Hi, I'm Sam,
In all my years of thinking of myself and despite how highly I've thought of myself, I have never considered myself to be a perfect human. I don't shine constant light on my flaws and as a result I can't mention them and by flaws I mean the things I can't change about myself, I agree that every other thing can be worked on, no matter how long it takes. I've always thought that the two scariest things for me in a relationship is getting cheated on and being tolerated. I understand that you are not always in love with your partner every single day of the relationship and/or marriage and as valid as feelings can be, it is also fleeting and a solid lasting relationship cannot be built on feelings alone. So I sit to think about the moments that you're "not in love" with your partner, what exactly is that period called? The period where it feels like their flaws outshine the best parts of them no matter how much you try to shift your focus to the best parts of them. Whatever that period is called can be a slippery slope into tolerating your partner but then again it depends on what you choose to focus on about your partner, how rational your actions can be and how long it takes you to remain "not in love" with your partner.
Exactly one month after my 29th birthday the nastiest character flaw I've always had finally became very undeniably obvious to me. I have always been aware of it but I became good at making up excuses for it and the excuses felt legit and I couldn't understand what everyone else meant but after today, no excuse is worth the continous behavior and I now feel like I owe everyone in my life a deep and sincere apology for how long they've overlooked this and not doing anything about it even after mentioning it to me. I confused talking alot with communicating. I always seemed to have something to say about everything, be it my situation, your situation, their situation but I never realized that I did a lot of complaining instead of saying anything tangible. I remember telling people that the thing I hated a lot was someone who complained alot but I never realized that I was one of the major people who did that. I somehow never heard myself speaking so in as much as it may seem like I spoke a lot , someone might assume I was one of those people who love to hear themselves speak but in reality I never really heard myself or paid attention to what I was saying, I just keep yapping like everyone else was tasked with hearing me speak.
I also seemed to always have the perfect excuse to give in different situations. When someone brings something to my attention, I listen for the first few minutes to get the idea of what the person was pointing out and I spend the rest of the time cooking up something to say to force you to see things from my angle. It is possible that my rebuttals are legit but for someone to feel the important urge to call my attention to something I did knowingly or not, I don’t think an excuse is what they want to hear. I have now realized that when I give my complete attention to everything they have to say, apologizing becomes very easy and fitting and not from the point of who was wrong or wronged but the acknowledgment of another’s feelings becomes paramount.
I make it a point to leave any situation where I feel like I’m being tolerated, for some unclear reason it’s something I cannot reconcile with. I can try to overlook it in the beginning but if the feeling persists then I have to find a way. Now imagine how I feel finding out that I have been the reason why someone else might consider tolerating me to be a good route to take. I have been a believer that “people treat you the way you treat yourself” and going with that logic, it then means that I’ve been tolerating myself as long as I’ve felt tolerated by people. How then do I remove myself from the situation of self tolerance? How do I leave myself because I’ve been tolerating myself and the self tolerance can only be as a result of my actions. Even without realizing it, I have been subjecting myself to one of my fears.
The positive to this is that despite the fact that I can’t leave myself, then it’s something I have to work hard enough to fix for myself and for others who have done nothing wrong but to try to love me even with the flaw that I just began to see. I’ve not done any research but I’ve been able to find ways to step away from this and try to move to the positive side of this. I have to make myself love me genuinely and not say “I love me” like a memory verse in Sunday school. The first step to fixing a problem is to identify and admit the problem, after this, solutions begin to appear, or ot could be that they’ve been there all these while, I might’ve been blind to them because I was focused on other things that were not true or important to me for my immediate situation. Light is often always appreciated after spending time in darkness and I can say that I really do feel like I can finally see and assess myself in a bright light now prior to my previous days and as much as I want to spend my precious time being mortified about my old ways, I’d like to focus on the present and hope that the choice of actions I select in the present can help me build a more comfortable future for me and in my interactions with people.
