Just Because

I often wonder if anyone else feels like I do.  If they sense how it feels to be of two minds.  To love, but to have changed.  To not love at all costs.  At great cost.  At sacrifice.  But learning that there is a line.  To love as you love yourself must mean that you can't quit loving nor taking care of yourself.....maybe?  But still to serve.  I thought that doing the one anothers....serve, love, think more highly of etc, would make something work.  It seems like the right formula.  Like the right approach.  Yet, here I am.  Knowing in the deepest way that "I'm not her."  I am not the woman of the year.  I do not make the one that I committed my life to happy.  Nor content.  Nor do I bring out the best in him.  Nor he in me.  There are things that I hate about myself now.  Things that I am feverishly working to rectify after too many years of bad habits.
This is not his fault.  I made my own choices.  I am, and have been, a big girl.  It's just this overwhelming sense that I didn't want the big battle.  The constant rut of bickering.  The ritual instead of relationship.  Because it drains me.  It eats away at my soul.  At my sense of having any worth. 
I had a pretty bad childhood.  Ok, really bad.  But, though now I am an adult and can decide, what is worse about this is that I allowed it to a degree.  I am my own voice.  I am the one who should stand for the me that God made.  But instead, I cowered.  I capitulated.  I caved.  At every turn.  I gave back what I got. 
Those times that I said "go"....sadly, I really meant it.  Because deep inside I knew that I was slowly losing something important.  Though at the time I didn't understand. 
But how do you tell someone that you can still love them but not want to continue?  How do you do it without meanness?  Is it even possible?
Not in the world that I've seen.  So, I hesitate.  In limbo.  Praying.  Regretful that it went so far that those many years can't be taken back.  Not so afraid anymore.  Just deeply saddened.  And yet, strangely, for the first time in many years, I can say that I have been truly happy in moments these past months.  I mean, deeply joyous.  Content.  Able to breathe in and breathe out.  How is it that it can always be that the best comes with the worst?  I don't know.  Maybe it just because.........
because Jesus loves me.  Just because.