Sunday thoughts

Here I am – another Sunday and another long train journey. This time I did remember to bring my book with me. (Though I did forget my headphones). So my daily writing spree failed but I’m ok with that. It didn’t fail due to lack of thoughts. In fact I had a plan of all the posts I would write – the right-media’s attack on students organising against PREVENT, Guantanamo, labelling and measuring of ethnicity, White “militias”, #Oscarssowhite … No, it wasn’t due to lack of ideas but lack of time. So for that I can forgive myself.

Today I don’t want to talk about the world. Well the state of the Eurocentric world I live in. I’m looking into myself today. I don’t know what it is – perhaps the crisp snow laid down on the fields, untouched or my morning spent flipping through my scrapbook from last year – but I am drawn back to all the warning signs I’ve had through my life before things went massively wrong. And all the times I consciously or unconciously ignored them.

One thing dominates these thoughts – my ex. This isn’t surprising since I have seven years of mistakes there. I wonder if it’s harmful to look back on those things. Or whether some reflection is ultimately healing. It is regret. It is embarrassment. It is shame.

The warning signs were there right from the start. I should have known he would not treat me well based on how he treated his ex. I should have never gone out with him knowing he hadn’t yet broken up with his current partner, even though he promised he would the next day. I should have left him as soon as I found out I was the “other girl” and he hadn’t yet even broken up with his ex. Should have. The warning signs were there. I chose to ignore them.

Lie after lie. Sometimes I knew. I suppose there may have been many times I didn’t. Forgive and forget. More like ignore and pretend. I chose to keep living the fairytale so that I wouldn’t be alone, so that I didn’t have to admit that I had made a mistake.

And then I would lie. As he got more controlling and I got more suffocated. Never cheating – never anything I would even care if he did. But he cared. Talking to colleagues and friends from university. Giving guys who were in my workgroup my number. Adding them on my Facebook. Of course he did all those things. He actually cheated on me – three times (yes three). But yet he made me feel like the cheat. I could see straight through the manipulations but I chose to ignore them. Stuck between the guilt of hurting his feelings – is that guy really worth loosing him over? Why can’t I just delete him of Facebook even if it makes me look like a completely isolated maniac? Why do I care what people think of me? But of course I did.

I had boundaries and lines I would never cross. Yet he made me cross them all. Using guilt and a twisted idea of what love is supposed to be.

So, not the cheeriest of thoughts on a long journey on a Sunday morning. The regret is not so much for wasted time. I know they have taught me to trust myself, to not compromise unless I want to and to find fulfilment in myself.

It’s more for the sins I’ve committed along the way. Thinking about it now the guilt drills into my heart and fills my stomach with cold, heavy stones. I trust in my relationship with my Lord and pray for forgiveness. I pray I find the strength to learn from my mistakes and to never make them again. And I pray for happiness – both in this world and the next.

O son of Adam, as long as you call on Me, I shall forgive you of what you have done, and think nothing of it. O son of Adam, even if your sins were to reach up to the clouds in the sky, and then you were to ask for My forgiveness, I would forgive you and think nothing of it. O son of Adam, even if you were to come to Me with sins nearly as great as the earth, and then you were to meet Me after death, not worshipping anything besides Me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great as the earth. – Tirmidhi