My feelings are my own. I generate my feelings by the thoughts I think. It’s my job to master my mind to spend more time thinking quality thoughts, the ones that generate the sort of feelings I wish to feel.

Anyone who’s embarked on a self-help journey has taken in the above in some form, whether it’s described as being responsible for your feelings, becoming an emotional adult or some variation of “no one can make you feel bad without your permission.”

But there’s a difference between knowing this and living it. And for me, that difference was a lengthy journey, some of which you’ve read about if you’re a reader of this blog. To summarize:

About five and a half years ago, I fell too hard, too fast, amidst traumatic circumstances, for someone who was in no place to relationship. And I wasn’t in the best place either. Our connection felt a certain kind of way that I hadn’t experienced before, and haven’t yet again. It was a relationship that made an imprint.

It took me a long time to get over it and move on. And then, even when I had, it came back from time to time.

Even when I entered another positive long-term committed relationship, I didn’t feel that way. Until I decided: he hadn’t made me feel that way; I felt that way. And even if I didn’t want to feel the exact same way, because different relationship, I could still choose to feel closeness, intimacy, support, warmth, love, etc.

And I did. I loved my man. Somewhere, sometime several months back, I released the emotional charge of that previous relationship’s imprint and let it float away into the ether. In so doing, I gave myself a fuller, deeper permission to commit to the now.

I have no explanation for why this was so difficult for me or why it took so long. But one day, it just shifted. And the pain / grief / hope / loss / wishing / yearning, however faded it had all become, was just another something that happened that I carry with me in my memory and makes me part of whom I am today.

I feel more integrated, more grace, more resolved… maybe it’s the constant self-work binge I’ve been on since last autumn.

I eagerly brought this new fullness, this new readiness to meet my current long-distance love in a place of commitment and openness to future planning. I made energetic offerings to him, hoping he would embrace me in the energetic nuances of my evolution. And it lasted a comically short time before he blew it up.

There’s much more to the story, but I will leave it here for now. I am at peace with this completion.