I've spent a lot of time lately reading through my old journal entries, and I've noticed something rather strange and sad.

Outside of a relationship, I seem to have little to write about.

By "little", I mean, fewer entries, less drama, less quality writing.

Granted, once I started working again, time and energy dropped off, and my focus shifted from a failed relationship to a new life full of possibilities. So the need to write about angst from an emotional past dwindled away, along with the desire to even think about it.

And though some things have happened over the past few months which would make for some intense entries, I didn't feel the need to share them publicly. The person involved didn't deserve to know what was going on in my head, so it seemed wiser to keep my thoughts tucked safely away. Putting them in a journal would have meant potentially exposing them - and myself - to him, and I'd simply had quite enough of that.

I got tired of being judged for having emotions (and having those emotions be the only thing that defined me as far as he was concerned). Tired of having everything I said or wrote being filtered through one person's narrow vision of who I am and what I'm all about. Tired of bearing all the blame (and ensuing guilt) every single time he couldn't deal with me because of his own issues.

Just overwhelmingly tired of this person's erratic, unpredictable, immature behavior toward me.

Not that I haven't demonstrated similar behavior myself. Oh, I have indeed. But at least I'm evolved enough to admit to my imperfections (and to apologize for them), while still acknowledging that I have not yet made it to the highest plane of development I'm capable of as a woman.

Which is why it still manages to irritate me to be judged negatively by someone who is himself under-developed in some important aspects of dealing with other people.

"They" say that the things which we find most frustrating about others are the keys to the things we dislike in ourselves. That's what makes this all so laughably ironic: we're both hating in each other the exact same thing. The evidence of this similarity is just manifested in different ways.

My method of reacting emotionally is to pop off with a smart remark, expunge my thoughts through lengthy emails, and then sit back and wait for the other person's feedback on what I've said. (Actually, sometimes I even do that when emotion is not involved. Therein lies my point about having everything I do run through the "emotional" filter. It isn't always about that, but he seems to think it is.)

His method of reacting emotionally is to clam up and flee the scene. He believes if you ignore the problem, it goes away. (And gee, I guess he's right, really. I'm pretty far gone at the moment. He doesn't have to face me, or what's happened between us. He just chooses to pretend it never happened at all and voila! It never did.)

For each of us, our particular reaction is still based on some type of emotion. But to hear him tell it, I'm the overly emotional one. (Is that because men think words and emotions are the same thing? Woman use more words, ergo they're more emotional?) If he were able to see his reaction as being just as emotional as mine, then that might indicate we're far more alike than he'd want to admit.

So I decided to take a page from his book, and just turn my back on the entire matter. I've simply talked enough for one relationship, whether that of friendship or love. You can't argue someone into dealing with you, and I'm not even close to desperate enough to have him in my life that I'm willing to even bother trying to make him see my point of view.

And all of that is what made me decide not to write about any of this in my journal until now.

I figure enough time has passed that the likelihood of him reading this is pretty slim (since he's avoiding the issue, he's not likely to visit my journal and be forced to think of it again).

And I'm beyond the point of even caring anymore if he does read it.

It's taken two full years for me to realize that this man is not and never was the man I imagined him to be. I was blinded by some twisted belief of my own that I wasn't good enough for him, when all along, he's been the one who wasn't good enough for me. He's proven this time and time again, I just refused to see things clearly.

But my eyes are wide open now, and my vision is perfect.

Such clarity is good for the soul - and the heart.