Misunderstandings and Warts

Of late, I've had a spate of disconcerting dreams about my ex. The Ex. You know, the one who ripped out my heart and threw it down onto the cold hard highway of despair before running it over, repeatedly, like an eighteen wheel truck runs over a small, helpless mammal...Um...yeah, so anyway, like I said, I've been having these dreams, which in themselves aren't all that disconcerting, since it's pretty standard to dream about people who played a major part in your life for a long time. What is disconcerting, however, is how normal it feels when I dream about him, as if there's nothing wrong at all with him being there. It's as if my unconscious mind has somehow failed to grasp the fact he's no longer in my life. You see, in my dreams, we're together, just like we used to be, everything's just fine and dandy, and I feel safe, and comforted by his presence.

Whilst mulling over the meaning of these dreams on my work trip up to Manchester today, it finally struck me that what I miss most about that relationship is how completely I was understood by another person, how for years there was somebody there who got me, knew all of my little idiosyncracies and found them charming rather than weird or annoying - loveable, even. Well, maybe not all of them, but the vast majority. But beyond the habits and the oddities, he knew the real me, the one behind the party girl image; the me with the stupid insecurities, the me who is scared of failure, and spiders, and death, who still doesn't know what she wants to be when she grows up, who just wants to be loved. And after nine long years of loving that me, he walked away. Without a backwards glance. And whilst that hurt - GOD, it hurt - that's not what I want to focus on in this post. What I want to focus on is how much I miss having someone - a partner - who understands me, because everyone that's come in and out of my life since The Ex hasn't even scratched the surface, not really.

Perhaps that's why when I think about those people, in particular the 21 year old (who, I must admit, I have been thinking about a fair bit since our final correspondence three weeks ago), I feel a certain kind of sadness, but one that's entirely different to the kind of sadness I feel when I think about the Ex. And that's not just because I loved him. It's because they didn't know me, the real me, not really, not at all. They only knew the me I chose to project, and all I chose to project were my most positive character traits, because I was trying to protect myself.

So what have I learned from this realisation, and what is the purpose of this somewhat self-indulgent post? I suppose in funny kind of way it's helped me to get just that little bit closer to knowing what I really want, and how I need to start behaving in order to achieve it. It's all well and good projecting only the good bits of your personality, but the only way to find true happiness, to be truly accepted for who you are and to forge real and lasting relationships (not just in a romantic sense, I might add), is to reveal the whole of yourself, to lay yourself bare and see what happens. Yes, you might get hurt, but better to get hurt than to live a lie and never again feel the way it feels when someone really understands you.