"I don't know if you do this consciously or not but… Bringing other people down apparently lifts you up."

Wrong. You are wrong, wrong, wrong. You are mixing roles up here and vilifying me to howl down the voice of your conscience. Get out of my way. Don't come near me or I will explode.

"I am not trying to hurt you. I just want to help you figure yourself out because I care."

I am not liste.. Wait, what? You hit me at that party. You followed me through the crowd and hit me as if no one was watching. And I did nothing wrong. You deserved me running away from you. You are sick.

What's more, I did you a service just by going out with you because, well, who else would have been able to put up with such a psycho?

* * *

Spent abroad, the freshman year of college, — months of missed calls and ignored messages, litres of tears, and volumes of cliché excuses for not getting close to another person, such as "I haven't recovered from my previous relationship yet", "my ex gave me trust issues", or "men always mess you up, sooo no thanks", — blurred and intermingled memories. For what is certain, we fought a lot. Especially towards the end.

He was never content. To him, there was always something to criticize or reproach me for. He also had this irritating habit of calling me stupid each time our opinions divided and embodied the combination of hypersensitivity and aggressiveness. Of course, I retorted back, stuck to normal people at social gatherings and played dumb when asked what was wrong.

Not that we never had peaceful moments, — we did. But those were like rare glimpses of sunlight on gloomy storm days.

Now that a year had passed since our breakup, it didn't matter anymore. It was over.

We all have had that one relationship we don't want to look back on, — a relationship that devastated us, leaving behind unwillingness to ignite a new one. We might not dwell on it anymore, we might have thrown away everything they had offered us and erased their number from our contacts, — maybe, even blocked them on social media, — and yet, the bitter aftertaste remains on our lips each time we pronounce their name.

Upon my return home, I suffocated on the idea that my ex-boyfriend and I walked the same streets. Although running into this person would have doubtlessly been the epitome of disaster, I had to know what had become of him.

Where am I going with this? — Long story short, we met up, bearing neither grudges nor expectations. He was looking me in the face, whereas I was looking in the distance, slowly realizing that, for over a year, I had been mistaken on his account. He wasn't inherently evil; hypersensitive, maybe, but not evil.

Giving my ex-boyfriend the boy toy treatment: showering him with insulting jokes while pretending to sulk when he did the same, expecting him to give me his full attention all the time and be in a good mood when we saw each other, or making him jealous for the sake of feeling wanted — this attitude could have passed with an extremely confident and even-tempered person.

Alas! — My ex-boyfriend was the exact opposite. And while his character wasn't a God's gift either, all I did to "help" him improve was continually fuel the fire of his insecurities. From his point of view, he did not attack but defend himself.Each of us was the aggressor in the other's eyes.

Acknowledging our personality flaws is never easy. We would rather gossip about other people's shortcomings or failures. Someone is calling us out on our own? "Haters gonna hate" and anyway, "nobody is perfect." And, besides, it was them who "triggered" us in the first place. We are nice, clean and shiny.

At the time we were dating, my pride didn't allow me to step into my ex-boyfriend's shoes and look at the conflict from his angle. Not even to admit my wrongs and say sorry. My selfishness and lack of empathy, supposedly appropriate for a modern liberated woman, — which proved to be an unviable standard, — condemned my relationship.

As for you, there, do not repeat my mistakes.