Everyone Has Their Crazy — This Is Mine

She stood above me with an expression of complete disbelief. I was sitting Indian style on a patch of grass in her apartment complex’s parking lot. I had a piece of glass from a broken beer bottle gripped so tightly in my hand that blood trickled out of my palm’s crease and down my arm. I was totally unaware of the force that I was using to hold that piece of glass. Had I known, maybe I would have let go… surely, I would have let go.

Everything in my world was still. I did not hear the chatter of the neighbors walking by. I ignored the confusion in her eyes. My actions numbed me to all of my surroundings. All that had my attention were the thoughts of disappointment circling in my head.

How am I here right now? Am I really acting out again? I thought I had moved past these moments. I thought I had rid myself of the pure panic that I can feel when someone wants to walk out of my life.

I thought wrong.

You see, life has a tendency to test us in the areas where we’re the weakest, and I am the weakest when a partner or a friend has decided they don’t want me in their life. I should be confident and I should tell myself “If they want to leave then they’re not worth my time nor energy.” I do not do this, however. Rather, I act like a child whose mother has told them they can’t have an extra piece of candy. I throw a fit. I want them to change their mind. I WANT CONTROL BACK!

The amount of times I have desperately begged and pleaded is a number I have purposefully forgotten. I am embarrassed by the way I portray myself once someone simply makes a decision to remove themselves from my everyday life. No one, and I repeat no one, should show up at their ex’s doorstep with hopes to change their mind. No one should yell nor scream in the middle of a parking lot just because they find out their ex is seeing someone else. And no one should send countless texts nor make several phone calls to try and persuade someone to feel differently. It’s pathetic, yet I am a repeat offender of these actions.

I wish I could tell you why. I mean, maybe I just feel too deeply. Maybe every emotion I experience washes over me like a rogue wave in the middle of the ocean. Desperation, panic, fear and anger come out of nowhere. Once they appear, they’re powerful and inescapable.

Those feelings that wreak of negativity have almost always taken me down with them. They have told lies about my character, and they have changed the minds of people whom once adored me.

Those emotions – they accompany abandonment – and they are my crazy.