Sometimes I read writings about breakups. To someone for whom much time has passed but who hasn't yet met a new person, those stories—while they sometimes feel like the past—at some moments feel like the present. But these days those writings don't read comfortably for me. The reason is that they contain a 'negation of the other person'. And I think such feelings seem to hold a 'self-justification'. Self-justification—the nuance isn't good, but there must be a reason behind all rational thinking.
The truth is I don't have strong defense mechanisms. Because my defense mechanisms aren't strong, I can't really negate the other person. This applies without exception whether the other person is a friend, a lover, a parent, or a relative. The proportion in which I think they are 'right' is a bit higher than the proportion in which I think 'I am right'. Oddly, this isn't the case when exchanging opinions about some 'social issue', but when talking about a 'private' subject rather than such a 'public' one—especially a subject concerning 'me'—the proportion of the other person being right is higher. Perhaps that's why I'm not very good at self-justification.
When I first broke up, for a long while I engaged in 'self-abuse' that was far from self-defense. That self-abuse was full of the premise that 'I was a lacking person'. I feel myself to be lacking, so how could I, of all people, say to someone 'you too are a lacking person'? I don't think I regarded others as 'lacking people'. My sense of them was about that of 'ordinary people'. But it seems this 'ordinary person' belonged at least to the category of someone better than me.
Writings about how hard it is after a breakup mostly come with comments like 'you broke up because the person you parted from wasn't your destined one', or 'you broke up because the person you parted from wasn't earnest about you'. Well, most of the content is words to look after the writer's feelings. But these comments are, in the end, words that send the responsibility to the other person. I don't want to argue over whether that's right or wrong. But I think there's no statement that so plainly reveals an attitude of evading the locus of cause as 'we broke up because the other person did ~~'. Unless it's a case where one party unilaterally committed a relationship-destroying act, most relationships are always mutual fault, mutual contribution. For example, when my taste and the other person's taste collide and those tastes can't 'coexist', someone's taste has to step back for the time being. In the early part of a relationship both sides have the 'room to yield', but as time passes humans adapt, so they often become numb to the other's yielding. There are also cases where one becomes more sensitive to one's own consideration.
The biggest reason I've recently been able to stand on my own feet and love myself is that I was able to accept my past self. Because there was an 'acknowledgment' of the me who was lacking, the me who overthought, the me who couldn't readily reach a conclusion about how to decide, and the me who created conflicts and couldn't resolve them skillfully. I no longer negate that past self. Once I acknowledged that I, too, contributed 50 percent to the many conflicts that happened in the past, I neither resent others nor get swept up in the fatalism of whether others were my destined ones or not. Having come to love myself, I instead gain the room to look back at myself, and the room to look into others' thoughts and hearts.
As I try to close this piece, I get the feeling that to someone this writing of mine will look like 'self-justification'. But I don't want to engage in self-justification. Because there are more relationships in which I felt I was lacking, I don't want to turn my own shortcomings into the other person's problem. I just want to cleanly acknowledge, 'I was lacking', and I do acknowledge it. But in the end, whether it's self-justification or self-pity may in fact not matter. What I do in that moment, and in the coming future, is what will truly matter. Every relationship always has a greater possibility of forming a virtuous cycle when both sides make an effort. There's no rule that it will surely become a virtuous cycle. The possibility just grows a little. And I believe in that possibility, and I look for the cause of every problem within myself. Since the other person, too, must have had reasons for their choices, as I try to fathom those reasons, at some point I get the feeling that the answer was something I'd held all along.
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