happy in her new relationship // relapse for me

I've been doing so well. Even stopped visiting this sub for a while. The obsessing finally went away (not that I ever completely stopped thinking about her), and I felt on many days that I was moving on.

We haven't actually spoken since a huge fight almost two years that would turn out to be our last direct contact.

Since then I haven't ever reached out to me, but I did get a "thinking of you and sending you good energy" text last fall, followed by a tepid text on my birthday. Enough to pique my interest.

She also loves to send me TikToks on rare occassions. No message with it, just DM's me the random TikTok (they aren't about love or relationships or anything, more about cute animals and inside jokes we used to have). She seems to send me one about every six months on average.

So I saw through a friend that she was dating someone. I'd been really good about not looking at her socials but the gut punch of learning about a new person was triggering enough that I did some digging (which is basically self-harm, I know).

They seem really happy and it looks like they've been together for a while now, at lesat a year and a half at this point.

I'd taken a kind of selfish comfort in knowing that all of her relationships tended to burn out in less than a year. So it wasn't that I failed at "solving" her. This one seems different.

And it's really making me sad because it goes against the beliefs her patterns have given me, that she can't make it work and will undermine it, and that there was nothing I could have done differently. But it seems like this guy is able to do something that hasn't caused her to blow it all up. And I'm so envious of him for that.

This makes me feel the crazies all over again, wondering if I could have somehow been that guy instead of the guy who was abused and painfully discarded.

Now I can't help but blame myself and beat myself up for not doing it right.

It's a pretty bad emotional relapse for sure.