Dear Mina:

When you wrote that your mother “has been quite vocal” about not accepting your “introvert personality”- what did she actually say to you (will you state her words best you can?), in what tone and how often?

anita

Dear Mina:

I am dismayed by your mother’s strong expressions of disapproval of you. My goodness!

She told you that you are weird. She told you that if she wasn’t your mother she wouldn’t be friends with you.

When she told you that you are “the type of person that people dislike the most”- she told you (not in these words): I don’t like you!

I can understand better the title of this very thread, why you felt so badly rejecting another person- because you were and have been rejected by your own mother and you know how much it hurt.

Your thoughts and feelings?

anita

(Thanks Anita for your comment on my post – it made my day hearing that from you 🙂 hope you have been well “on your mountain wise lady”! 😉 )

Hi Mina,

Thanks for taking the time to reply me and letting me know that my reply meant something to you! I felt very touched reading your reply too (I was teary reading your post) and I am so thankful to know someone in this world understands. Even though we are strangers but I feel somewhat connected to you through our shared experiences and I could truly feel your well wishes for me! I also want to send love to you from my side of the world and you are not alone in this either Mina!

I felt so indignant for you reading your mother’s comments that you are “weird” and there is something wrong with you just because you are not as social as she hoped that you are! There is definitely NOTHING wrong with you and I would definitely want to be your friend if I knew you in Korea or in your home country. And we are all built differently and we have different characteristics/personality too. It is a shame that your mother does not accept you for who you are 🙁

I really liked the part that you said “I can also share many things that you loved about him and a lot of things in the relationship that was very good and worth smiling over”. I think that is the beautiful part of relationships and it is something that would not be taken away from us no matter what the ending is. The special memories you share with him, the precious moments that only you both know and the fact that somehow at some point in time your life intersected and you had those moments together. I thought it is something precious as not everyone gets to experience these moments.

I feel the same way as you in that I am thankful for what I shared with my ex boyfriend even though I wished there were more of such moments and that we did not have to end.

I often ponder about the what-ifs too.. like you wonder if  “my ex boyfriend wasn’t so much of perfectionist and if I wasn’t so needy…” I wonder what if I had met my ex boyfriend at a different time.. but unfortunately the reality is that your boyfriend is a perfectionist and you had your needs that he could not fulfil (I still do not think you were being needy! You just had your needs that is all). And that is something we cannot change.

And thanks for your concern – I am in a better place now, much better than when we first broke up 🙂 I have now shifted my focus to working on myself and being a better person. I still have some little hope that in the future, that someday maybe if he was in a better place to be in a relationship.. then maybe we could have another try. But I am not banking on this hope and I just focus on what I can do at the moment. And what I can do at the moment is to be a better person and to take the lessons that I have learnt from being in a relationship and move forward in my life. If somehow we can end up at the same place again then it would be a bonus. But at this very moment, all I can control is living my own life and doing the things I want to do.

And I hope that you can do so too! Especially with you starting to honour your own needs and living life the way Mina wants too.

And I can see why you were so anxious when you were with him. There was so much uncertainty as you “truly did not know when we will be able to see each other again.” Anyone in your shoes would feel the same too as you are subjected to the uncertainty.

And it seems that the anxiety did not stem just from him. From what you share, I get the sense that the anxiety stemmed from your need to be accepted (and you said your ex boyfriend was the first important person in your life that accepted you) and thus you were looking to him for acceptance. So when he was not available to you, it triggered your fear of being rejected again.

Worse still, your biggest fear came true when he broke up with you and his rejection confirms the “unworthiness” that your mother has said of you.

But that is not so my dear Mina. His inability to be in a committed relationship at this point in time reflects nothing on your worthiness.  He is not rejecting you – he just cannot be in a relationship now.

You are sucha wonderful person and I wish I could give you a hug right now to tell you that you are worthy and you have soooo much goodness in you. I wish that you could see that and I wish that people around you can see that.

And like Anita has said, I hope that you will be living with an “acceptable Mina” and your worth would not be measured by GPA or who you marry or your financial status or how sociable you are. I hope you will be accepted for the most lovely human being that you are.

I thought the gift that your ex boyfriend gave you was the experience of what it is like to be accepted and loved for who you truly are and it pointed to you that there is this deep desire to be accepted. And I am sure he would not be the only person to accept you for who you are. There will be people in your life who will do so (not just romantically but people in general) and most importantly, it starts from you accepting yourself for who you are 🙂

I wish you peace and love Mina!

Dear Mina:

You are welcome.

What an interesting, profound sentence you wrote: “I realise how I became the person that knows myself the least”-  I would like it if you elaborated on it sometime in a future post.

I hope you share more about the “weird position” of your emotions as the day/s progress.

Clearly, your thoughts about your ex boyfriend mean comfort for you and comfort is what you need.

You wrote: “He always know what to say to me, the perfect thing to comfort me” – written in the present tense. It is your thoughts of him in the present that give you comfort. You shared on your other thread that you go to places that you used to go with him, sitting where you used to sit with him. You do so to feel that comfort that he represents for you.

anita

Dear Mina:

About the last topic, anytime you’d like, if you’d like to elaborate on that, please do.

Regarding finding comfort in thoughts and imaginings about him and places where you were together: there is nothing wrong with it, of course not. We need comfort. If there was a small item that he gave you, carrying it with you would have been a good idea, so that you can always hold it when you need to, while in class or anywhere else.

You wrote: “Do you agree with her (“He is not rejecting you – he just cannot be in a relationship now.”) or you think that my ex did rejected me because the reasons of the break up was his distress that was caused by me?”

Regarding “He is not rejecting you”- I just looked closer at the definition of “reject”: “to dismiss as inadequate, inappropriate, or not to one’s taste/ dismiss as failing to meet one’s standards”

Considering this definition I am correcting myself: he did not reject you, he ejected you from his life, that is, removed you from his life (broke up with you) so that you are not in his life.

Regarding “he just cannot be in a relationship now”- I agree.

Regarding you causing him distress as the reason he broke up with you, I disagree. His distress was ongoing way before he met you and had nothing to do with you.

anita