Not Chosen

I saw something earlier today that stopped me.

A woman was talking about the devastating pain of betrayal. Of being discarded by someone you loved and invested in fully.

The pain of watching that person move on with their life like they hadn’t just destroyed yours.

Like they hadn’t left you standing in the wreckage, responsible for clearing the debris and rebuilding so much of what you believed about yourself while you were still bleeding all over the floor.

The pain of watching them live like nothing happened, and I meant less than nothing.

Supposedly happy now with their new person.

Healed.

All better.

The hero in her eyes, at work, and socially.

While you know the truth of who this person is and the dangers they carry with them.

That shit fucking hurts.

I had to battle with that a lot this last year.

A lot.

I wrestled with my self-worth.

I had to believe, without proof, that this was not the end of my story.

I had to extinguish the relentless fears that I would never find healthy love. That he had been my only chance. That somehow the person he moved on to next was better than me.

And underneath all of it was one of the most painful truths:

I still wished he had chosen me.

Sitting here now, after having sat in the fire—after crying and screaming and burning so many of those beliefs to the ground—I can see things I couldn’t see then.

What happened was never about my worth.

He didn’t choose better.

He chose easier.

I had been so easy.

I adored him.

I saw him as everything I had always dreamed of.

And for a long time, I believed him.

But as time went on and things happened over and over and over again, I became less easy.

I required actual change.

Emotional maturity.

Honesty.

Healthy communication.

Healthy behavior.

Vulnerability.

His attempts to soothe me without actually changing stopped working.

His words stopped being enough.

I started paying attention to the distance between what he said and what he did.

And eventually, being with me required something more than telling me what I wanted to hear.

I see that now.

And still, despite everything that eventually came to light about who he was and what he had actually been doing, I spent months wishing he had chosen me.

Attachment is cruel that way.

You can know someone lied to you.

Know they deceived you.

Know they hurt you.

Know that what you thought you had was built, at least in part, on things that weren’t true.

And still ache to be the one they chose.

As though being chosen by the person who deceived you would somehow prove you were worthy after all.

I don’t want that anymore.

After all the work I have done within myself to heal and grow from this experience, I can finally say something I could not have said a year ago:

I am so thankful I have outgrown the version of me who so badly wanted to be chosen by a liar.

And somehow, that is exactly what the woman in the video said I would be.