment.
Things are great at the moment,
nothing could change this.
I couldn’t imagine my life without you,
without us like this.
The light of love, companionship and belonging sure shine bright in your heart, but that same light has the potential to deflect and blind.
Break-ups, whether they are with a friend or a lover, are emotional. People generally empathise with one’s loss of this person, but rarely do we touch on the emotional impact and hard, soul-searching journey that people are forced down to reclaim themselves after they have been stripped of their sense of self.
Disorientation and self-crisis are all to be expected at this time and naturally so- you’ve just lost the person who defined almost everything about you, to you.
So, who are you?
One of my favourite lyrics from the Little Green Cars closes their song with the line “It’s easy to hate yourself when all of your love is inside of someone else”. This line has always stuck with me and for good reason.
How do you pick yourself up after losing what seemed to be the most important person in your life? More importantly, and a discovery you will certainly make further down the track {as I did}, how do you rediscover and take control of your own person after the fallout?
The answer has taken me more years then I would like to consider but the only way you will reclaim your precious person is to…
Regroup and recreate.
With more meanings than one, and a simple answer at that, this discovery may have come more easily to you, but for me, it has been my most valued lesson yet and one that has set me free.
If there were two ideas I could pass on or inspire in someone else, it would be a regurgitation of those taught by a man I dearly admire, author Paulo Coelho, a man of wisdom, insight and plain sensible thinking. And those lessons would be…
- You can never own someone, so don’t allow them to own you.
- You are control of your life. Be true to you.
So, with those considerations in mind, be smart with and remain conscious of your investments at all times.
Most importantly- BE IN CHARGE OF YOU!
// CONTRIBUTOR
ANEEKA SIMONIS :: FASHION COLUMNIST
Hopping from state to state in her adolescence, Aneeka and her unique personality refuse to be put in the corner. As if everyday is her wedding day, Aneeka vows to incorporate something old, something new, something borrowed and sometimes something blue into her daily fashion before she catches lunch with a girlfriend or trundles through city streets. Aneeka can often be found curled up in Starbucks with a tall caramel java chip frappuccino, messy hair and furiously typing fingers that barely keep with billowing ideas for her latest article or memoir. Currently studying journalism at Swinburne, Aneeka is interested in all things media and enjoy her role as a broadcast journalist at an inner city Melbourne radio station. You can follow her on Twitter or on her blog aneekasimonis92.wordpress.com
