to everyone who emailed me. I have to say, I’ve posted things here before in … uh … for lack of a better way of phrasing it, “haste” - and I’ve taken them down when more level-headed observers kindly informed me that it was probably not the right thing to do.

So when I posted last night at 4 am, I thought, “god, I hope people don’t tell me I was out of line.”

But then I decided, you know what, even if they do, I’m keeping it up. Because I’m so sick of pretending - I’m so sick of protecting him.

I learned a long time ago that if you tell your friends and family that your boyfriend just did something shitty, you may forgive them, but they probably won’t. Because I didn’t want to go through that with Jakob, I kept a ton of things to myself. I would say it’s a fine line, especially given his specific, uh, “moodiness issues,” but it’s really not. As someone who is very close to him said, “He is responsible for his actions, period.”

What really spurred me to write that post last night wasn’t even so much hearing the details of how he went back to my friend’s place, or thinking about how he told me yesterday that “if you want to encourage me to take you back, you should try to prevent me from thinking. your appeal comes from the sensory level of things - your smile, your skin, etc.” (Ah, I knew it! It was just my skin all along!)

Down the rabbit hole!!

What really spurred me was reading old IM conversations and seeing patterns. Not just tiny patterns but great big heaping patterns. I saw that I was smiling and nodding and letting him get away with condescending behavior, because I genuinely thought “there’s no way in hell he could really think that.” Since it was so off-base!

I might post a few of these conversations on JakobandJulia.com if I feel the desire to later … they’re fascinating, if only to serve as a warning and a reminder.

In all fairness, one of the best things that came out of my relationship with Jakob was his encouragement - goading really - to actually make public what I think. Before that, I had this sort of uptight, stick-in-my-ass blog where I posted perfect little not-at-all-telling screenshots of my tv appearances. It was less of a journal and more of a list, and it really wasn’t me at all.

So it was his idea to take the relationship public. Before then, whenever I referred to my boyfriends, I would use a non-specific term like “The Boyfriend.” And even though I said JakobandJulia backfired - it only did for our relationship specifically. It’s hard to handle criticism, and it’s even harder to handle it if it’s public. Just because I have worked hard to get a thick skin (and the confidence underneath) doesn’t mean that everyone does. And Jakob, while on face blisteringly confidant, is actually - like so many people who admit no cracks - very much not.

So I have to thank him for this, for my tumblr, for pushing me to go to a place that I (clearly) wanted to go. I like telling people what I’m really feeling. And apparently people like it too. There’s SO MUCH bullshit in this world, it feels good when you can - once in a great while - cut through that.

I’m still angry and sad, but I turned a page yesterday - and for anyone who’s been in on-off relationships, they know what I mean - it feels better to have made a decision than it does to waver back and forth, attempting to justify the unjustifiable while wondering where you should draw the line.

He emailed me today with the following: “I like the idea of a character whose self-confidence is so low, she needs to confide in a small group of friends whenever something goes wrong. If they don’t cut it, she confides in a much larger group of anonymous followers. The interesting part is when she can’t get a guy to pay attention to her, and she starts using the audiences for that purpose. But she doesn’t succeed, because it’s that sort of behavior that convinced him she wasn’t good enough in the first place.”

I feel sad, because it’s like talking to a stranger. But I suppose in another sense, it hurts less, because that’s not the Jakob that I loved.

I don’t need or want his attention anymore. I just want to be honest again, and I don’t want to hide anything.