Trying to Decide Something

[rexbeccarox]

For my own sanity I had to make the decision to make a clean break. I sent her one final message letting her know that I was giving up trying, and I tried to move on. It was hard, but eventually I got my sanity back.

I had to do that recently with someone else. It sucked, but it felt good once I moved on from it. I'm sorry you had to go through that, Rob.

I wonder, are you chasing a ghost? When we remember the past, we always have a very skewed perspective, and can make ourselves believe it was something entirely different to what it was. Of course you have strong feelings and you had good times with him, I'm not trying to deny that of course. But I'm wondering if your expectations of what would happen if you got in contact are likely to fall short of what would actually happen, and would lead to more heartache. So many times I've tried to return to things in my past in some way, to relive them, and almost every time they are nothing like what I remember, and they even go so far as to destroy the nice memories I had of them. Maybe, as your memories are precious to you at the moment, they should be preserved as they are?

I've thought of the chasing a ghost thing; I've even tried to convince myself of it, but I was keeping pretty complete journals at the time. I see the path I went down very clearly now, and the only ghost was me.

I hope something in there was useful, and that you can decide what is best for you.

Thank you, Rob. It was very useful

---

I've always attempted to live in a "no regrets" way, but I realize I have every regret right now.

I have mixed feelings about a "no regrets" philosophy about life. On the one hand it can lead to a lot of fun and interesting experiences you might not otherwise have had in life. On the other hand, it can blind you to your own motivations and give you an excuse to do things that could become harmful or damaging to yourself of someone else.

I don't know that there's a solution to this, other than to strive to live a "no regrets" life, but to remember that when your "no regrets" decisions significantly involve another person that a self-examination should be done to assess your own (and their) motives as a way of protecting both parties.

I've definitely thought of what my motives are and whether I can hurt Dale in this process. That is absolutely the last thing I want to do. That's why it's hard for me to try to contact a family member. I just don't want to make Dale's life worse; only better.

For myself, I know that I've used the "I don't want to have regrets about passing this opportunity up" as a means of forging ahead into a relationship without examining my own motives for pursuing it. In the end I did walked away with regrets, they were just a different set of regrets than I imagined I would have going in.

Having said this, this kind of comes back to Dys's allusion to examining your motives. Just as you should think about your own motives for wanting to reconnect, I think you should also spend some time examining just where your regrets are coming from. Do you regret how things ended between you? Or the fact that you engaged in the relationship in the first place? Do you regret how you treated each other? Is your desire to reconnect somehow related to your feelings of regret?

Excellent questions to ask myself. Thank you. I'm pretty sure my regrets come from the damage I did to myself and to him. They also come from what *could have been* if I hadn't been so out of sorts and stupid. I regret ending it, especially in the way I did. I regret fucking up, I regret hurting him, and I regret not finishing what I started, the way I approach just about everything in life. My desire to reconnect, in part, definitely has to do with regret, but I also have a strong desire to know him again.

Yeah... I'm sane enough to think that way. I keep trying to put time limits on myself- like: just wait a week before trying to contact him in another way; I'm just so ridiculously manic right now. I'm trying not to be nuts; I swear.

I'm doing this with a particularly aggravating penpal. She is terrible about writing me back, and when she does she espouses her desire to keep writing but then goes months without contacting me about anything. I'll fb message her and I get a "seen" time stamp, but she never writes back, not even "hi." So I mark my calendar with the days I've emailed her and then project 6 to 8 weeks into the future before I email her again to check in.

Yes, it's extremely annoying, but it also means that I only get really obsessive/mad about her lack of communication every month and a half or so. (It's been one month yesterday since the last time I emailed her which was 8 weeks after the last time I heard from her - and that was only because it was my birthday. Before that it had been months. No, I'm not obsessing about this at all :p)

Oh man... that's a bitch!

---

I echo CM's sentiments.

I have a sort of diametric sentiment about the "no regrets" thing.

On one hand, I fully support trying to make a connection with Dale. I think that as long as you are doing it in a respectful way, there is nothing wrong with trying to make a connection with another human being.

On the other hand, if you have reached out to him in a way in which you are sure he received your message, you have to be okay with the fact that you tried and he may not want to respond. Or maybe he just isn't in a place right now where he wants to respond. Maybe a year from now he'll look at an email or a letter that you sent him and decide that he actually does want to respond and you'll get a letter from him. Maybe.

I'm pretty sure he isn't even aware I'm looking for him as of this moment. The email address I used is the one he used when we met in '02 and it doesn't look like he's at all active on google+, so I don't think he's seen anything I've sent him. I'm pretty sure he'd let me know either way- we used to have a thing when we didn't want to talk about something: "please fuck off!" I can't see him failing to espouse it in this situation if he didn't want anything to do with me.

I think it all comes down to a self-examination of your motives, as others have said. It also comes down to empathy. Think about his feelings as well. (Now, if I were him, and got several messages but didn't want to start a dialogue, I would send at least a brief response stating that.)

All in all, I think you need to at least try to get a response from someone, if only to ease your mind. Even if it's the brother telling you to sod off, I think a response of any kind is better than silence.

Thanks Steel.

---

Yeah... I'm sane enough to think that way. I keep trying to put time limits on myself- like: just wait a week before trying to contact him in another way; I'm just so ridiculously manic right now. I'm trying not to be nuts; I swear.

That might also be procrastination driven by fear. Each of us is different, but for me the biggest regret would be not taking that step and not getting some kind of closure. Things won't always end well, but they may never end at all if we don't give it a shot. The phrase "the only real failure is the failure to try" may seem hokey, but I've lived life both ways and I'd never go back to the timid approach.

Find him, get in touch with him. Be determined to live and enjoy life no matter how it turns out. You can do it, Becca.

Alright. I'm going to try to get in touch with a couple more people, and if nothing happens, I'm flying to Oz. I have to. We only get one life, right? I'm not gonna fuck this one up any more!

I have to thank you all for your amazing support. This is the biggest emotional rollercoaster I've been on in a long time. It's really nice to know there are people out there who care.