An Open Letter to the (ex) Love of my Life

Dear John,

The reason this is an open letter is because I have no intention of hiding my truth from you (or anyone), and I’ve realized my doing so has caused a lot of emotional and creative constipation.

It was so refreshing to talk to you yesterday for the first time in forever. It made me realize how I’ve been having a one-sided conversation with you for the past 5 years, filling in the blanks myself instead of actually hearing you, letting you in. My guardedness has come from a distrust of myself, not knowing if I’d be able to experience you without wanting or needing something. It hurts my heart to think that you might secretly see yourself as the eternal “bad guy,” while I secretly have a heart full of genuine love and forgiveness for you. And I’m not Mother Theresa over here. I no longer have the desire to be seen as the victim or the “good guy"—I played a part in trying to manipulate you into following my script (e.g. “If I suppress my feelings and act like the ‘cool girl’ long enough, John will probably propose in 2 years!”). I was unwilling to sacrifice the comfort of our relationship for the unknown frontier that would accompany speaking my needs aloud and unrelentingly showing up as my full self. I wasn’t listening to my intuition or to you trying to tell me something was not right. We are no different from each other, we simply dealt with our pain in different (equally maladaptive) ways.

I wrote this when I got off the phone with you:

It’s so refreshing to talk to John. So incredible to truly feel like I didn’t need anything from him. I got to be present with him. See him for who he was. Celebrate who he is. Celebrate our love together. We shared so much joy, so much happiness. It really felt like a roller coaster being in love with him. It was like seeing everything in color suddenly after having lived on a greyscale Kansan farm all my life. I wrote in a journal entry right after we started dating: “I finally feel the difference between pretending to be happy and actually being happy.” Our relationship unlocked so much truth for me—new dimensions of who I could be, of what it meant to be a human, deeper levels of joy, lighter levels of love. Losing John left a big gaping hole in my life that I feared would never be filled. How could it be? I worried I’d lost a huge part of myself. I beat myself up for not being happy anymore. Blamed myself in a lot of ways. Blamed him in even more ways. I was devastated.

That big gaping hole made room for me to fill up more with myself, become the parts of me I thought were him—his eternal optimism, his playful spontaneity. One of our first dates was spending a weekend in Vegas to pick up my iPod that I had left there the week before. The feeling I had with him was that everything would be okay always. I remember at the very beginning of our relationship, having felt unusually high levels of sustained joy, I got worried about setting his expectations too high and said, “I need to warn you, I’m not this happy all the time. Sometimes I get sad.” And he simply laughed and said, “Of course you do! When you’re sad, I’ll love you just as much as I do now.” I don’t know if that’s what he said exactly, but it’s what came across to me, and it was something he really delivered on: unconditional love in happiness and in sadness. It's the same unconditional love I get to give myself now and can extend to others in the same generous way it was extended to me.

I realize that I’ve been avoiding processing aspects of our relationship. It isn’t my anger, pain, and sadness that are difficult to acknowledge (those parts of me feel very free and seen), but my love channel has been backed up, in need of an emotional laxative. I wasn’t even aware I needed assistance with this until I recently had the experience of helping a friend through a situation similar to John’s. I had the privilege of hearing my friend speak his truth honestly, own up to his mistakes, express his heartbreak and love, his devotion to growing into more of his true self. Hearing this unlocked something for me. It felt like a massage I didn’t know I needed. For the first time, I was able to let in the love that John had for me, feel in my bones how much he had always been trying his best, receive the sincere words of apology and repentance he showered (Schauer-ed :)) me with in the days, weeks, months following our separation. I hadn’t felt safe letting them touch me until now. I experienced this as pure love, as if it had been sifted through a strainer that collected every part of the story that wasn’t true. What a gift. As I write this I feel so much freedom.

In fact, I’m currently going back into my memory box (pays to be living in my childhood bedroom) and reading the letters, the cards, the “forgive me” haikus I received from you (back to first person heyy!). Letting each word touch and delight my soul. They’re hilarious, really. They made me so mad at the time, but I knew I kept these for a reason.

I had barricaded myself against the love present here. I did it for my own self-preservation. I couldn’t trust myself to love anyone. I couldn’t trust myself to let love in, to believe people when they expressed affection for me. I can feel the charge removed as I sit here reading these letters, needing nothing from them, wanting nothing from them. Feeling the gift of them. These weekly letters from you were essentially private journal entries, complete with realizations like “I know I need to give her radio silence, like she’s asked for,” and then promptly stuffed in an envelope, post-marked and addressed to me. I’m laughing and crying so much, letting it all in, letting it all touch me. One of the letters ends: “In the meantime, please don’t forget the love. You’re my favorite human on the planet, and life without you seems like a pretty boring place. Life is what you make of it, and I created a real fuck of a challenge for myself. But boy to I LOVE LIFE! I LOVE YOU! It’s a crazy ride we’re on with ups and downs, but the lowest lows bring the highest highs! This will bring the best out of me and an even better you out of YOU! AGGH I’VE NEVER WRITTEN THIS MUCH EVER HAHA I’M GOING CRAZY. LOVE YOU KATIE I’M SORRY BUT YOU TOLD ME ABOUT MORNING PAGES!!!!” (I should really own stock in The Artist’s Way.)

In the same box I'm finding my own writings as well. I’ve done most of my processing through assisted self-inquiry (i.e. a 12-step program, life coaching, writing, two-sided talks with friends, one-sided talks with Brené Brown, Glennon Doyle, Julia Cameron…is this an Academy Award acceptance speech? *spoiler alert*) I’ve shared my healing journey with plenty of people, but I realized yesterday I’d never shared it with you.

On my first day of acting class after moving to NYC, we had the assignment of writing and performing an Oscar acceptance speech. Here’s what I wrote:

Thank you for this award. I’m doing my best to ignore the thoughts of self-doubt creeping into my head, but they’re here, so I’ll welcome them. I’m welcoming what’s here.

There are so many people I want to thank. I’ve been surrounded by unconditional love and support my whole life from my family and friends. But today, I specifically want to thank John Schauerman. To catch everyone up, John is my ex-boyfriend. The first man I ever loved. I felt like I had picked him out, chosen him. We dated for 4ish years until I found out he was cheating on me and I abruptly ended our relationship. It feels odd to spend such an important moment thinking about you, let alone thanking you in this speech, but the truth is that I have a heart full of gratitude for you, and I say that without sarcasm or disingenuousness.

The moment I realized you’d betrayed me I had to decide immediately what I deserve from the world. I never would have known the depth of my own soul if you hadn’t left me with the gaping holes you had once filled in a way I thought was perfect. That heart-wrenching, uncomfortable emptiness was a gift. And storytelling is a gift that allows me to access that wound—to open and close it and re-open and re-close it to help other people feel less alone in their own pain. Thank you. Thank you for giving me no choice but to trust myself and my intuition. Thank you for helping me see I’m not always so right about everything, because sometimes life surprises you and there’s no room to be right, there’s only room to be here. Thank you for helping me feel my own presence and solace in the midst of gut-wrenching change. Thank you for the experience of overwhelming love and loss that has helped my heart hold more than I ever could have imagined.

Thanking you now makes me worried I’m dwelling—I’m afraid I’ll sound like I’m not over it. But what is getting “over it” anyways? I’d much rather own it. The secret to life is taking whatever comes and saying “thank you.” John, I don’t regret loving you and I don’t regret losing you. I am grateful for you. Thank you for treating me like I was weaker than I am so I could start living in my full strength. I will never stop loving with my whole heart.

I wrote that three years ago, delivered it in front of a room full of (relative) strangers, and never mentioned it to you. Here’s another little thing I wrote (should we call it a poem?):

It feels so good to finally let my love flow freely, to release the resentment I thought I needed for protection. It might not have been appropriate to have had this conversation before yesterday. Perhaps there was a little bit of me that wanted something from you, needed an apology, desired validation. I don’t regret the time I kept myself “safe,” setting up a hard, firm boundary. You said, “It was right of you to ignore me”—that was something I didn’t know I wanted to hear! I appreciate the acknowledgment that I took damn good care of myself through that time. Today I feel like I’ve been given a ginormous gift. The ability to look back on a whole chunk of my life with love-eyes, forgiveness-heart, true openness and clarity. I feel the freedom of meeting my own needs, so I don’t need to look to anyone else to do it for me. Even now I’m scanning my body, searching my heart, wondering if I’m missing something, denying a bit of hurt that is left. I can trust that it will show itself to me if it’s there. What a joy. I couldn’t wait to sit down and write this out.

I’m sharing this because I feel such a sense of relief and openness. I’ve been having both sides of the two-sided conversation between us, and it feels wrong to keep this a secret from you. It feels silly to keep it a secret from anyone (hence the open letter). I’m grateful for the courage of my friends to speak their truth aloud—it gives me the courage to face myself honestly and admit who I am to the world. It’s helpful to own the part of myself that was holding onto my victimhood to retain a sense of power, a sense of “I was right,” “I won the relationship.” I stand here no different from you, no different from anyone else. I truly believe we are all constantly doing our best, and that can look different depending on our circumstances. Having compassion for yourself is the key to having compassion for others, and vice versa. Thank you. Thank you thank you.

Processing grief, sadness, loss is never too late. Even if you believe you’ll never “get” what you want by doing it, you have no idea how much you will unlock in someone else by being willing to explore your own truth.

I’m grateful to myself for sticking with me, taking courageous steps, and practicing what I preach to make a scary phone call. I love you, John. I am grateful for the four(ish) happy years we spent together and I’m grateful for the John-sized hole you left in my heart that I’ve gotten to fill with Katie. Love you so big.

<3

Katie