Ending my 4 years long relationship

It feels like I've just went through an accelerated growth these few months. Before I go any further of the growth and everything that has happened, let me just explain my title. I haven't told my parents and some of my sisters that CJ and I have already broke up. Well, I broke it off. It's been around 9 days now since the break up and I'm doing well. CJ on the other hand isn't doing quite well, he is still going through the early stage of grief. He is still trying to seek connection with me, I've also just argued with him yesterday because he was saying accusative things to me again. It kind of just solidify my feeling that I have to end this before I invest more time and energy. It's also kind of trying to need to manage his feelings, again, part of the work I need to do to set more boundary with him. 

For the larger part, the relationship was happy and fine. We genuinely loved each other and with a lot of effort, we were always able to resolve issues with cooperation from both ends. It was just getting frustrating that there were always certain important views that we couldn't find the common grounds, such as how we value money and management around that, self awareness and accountability, and just a general difference in the frequency that our brain view things. 

It was particularly frustrating on my end to constantly need to use gentle parenting on my own boyfriend. Spending was on big issue that we constantly argued on, it's only about this final year that I gave up trying to understand and help him at all with how he chose to use his money. The feeling of being "done" periodical spawn all over our relationship over the years. How I felt about going on trips with him would be shoved aside because of how much he wanted to go on trips together. The desire to do activities with him also diminished because no matter how I reiterate my desire to connect, his experience sounds something like (go karting) "I improved my time so well at turn 6 and 7, I was just touching the side of the wall," when my experience was more I was looking for him and trying to have a battle with him. I used to want to help him have a better relationship with his parents, but after hearing him complain about them and how he's keeping scores still with them after 3 years, there's only so much I want to be triangulated into their dynamics. The realizations that I keep hoping that he would have never did came around much, no matter how many times I repeated them, in all kinds of ways. The only outcome to that is feeling done with things. 

I felt my resentment building up to a point that I can no longer untangle them with working through them. I told him we should go for couple counselling, which he suggested that I should go for individual counselling first. It was rather insulting, but I did my duty. I did went for individual counselling for my own self esteem. Then we started couple counselling. Coming from a 3rd person's point of view, he finally starts to understand all the things I've been trying to tell him all these while. Most sessions I came out feeling loving and hopeful, only for it to go away by the end of the day. We did a total of about 11 sessions. 

At the same time, my career was doing great, I was in a good team, it was doing a good cause. I was starting to see that I mattered too to all these people that I was supporting. I've become close with Kelvin and his encouragement and acknowledgment to my work ability slowly gave me the self esteem to give myself the credit that I was due (also partly my counsellor's work). It was all just a good timing that I had everything in the up rise for me. Which I spent more time at work. I started feeling more of myself again. The self I am in the relationship started to feel like a obvious split in myself. I started to feel more strain every time I needed to pick him up when he's down, more so when I don't feel like he's pulling the same weight on himself. I told him I needed him to do more, to work on himself more; which he heard was I was looking down on him instead of hearing that I am not getting my needs fulfilled. 

The frustration was growing. I felt held back, when I just found all these hope for myself to fulfill. By the 11th session, I was expressing how I was unable to picture him in my future without having less of myself. He brought up that he would be able to understand if I were to break up with him, which me and the counsellor took it as an immediate venture to talk about. But we went home and he had a meltdown because I said it before that I'll give it until the end of the year to see if things get fixed, but at that point I already could see myself wanting nothing but out. But because he was having such a hard time taking that, I caved and got back into the relationship. 

We ended the counselling. I worked more because the next Potong Royong was coming around. I indulge in the work and the high of feeling like my life is finally progressing again. With my sister's prompt and Kelvin's encouragement, I feel like challenging myself to go into vet school again. I predominately work with Kelvin and he also fetches me to work, so we have become more than colleagues and actually close friends. There were a lot of things that he was somehow able to push me to take up the challenge that I would have otherwise shy away, so he influence me a lot. All of these doesn't sit well with CJ (understandably) and he grew wary of Kelvin. In his perspective, everything changed once Kelvin came into the picture, which coincidentally is, but everything falls in the right place too because of all the work I put into myself. CJ gets upset at me too for saying that I listened to Kelvin when he also had been telling me the same thing; when he also only understood me from the counsellor's reiteration of me. In my perspective, I've outgrown the relationship. Eventually, I felt so incongruent with myself after being gone for work for 1.5 weeks, I found myself being so angry at CJ for everything that he does. I talked to him after my cousin's wedding, telling him how I feel. We broke up that night, during that time, he found a moment of grace to end things nicely and set me free. 

But for these time, he still sends me couple reels that we used to send each other. He still writes long messages to me, which after the initial few days, it's only right to not feed any energy into them. Yesterday he had a panic attack, I know this is not the time to say he need to deal with it himself, so I still guide him through the phone to go through his panic attack. He still got hospitalized for it. He sent me a message with accusation tone of Kelvin and I, which made me really mad to still need to deal with his emotions and expectations. I broke up too knowing that I cannot be responsible for his expectations and feelings anymore. I felt like I'm still being plagued as his outsourced place to deal with his emotions. I don't want to do mean things because it's not who I am and I know he's going through his process, but I wonder if that might be a solution I need to accept somewhere down the line. 

So yes, this is the whole break up story. I wanted to talk about my own journey and discovery, but turns out this story is still really fresh that it just kept blurting to this length. Next post I suppose. Stay tuned.