Some people believe that they have life completely figured out. As much as I would like to, I can not consider myself one of them. I am not perfect. I do not have all of the answers. I do not always know the right things to say. There are some days where I don’t even feel like I’m that great of a person. I’d hate to blame anyone other than myself, but there are actual people out there that I could attribute some of my character issues to.

There are a lot of us who suffer from having experienced personal relationships that were poison for our futures. At the time when we were in them, things were probably fine all the way up until the point that they weren’t. And at the moment things became ‘not fine’ it was already too late. As human beings we have a natural tendency to gravitate towards people that are similar to ourselves. This is why you often see very successful people congregating with each other. This is also the same reason why broken people find their way into eachother’s lives 9 times out of 10.

I constantly wrestle with the consequences and effects of the personal relationships that I’ve had in my life. The decisions that I’ve made and the people that I let get near me directly impact the person that I am today. I used to be fairly popular among my peers when I was in school, but that was only because I felt like I needed to be. It used to hurt my feelings if people didn’t like me so I would camouflage myself in a false persona so that I could feel accepted. Being likable and becoming popular was easy, but being myself became harder and harder to achieve. Being myself was especially hard whenever it came to my love life. On the surface, I was the perfect gentleman and the textbook boyfriend, but on the inside I was a monster. I may have been faithful in only 2 of the many romantic relationships that I experienced. I could blame it on them, or on the circumstances, or even on the fact that it runs in my family and that’s just what men do. Who I blame would not change the fact that I hurt a lot of people and they didn’t even deserve it.

I should have just been honest.

I should have been honest with the ones that believed who I was and I should have been honest with myself. I had horrible relationship experiences mostly because of the fact that the relationship I had with myself was poisoned.

My poisonous relationship was with: Me.

I did myself a disservice by failing to admit what I really wanted out of life and who I really wanted to be. My life would be completely different if I had understood that people may not always like me and that it would be fine as long as I truly liked myself. I wasted so much time trying to please other people that I forgot about nurturing the relationship with myself, which caused me to ultimately ruin my other relationships because they didn’t really know me.