Friday, August 20, 2010

Four Years Ago...

It is hard on a day like today to not take a walk down memory lane, and so I have.

Four years ago this day I was married to Janardan.

I hold myself accountable for a lot of what has happened in my life. I know his choices weren't my choices, but a fair few of my choices were incredibly dumb.

In retrospect, the decision to marry Janardan was a pretty rash one, a snap decision that once I made, I never questioned, never revisited, never analyzed against the evidence. It is also a decision I made before we even dated.

Our dating life was not incredibly better than our married life. There is a moment in our courtship that I have thought back on a lot the past while, the moment when Janardan told me he wasn't really ready for a relationship, and suggested that maybe we should break up, and I did not even consider it. If we broke up, we would get back together and get married. If we stayed together, we would get married. I had already decided, and I stubbornly clung to that decision, willfully oblivious to any event but that final event. The details didn't matter. I knew what was going to happen.

I will sometimes idly wonder why -someone- didn't say -something- to me in that time, and then remember how I was, and know exactly why they wouldn't have. There is nothing that anyone could have said, nothing that anyone could have done that would have changed my mind. I am stubborn. Stubborn beyond reason.

I made the decision one morning in May of 2005, as I went about my work at early morning custodial. It was probably around 6:30am when I decided unalterably the decision that I would marry him.

Every one of us is a wonderful son or daughter of God, with an amazing potential, a capacity to do a work beyond our greatest dreams. And I saw in him that potential. I saw in him a greater potential than I had ever seen in anyone, and I wanted it. I wanted the future that was possible with him. I wanted to partake in that greatness, in that life that would shape the world.

In retrospect it sounds like delusions of grandeur.

And I held that view, that possibility, until I finally saw a crack, a chink in the armor, when the potential began to seem impossible, and it was not until I came to terms with the fact that he was leaving me, and until I stopped talking to him that I began to fully understand that the reality of my world, the reality of his choices, my choices, had been leading nowhere near that potential, and that a grand potential for greatness was worse less than nothing when the choices being made were heading for pain, misery, and control.

I was reading through a conversation we had in December, where I was still intoxicated with that idea, where I said that I thought even if some other guy could make me happier, I would always want the potential with him, and I would go back to him at the drop of a hat.

I don't like to place blame. Yes, I think he was controlling and manipulative, but I think that I let him control and manipulate me.

I wondered all the years of our marriage why he had married me. Before we were married, I was so focused on my goal, so focused on being with this amazing guy, having this great potential in my future, and then as soon as we were married, I began to question why he had married me. He never really answered me. I still don't know why he married me.

But to my self in December, I say, You're wrong. There's no way I'm going back there, not no way, not no how (...trying to think what movie that is from, can't remember! Ah, google reveals it's the wizard of Oz). Because I have my own potential, and I don't plan to put it with someone who is wasting his away. In the vein of the parable of the talents, I would rather be with someone with only one talent, but who is using it for good, than someone who has ten talents, but is burying them (I know the parable goes the other way, but it works better for my metaphor this way).

I have always been someone who thinks a lot about the future. Still do. Think about what the future will bring, plan for the future, anticipate the wonders of the future, and find happiness in the happiness that there will be in the future. It was this taken to misguided levels which led me to be so blind to my life and the problems I was facing, to the tremulous issues in my marriage, and even the relationship before the marriage, because I had this hope for the future.

But eternity is not a bunch of tomorrows. Eternity is today. All we get is today, every day, forever.

I find the biggest impediment to me making the use of my own potential is my own belief in myself. I really am my own worst enemy. Today, I want to be my friend.

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