Apology Accepted

“I’m sorry.”
It’s all I ever wanted him to say.
A few months ago I finally got the apology that I always thought I deserved, later struggled to justify, and finally declared I was entitled to.
I know that I am not easy to love. No woman (or man) really is. I know that I pushed men away both conscious and unconsciously. But I’ve also always known that it was – 95% of the time – the other party that caused me to behave so badly and irrationally.
The apology up for discussion came from The Musician. One of the more important men in my life, he is the one ex who has had the greatest impact on me. He came from money, yet never admitted it. He wanted to save the world, yet was always uncomfortable actually living in it. He wanted to be a struggling artist, yet refused to admit that art can thrive (honestly) without poverty.
Rather than embrace his upper-upper middle class upbringing, he wholeheartedly rejected it by joining the Peacecorp and moving to a ghetto town in northern New Jersey. He could never understand how much I wanted to work for a living and establish a more solid financial foundation than my parents ever could. I didn’t dream of money but rather upward mobility; a goal he could and never would quite grasp. He wanted to live a life of servitude and struggle in the hopes of both apologizing for his family’s good fortune and justifying his own artistic expressions. He hated me for working my ass off at a (semi-) corporate establishment. He hated how his father praised my successes as he struggled to cope with his son’s lack of. He hated how much I had to work for what he already had.
It tore me apart when we finally broke up. Yet throughout the entire relationship I always felt the same way: I was wrong for wanting to be successful while also believing that I could still be creative.
When he wrote me this past Fall and apologized I nearly fell off my chair in shock. I never thought he would come to admit that he had been selfish and ignorant. And, perhaps most importantly, I never thought I would finally be given the acknowledgment of not necessarily being right, but at least not being wrong. He told me he was sorry for the way he treated me and for the way he made me feel for trying to succeed. I forgave him. And it felt good. However, what has felt better is that I cannot remember a single thing about myself when we were together.
This is a breakthrough because – for years – I punished myself for not being what he wanted. I would stay up and scowl at my own personality for not seeing what he needed and providing it. Rather than just settling for the realization that we weren’t good together, I tormented myself for not trying hard enough to satisfy him. I thought that because he was so unsatisfied with who I was that I had made a mistake somewhere along the line and become someone that could easily be tossed aside.
I did what too many women do: I began to believe the excuse that he used to get out of the bad relationship.
It’s sad to admit, but there’s a line from “Pretty Woman” that really does hold true. And that is, “The bad stuff is easier to believe.” This is why it was easier for me to accept the breakup, because I just swallowed and digested that what I did was wrong. But recently, when he apologized, I was finally granted permission to believe that who and what I did was fine and ok. I was finally able to embrace the me that he never allowed me to be.