The Reflection

It is said that in love, we see a reflection of ourselves.  Maybe that is why love is such a scary thing to enter into.  If we are honest in love, then we have to be honest with ourselves.  I go back and forth between wanting to be alone forever and wanting to find that special someone who completes me.  I do not think that I have come far enough in my self discovery to know who I want to see staring back at me in the reflection.  There have been many men in my life.  Each one has been a very accurate reflection of my current sense of self.  None have been a reflection of the person I ultimately want to be.
There was Jimmy who reflected my desire to have a home and a sense belonging.  I started dating him before I had discovered why I never felt grounded. Trying to steal his sense of belonging and make it my own only made me resent him.  His home would never be mine and his family would never be mine.  They took me in and treated me like one of their own, but I still did not feel as though it was my place.  He did not know who he was without his family and outside of his home, and I did not know who I was without mine.  It was too soon for me to start developing a new sense of family, because I had not yet processed and let go of my previous one.
 After Jimmy, there were various men that reflected every aspect of myself that I had woven into my identity.  One after the other, showed me sides of myself that I wanted to let go of.  Sides that belonged to who my family told me I was but not who I wanted to be.  There was the world traveler who lacked any stability, there was the doctor who thought his career would fill the other empty cracks in his life, there was the party animal who thought the solution to problems was to forget them, there was the adrenaline junky who self medicated by scaring the shit out of himself and there were many mountain men who found their sense of self by climbing the tallest mountain, kayaking the class 5 creek and skiing the wind blown couloir.  None of them reflected the sides of myself that I wanted to grow.
When I made this painting, I was dating a boy who had experienced a childhood very similar to my own.  It was while I was neck deep in the pain my family  had caused me and accepting that I was allowed to feel it.  With him, I felt comfortable being upset and not smiling.  I thought that because he had been through similar traumas, he could relate to what I was feeling and help me to express it.  I did feel my pain.  I did wallow in self pity.  I did self medicate.  I did allow myself to use my pain as an excuse to be angry at the world and close myself off.  There came a point when I wanted to move on and become someone different.  He never did.  This was a huge turning point for me; realizing that I could feel the pain and wallow in it but then let it go and no longer allow it to control who I am.  Letting go of him and the reflection of myself that he represented, really helped me to move on to the next stage of my recovery.  It also taught me how enlightening relationships are, whether they are positive or not, they can help you to discover the person you are at the current moment and tell you if that is the person you really want to be.