An Understanding

My mother once gave me some advice: if you ever dislike someone you probably don't understand them. I would just like to say that there is a lot I don't understand about people at the moment.

As I continue moving on in my life and my relationships, marking months rather than weeks, I find it hard to let go of certain baggage. I have been dealing-- or I should say refusing to deal with--a barrage of e-mails and now text messages from my old roommate who is not a student of the take a hint school. She wants me to pay for things in the apartment that were broken "as a result of my actions," not things broken by me. After all I have been through in this breakup and subsequent move I could not care less about her picture frame or her invoice for four-hundred-and-some-bullshit dollars. I have suffered consequences, many many consequences, as a result of my action and it is not up to this woman to assign more as she sees fit.

In a recent e-mail she stated that, "Perhaps you are not ready to move-on but we all are..." as if everyone from my past is standing on the other end of the moving on finish line waiting for me to catch up. But part of moving on has been ignoring these people and cutting them out of my life. One of my rules in life if that I only want people who add things to my life around me, not people who subtract from my bank account. It became clear immediately after the breakup that this roommate was not concerned with me or my wellbeing, as a friend would be. It occurred to me that she was not a friend, nobody in my life was or if they were they were the fair-weather breed that didn't seem to want anything to do with me when things got rocky in my life.

One of the most powerful lessons that I learned was one in understanding. At first I hated all of these people and then I thought about what my mother said about not understanding the people we dislike. I didn't understand how these people could just cast me out of their lives. I then had an eye-opening "he's not that into you" type of revelation about my ex: he just doesn't care. He never did and never will care about me. I wasn't used, he wasn't mean spirited or evil or any thing of that nature. He just didn't care. He still doesn't care. And he never would care. And the love that I felt was something I invented. It never existed. I didn't lose the love of my life, I never met the love of my life.

I have been trying to apply this principal to the things that upset me. If someone doesn't care about me I need to stop caring about them. I need to be indifferent. Not mean or spiteful, but completely unaware. It means not checking their Facebook pages because there is a morbid part of me that wants to know how they are doing. It means not replaying the relationship in my head and looking for things I could have done better (I realize now nothing I could have done would have changed the outcome). It means not responding to their messages, however benevolent sounding. It is my turn to not care now.