My heart has been battered this past year. There were times that I thought it had broken beyond repair, and times when I realized that it could be broken even more. I have felt the physical ache in my chest that I have only read about in books and I have cried until there were no more tears to cry.
Looking back now, on the journey from there to here, I can see that I made a lot of mistakes. That I was trying too hard to force change into my relationship. Trying to hard to change The Boy™. What I really needed to work on, was changing myself. I needed to change my attitude about a lot of things, and the way I responded to certain situations. I needed to change the way I interacted with the people in my house and how I managed myself and my time and my needs.
I think that all along, I knew some of this. I knew that there were things I needed to be working on, and I was, but not as wholeheartedly as I could. I felt too broken for that. I had this idea that when things started to get better, when I was feeling better and happier, then I could really focus on what I needed to be doing better and then everything would turn around for the best.
I was wrong. As I have started to focus on me, and what I needed to be doing better, I started to feel better. I also noticed that as I started to put the attention onto what I needed to fix, that other people started to pay attention more to what they needed to be doing. Change started to happen all the way around, and slowly, very slowly, things have started to turn around.
Some days we still have our struggles. We both fail, in our own ways, for whatever reason, but we own up to our failings. We apologize, and we move forward. We don't let them turn into something bigger. Something that will backslide us into a darker place that we don't want to be again. It's not always easy, but we are learning, and growing, and changing and so is our relationship. I like to think that it's changing for the better.
The Head and The Heart: Down in the Valley
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