Losing and Finding Myself

After a break up most people I know make a change in their lives. They move because there are too many memories of the person in the old apartment. They get a tattoo or a piercing. They go on drinking binges. They get a new hair color and cut.

Last September, I didn't want to be Jenn any longer. I thought maybe I was attracting the wrong guys because I was blond and they assumed that I was something that I am not. So my amazing friend CD, colored my hair. It was brown and I loved it and I continued to love it for about 6 months. Then I realized I didn't like brunette Jenn. When I changed my hair color, I had changed one of the things that I loved most about myself. One of the things that made me feel connected to my family.

I had been attempting to distance myself from Dane, but the only people I managed to feel distanced from were my family members and myself.

I feel as if I lived those first 6 months in a pain induced haze. I was there, but I really wasn't there. There were a few moments of happiness, but at the end of the day my distress swallowed me whole. I have spent so much time trying to figure out how someone who had purchased a ring and had wanted to marry me, changed his mind and magically no longer loved me. Was his love like a light switch? Was it really that easy for him to turn off and on?

I analyzed and reanalyzed every moment I spent with him. Trying to learn my mistakes. While I was searching for answers that never came. I became lost. I became the sad heartbroken person, who lost her joy for life.  I became so angry at God, that my nightly crying ritual that began with missing Dane turned into me yelling at God. I begged for God to take away the pain that sat on my heart, but the following day it was still there. I didn't realize at the time that it was slowly getting smaller and smaller because the stone was so large to begin with.

I no longer miss Dane. I am still confused. Sometimes I daydream about asking him ,"Why?" I think his only answer is that he came back really messed up from the war. I want to ask him if he ever really loved me or if he only loved that I had been waiting for him while he was deployed.

I am no longer as angry at God either. I realize that if I had been totally listening to God I would have known from the very beginning that it was bad idea to date Dane. That is one of the reasons why I am spending the next year not dating. I want to be more dependent on God, I want to live everyday listening for the voice of God that comes as a quiet whisper like it did for Elijah.

My joy for life is returning and is almost at full speed again. When you are part of a couple, you give a part of yourself to the other person. You hope that they will cherish it and that you will walk together through life growing together. When a break up occurs,  you may get part of what you gave the other person back like your CDs or your house keys but more likely than not the part of your heart that you gave to them will not come back as whole.  The post break up period is about accepting and figuring out who that new person is.

I may have lost the desperate to be loved girl that I was but I am finding the strong woman that I want to be.