Dear Nicka,

Each person do have their own personal baggage. So the question is: how have you learned how to live with yours?

Though you’ve detailed the paths some of your relationship had taken, you don’t have anything on the topic of self care, other than you don’t have any support near you? Do they live far from you? Are you active in any social forums? Were you a part of any group meet ups before that you can contact via Zoom? What activities have you taken up other than attending classes?

Which lead to the question: what is the relationship you have with yourself? Is it similar to the kind of relationship you had with your exes? Is it the kind that you called yourself names and shame yourself? Is it the kind that you find boring if it’s just you alone with yourself? Do you allow yourself to feel your emotions or do you feel them through the reactions of others?

You write of the actions of your ex in the context that he did not provide much emotional support and it’s fine to want that from a partner, but you can’t tell someone that you know what they are feeling because you don’t. He might have ‘close’ family nearby that could potentially support him, but you don’t know their family’s history as intimately as he does. So it was a judgement on your part to tell him that it felt that the separation easier for him than you because he had ‘support’. His anger of that is pretty understandable. You decided you knew what his possible emotional state was or the support he had when you’re not even him. But did he actually told you that he wasn’t responsible for his emotions or was that you deciding how to interpret it? Because a lot of his actions does look like from your narrative, but you’ll also have to see it as a judgement call on your part too.

Now, it’s understandable that you’re combing through your memories to try to make sense of your past, but your vocabulary has a feeling of blame in it. You don’t want to be a fool? What does that mean? You were ashamed of being drunk even though that’s just a chemical reaction in your body which means you weren’t clear headed at that moment? You have a lot of baggage, yes, but where’s the compassion for being human? You’re caring, but for whom?

You’ve excused a lot of your ex behavior until the straw broke the camel back so what’s helped you opened your eyes to the reality of your relationship? To the relationships that you want, but don’t do much to cultivate? There are many ways to create a support system, but you’ve only focused on romantic relationships so far. What about friendship? Why did so much of your effort go into romantic relationships and not friendships? You want a support system, but it doesn’t seem you’ve tried to established any friendships to even get it started.

You have a lot of questions to sort through so please think of getting some of kind counseling for that if you can. You don’t have to grapple with these issues alone, but you’ll have to be the one to cultivate the steps to helping yourself.

Good luck.