An Open Letter

I might as well vent to it here because it's a nice outlet. One thing that's been going back and forth in my mind has been the difference between intentionally saying something that is hurtful, and saying something that is hurtful from negligence of remembering or thinking about how it's a hurtful topic. The intentionality does have a overall worse connotation in my mind, but at the same time I still think it's fucked up in a different way how she said something super damaging to me even without the whole context of losing my mom, because I had told her several times before about how that was something that was traumatic for me. Like it kind of feels that even if it wasn't intentional, someone that I care about hurt me really deeply from just negligence. Even if the intentionality is not there I think it's pretty important to kind of acknowledge that and evaluate if that's something I would want in any kind of relationship, friendship or otherwise. I think especially to be intimate with someone or tightly ingrained, it's important to not have to feel like you always have to have a guard up in case they again say something that's hurtful or sensitive. I have to walk the thin line of saying sensitive and being concerned about that being interpreted as in “I'm too sensitive”. But I think this is more analogous to if someone was assaulted, and you made careless jokes that were related to that. I think that's universally a no-go kind of situation. Sucks that I'm sensitive in this way, but that's part of who I am and I don't know who I would be without the bad parts.

It kind of sucks that I never really got an apology for it, and instead what I got was a “I'm sorry that you didn't get more support about your insecurity growing up” which was horribly worse than saying just sorry, for reasons that I don't really want to explain right now. I think I have to be worried about unfortunately being perceived, and since I don't want to put all of our dirty laundry out there on the internet I'm going to hold back here for now. At least talking about exactly what she said that gutted me and the context behind it.

I think at the end of the day I have felt an incredible sense of freedom. I guess it's more just of the feeling that the opportunity to meet people that understand me and click with me is absolutely ripe, and I don't have to settle for a relationship that was kind of slowly destroying me. I'm very proud of the stability that I've built for myself throughout all of the hardships I've had to face growing up, and when I say that I mean to this point today. And I think that this is still part of me growing up and that's kind of a happy thought if I'm being honest. I'm not sure if I can exactly articulate why it is.

Today when I went to the gym it was closed, and since I thankfully recently bought my own basketball, I instead went to an outdoor court nearby and I just shot and practiced by myself for 2 hours while listening to podcasts. It was a beautifully sunny day, but the wind was absolutely nightmarish for the first hour and a half. Anytime I would shoot the ball, it would pretty consistently fly unpredictably. I thought this was pretty unfortunate because I have been trying to practice shooting straight and I've been trying to learn the proper form for that, it's kind of hard to do that when you get constantly incorrect feedback just because of the wind today.

But I also thought that was incredibly poetic and a weird concrete example of a general life lesson. Just because today I'm playing outside and there's a ton of wind, does that mean that I should fundamentally change my approach and try to shoot to the left to account for it? Or maybe I should change my stance or hand position to deal with that bias. But I think the answer is a pretty clear no, since I am trying to learn the game, and it's better that I stick to what I believe is the proper approach, even if right now I'm getting conflicting feedback. This was a horribly convoluted and unpolished way of essentially saying how just because things are not working, doesn't mean that you are doing something wrong. And almost equally as important, just because things would work if you did it differently doesn't mean that doing it differently is correct.

I think I could have maybe's relationship work, by sucking things up more, or studying and learning how to communicate better to account for their issues. Or I could have done so many different things. But at the end of the day how many of these things would end up hurting me once the wind goes away and I'm in a happy situation. Hopefully in my next relationship, I'm able to communicate with my partner without feeling like it's a debate. And hopefully next time my partner can empathize and understand me better. I think it's important to remember this, because I think I lose sight of this a lot. Just because you get bad feedback, doesn't mean that you need to fix that always. Of course there are valuable pieces of feedback and things that you absolutely should learn from, but that is not a universal thing.