Sealing the Revolving Door: When It's Time to Move On

I hate crying. Honestly, the only action in the world that is worse than crying to me is finishing the toilet paper and not replacing it. Crying really irks me for two reasons: (1) because it makes me extremely vulnerable, and (2) because I equate it with failure. I've only really cried when something didn't turn out in my favor; this is all too synonymous with failure. Like the time when no matter how I tried to teach this kid how to make a logical guess about a passage based on information that was given. He was just not getting it, and I don't know if it was the fact that I was hungry and cranky or if the kid really frustrated me, but I asked for relief and had a good cry in the bathroom. To me, I failed to educate him on something that only took common sense to figure out. Or the time I didn't win the Pine Manor Award in college. I felt like crying because I thought it meant that I failed yet again. Or the time when I lost my weekly metrocard, brand new.I was so stressed and mad at myself for failing to pay attention that I refused to speak to me for the rest of my ride home. 

Or the time we didn't work out.

We hate failing by nature. We have been taught to win, to succeed. Get a house. Nice car, good children. Great job and good husband. So when we don't have any of that, that feeling of failure is invited in to take a seat. If you are anything like yours truly, you cry to let it out.

I felt like a big failure when it fell apart. My eyes burned too much from anger and the heat of rejection to fathom the idea of crying. But I wanted to, badly. I wanted to bawl until my eyes grew puffy, nose shiny and tender. I wanted to cry like someone was trying to tug my heart loose. In that moment, I only welcomed my tears. I wanted us to be different. 

Wanting to believe in something different keeps the door in any former relationship a revolving one. We want to believe that we are the "exceptions" to the rules. How many times have we ever seen a hunnygirl run back to her former boo in spite of what he's put her through? She wants to believe in happy endings; she wants the same guy with a little something new. She opens herself back up, gives him another opportunity. She is secretly excited when things just seem different. She brags, tells her girls. She floats for a while at work unbeknownst to her coworkers and thinks about him. So it comes as an almost-complete-surprise when she doesn't hear from him. She remembered when he did it before, conveniently disregarded that it used to happen all the time. Long story short, her heart is broken yet again and if she is lucky, she will not bring it all on the next guy. She won 't do such thing; she pours cement in the space where her door revolves. She becomes a little brighter to prevent a next time. She takes her tears and turns it into sweat, grind, purpose. Next time? Not with him, she says.

What do revolving door relationships do for us? Absolutely nothing. Falling in the "this time" trap is our way of holding the door wipe open for him, and who wins then? 

Sometimes our spirits tell us to leave it alone, yet we rebel. We continue to take matters into our own hands regardless of the fact that our own hands did nothing for us the first time around. We let that door swing, let him bounce out of and back into our lives.

It's about time to let it close on him and his potential. We are too valuable to continue to allow ourselves to be someone's doormat. He wasn't around anymore, sure, but I had my security and my health. I had my family and my girls. I had memories too. I also left with the key to my 

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