I’m not going to lie, guys. I’m really struggling. I think it was a gradual thing, my decision to end things with my on/off person. But since I came to that decision this feeling has been really overwhelming.

I’ve been crying at night. I’ve been crying on my dog walks. Sometimes I’ll cry when I take a break at work or when I’m driving and tears will just leak from my eyes.

I think I’ve been going through different stages of feelings lately. And the first stage, other than sadness and tears, has been to scroll through our messages. I didn’t end up reading any of our messages to each other because I’ve known him for two years and we mostly messaged each other every day. That’s too much to read through. But what I did was along the same lines. I looked at all of the images we’d sent to each other. Of my dog. Of his. My nudes. Food pictures. Weird things I’d come across. The weird gif reactions he’d send in response to things I’d said or stories I told.

But I went back right to the beginning and swiped through them from the first to the last. And I cried. But I also had a whole series of thoughts. Mostly along the lines of ‘what if I’d done things differently? What if I’d said things in a different way? What if I’d acted differently? What if I’d set different boundaries? What if I pushed harder?’ And god, how I cried.

My thoughts would always start out like, like at this picture he sent me, what if I’d reacted differently to it, what if I’d been clearer, what if I’d said the right thing? Maybe he’d have been as open as he was in the moment he sent this thing? And I’d swipe to the next picture and my thought pattern would follow in a similar vein.

Throughout two years of conversation and 241 pictures I just kept asking myself these same type of questions. If I could have been funnier, or easier, or less anxious maybe then things would have been different.

What if I were better?

And it’s exhausting and pointless to keep hurting myself thinking like this. There isn’t anything I could have said differently or done differently. I couldn’t be any more me or any less me. It almost isn’t even about him. It’s about me and getting stuck in this cycle with him. I need to break free from it, I just don’t know how.