When Does Choosing Myself Also Mean Choosing Someone Else I Love?

Choose yourself. Be true to yourself. Choose you first. Put yourself first. Love yourself so you can love others. Etc. etc.

Hell, I just wrote an article all about this thought that choosing myself first and prioritizing my own happiness is the only way to truly love myself enough to love someone else, especially if not doing so means I am going to keep sacrificing myself for other people’s happiness and for lives they have created that have no place for me.

At what point, however, do I get to choose myself, and that means I get to be with someone I love, too?

Or is this an either/or situation?

Maybe the answer lies in the belief that I may have never been in a relationship that didn’t require me to compromise or sacrifice some intrinsic part of who I am to be with them.

And I kept abandoning myself over and over to keep the relationships together.

Maybe what I am asking is … is it really possible to be with someone who fully loves all of me without requiring me to earn, work, and sacrifice myself for their happiness while I forfeit my own?

Because this isn’t the first time I have had to make this choice, wondering if this time I am going to get it right.

And frankly, I am tired of myself and doing the same shit. I may be making myself insane trying to do the same thing over and over again.

Is it possible to have a love and life where two people truly want the best for each other, no matter what that is, and try to respect and nurture each other without holding the other one down in some important way?

That allows each person to truly be who they authentically are in love and acceptance?

Or am I delusional to even want that in the first place, to think that this can exist somehow, or to keep trying to be and find something like this?

Is this kind of love possible?

I thought I had that at one point. I truly believed I had met someone who really understood me and believed we really wanted the best for each other, separately and together.

That we were fighting the world together, instead of fighting each other for the world.

I was wrong, though. Things were not what I thought or believed, and my hope and belief in love, authenticity, and the beauty of human connection seem so vast and empty now.

How could I have been so completely wrong?

Maybe that is what grief does. It wants us to ask questions, to give space for answers, or to what we have avoided or ignored, so we can let it move through us.

But mine is definitely not moving through me. Not all the way, only in waves.

My stomach hurts. My head hurts again today, and there is a lump in my throat that won’t dissipate.

I know this is an ocean of grief.

It’s the energy of a hundred thousand tears that can’t seem to make their way out of my body, and lies stagnant in spaces where it has taken residence for a while.

Grief from a love lost, from memories my body has stored and doesn’t want to let go of, holding on for fear of what comes next if I don’t grip tightly enough to the monumental feelings, and important moments, and their memory.

Pain swirling inside from words spoken and hurtful comments assaulting me in my sleep, and dreaming and replaying in my mind the moments I would like to redo.

And just like the grief, I don’t know what to do with these words, or what conclusion to come to other than try to make sense of them by stringing them together here on this page, but that doesn’t mean they make any more sense at all.

And maybe that’s the point. That there is none. For how can there be a point to an ending and a heartbreak that feels like your whole body is broken?

Maybe the words are a bunch of nonsense wrapped in tears and memories. And maybe there isn’t a way to choose myself and choose someone I love.

Maybe the question isn’t whether I get to be with the person I love if I love myself too.

Because I had the love and the person.

And I had to choose myself, and I didn’t get to keep all of those things together.

And I can’t imagine another way that feels better. Not yet, anyway.

Maybe the grief is the gift I am left with for needing to make the same stupid choice in the first place, a choice I didn’t want to have to make at all.

And so now the question is, what will I do with that grief?

For it’s all I have left of the love I didn’t want to lose from choosing myself again.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.