Love ♥

Today is my anniversary.  I have been with my boyfriend for a year (with the exception of a short split for several weeks in July), and I love him dearly.  We definitely have had our share of issues, but I believe that it's worth it, and we can work through anything.  His birthday is later this week, so we don't have anything planned for tonight, rather we both took a few days off for a long weekend.  Hopefully we can spend some quality time together, and work on rebuilding some of the things that we have struggled with lately.

I've learned a lot from this relationship.  Our relationship is a first for both of us, and its been a complicated year.  It has taken a lot of trial and error to figure out how to navigate things. We learned a lot of things the hard way, and still have a lot to learn.  We broke up for a few weeks in July for countless reasons.  Neither of us were happy, but we couldn't pinpoint what it was that was making us feel this way.  It took splitting up to realize that we wanted to be together, and that we let all of the other things in our lives negatively impact us.  We were able to spend some time where we could each work on ourselves as individuals, so that we could then come back and work out the kinks in our relationship.  It's not easy, but in the end it's what we both want. 

I didn't realize it at the time, but before Mike and I broke up, I had lost a piece of myself.  It wasn't necessarily due to my relationship, but because I let my anxiety rule my life.  We were both having issues, and I became so stressed that I stopped actually trying to make any progress.  I started to pretend to be something I wasn't.  I think the reasoning behind this was twofold. First, I wanted to salvage my relationship.  Secondly, I didn't want to acknowledge the level my anxiety had reached.  I wasn't able to socialize, to spend time in anyplace that was too noisy or crowded, and I found myself constantly overwhelmed by my surroundings.  It wasn't healthy.  But this wasn't caused by my relationship.  Looking back, I think that some of the issues in my relationship were symptoms of my anxiety. 

The time that Mike and I spent apart was necessary.  It gave us the time we needed to recognize what did and didn't really matter, and what we really wanted.  Ultimately, we decided to give our relationship another try.  The hardest obstacle is not falling into old habits, but to use the things that we learned while we were apart to make our relationship stronger. 

I planned on writing this post earlier, before Mike and I got back together.  I spent a month focusing on me, and putting myself back together.  How I feel about him never changed, but how I feel about myself did.  When we got back together I stood up for myself.  I told him that as much as I love him, I need to put myself first.  I will not let myself go down that same path again, and if I have to, I will walk away.  I let myself get absorbed by the negative, and this time, I have to put myself first.