I wrote an article for The Mary Sue about an episode of Buffy. It lives here. Warnings for me talking frankly about the Ex of Doom.
I don’t want to repost it, honestly because I want to give my original post web traffic and justify the shiny $20 they paid me for writing it, but I’ll talk about it a little here.
Writing this was easy; having it out in the world was hard. I had a panic attack the day it went up, actually. The Ex would find it, he would find me. He would try to talk to me. It’s horrible enough that LinkedIn keeps trying to tell me that I should friend him; the idea that he might have any inclination to turn my way fills me with a cold, sweating dread. I don’t want it in the same way I don’t want to be stung to death by bees.
I’m lucky to currently have a kind, warm boy who understands all of this, and understands me. But it’s still hard, to be so afraid. It used to be that I thought about the Ex every day, that my thoughts would be a constant undercurrent of anger and heartbreak. These days, I can go days without thinking about him, but he creeps in in unexpected ways. I get a song he wrote stuck in my head. I remember a thing he does. My good, sweet boy innocuously asks why I have a random string of numbers in my e-mail address (it’s my birth year and the Ex’s birth year, a thing he insisted on). It’s weird how I can delete all the pictures of him from my collection, and move on, mostly, and he can still linger in my life. I wish this wasn’t how it was, but I think I’m dealing with it pretty well, considering.
Overall, I’m not the girl who was with him, anymore. That’s what’s worth remembering.