Day 60: Rings to Tie and Bind

When I got married I was the one getting the rings, my husband to be was already relocated in Singapore, he sent me the finger measure with a piece of iron wire, we chose them half white gold and half yellow gold and had each other's name inscribed inside.

When he arrived in Milan he tried the ring on and it was a perfect fit.

As a culture (Italian) we place much importance on the wedding rings, I always wore mine until I divorced and in the later years when I had become more lax about it, my husband took it out a few days after the wedding and told me it was just tight and uncomfortable, I felt hurt about that, because I believed it meant he did not love me and did not care for me.

Many of the things I used to believe today seem ridiculous to me, yet I believed them, I put value on two metal rings to define my relationship with my husband.

Women are brainwashed into believing that wedding rings are a sign of Love/value that a man puts in the relationship, yet when I look back, the love of my husband that was less spoken and less advertised than mine was more substantial than mine, while I used these rings to impose dos and donts according to the ringed/slave life we both had subscribed to, because rings are just for that, to define a property , an ownership, this is why slaves had rings on their noses, like bulls, so they could be pulled around and moved where they were supposed to be.

One interesting thing is that in my language the 'ring' finger is called ANUlare, couldn't make it clearer than that, wear your ring slave, now you are Mine.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to put value into 'wedding rings'

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to use the wedding ring as a way to communicate my subordinate position in my marriage by wearing it, a sign that 'everything was fine' or to take it off to send the signal that things were rocky instead of communicating what was going on with me in fear that what was going on with me was in fact not acceptable and bad

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel hurt when my husband told me that he no longer wanted to wear the wedding ring and stopped wearing it because I felt he no longer wanted to be with me and that he did not want me because I already carried that fear and then I put value in rings to define my relationship to another being to state that he wanted me or not

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear that my husband did not want me and to connect this fear to the wedding ring he did not wear because it was uncomfortable

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel more secure when we were both wearing our rings because it meant he was Mine and I was His and within this agreement everything was fine

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to desire that my husband wore his ring to show that he did want to be with me and that he was Mine so I could feel safer and not fear that he was having backchats about leaving me or regrets about having married me

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to define myself by a wedding ring as 'belonging to someone' as something that satisfied my desire to belong, because I believed I was not enough to myself

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to fear talking about the wedding ring to my husband because I feared he would mock me and that he would see in my desire for him to wear the wedding ring that I was in fact frail and insecure and he would not like me because he married a confident and self assured woman that was no longer around after I left my job and my country to go to Singapore

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to desire to own another human being as a way to not have to face my insecurities and my perceived worthlessness, because if I could own somebody I was not worthless and I could feel safe

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not feel safe  with myself alone and for needing someone else around in my life to feel safe

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel hurt every time he made jokes about the 'fucking wedding ring' because I associated myself and self value to the wedding ring and his desire to wear it and to feel diminished by his jokes

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel diminished by his jokes about wedding, marriage and the wedding ring and for taking them personally reducing myself to feeling worthless and not wanted, instead of realizing I felt worthless and not wanted in separation from myself as in me not wanting myself and not being the Self Worth as Life Here in every moment of Breath

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to associate men who don't want to wear wedding rings to cheaters while I was the one that ended up cheating twice, even wearing my wedding ring, proving that beliefs and traditions don't make Who We Are

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel guilty about cheating, because I knew he was not cheating on me but I justified my cheating with his carelessness that was not real but just made up by myself having built up images and expectation of the perfect couple, continuously comparing us to them, to the movies to fairy tales and when we came out short in perfection I blamed it on him because I was doing all the right things, like wearing my wedding ring, while he was always away to work to support us and our household

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to seek my own value into my husband feedback and for feeling diminished when his feedback was not good and then desiring to cheat to prove to him that other men would have in fact wanted me and treasured me, even though the value problem was always mine and he just got blamed for what I was not willing to face and take responsibility for

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel sad now that I write about this, because the first time I cheated I went home and told him  and told him I wanted to leave with this other man and I was hurt because he did not call me a whore like men of my culture do, but he told me 'that he was sorry to see me suffering' and hoped that I would make up my mind so I would no longer suffer like I was

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not feel loved because he did not call me a whore and slapped me around to show me his passion, instead of seeing that love is not calling a woman a whore and slapping her around to show passion  and that is just insecurity and frustration, yet in him not aligning with what I understood as normal, I was unable to see that love doesn't bind and hurt, doesn't own the life of others but stands and gives what it would like to receive

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel soooo bad about what I did when I discovered the other man couldn't even remember me after 2 weeks, and my husband came home from a business trip got into bed and told me 'thank you for coming back to me', that I lived in guilt and shame for the rest of my marriage, even though he never brought it up once but the diminishment of myself had been so big that instead of appreciating this man I went on to find faults with him, so I could lever the field and not feel like such a shit, because I was not even sure that I staid for him or because I had nowhere else to go

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to gossip behind my husband back, looking to build an entourage of people that saw me as right, because I felt so wrong that instead of stopping and starting to make things right,  started to make him wrong, because I lacked the tools to self correct and anything I tried from Meditation to positive affirmation never changed me or who I had accepted and allowed myself to become but just compounded my self judgements and shame and guilt that I projected on him as blame trying to take him down from the pedestal where I myself put him in comparison to me and my vile ego and self interested living

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to intentionally harm another because I was damaged through my own damaging within my extensive participation in thoughts emotions and feelings and because I had not yet found ways to stop and correct myself

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to share my own hell with others dragging them by their hair onto my emotional rollercoasters and accusing them to being emotionally retarded, while the only one that was emotionally retarded was me, having engaged most of my life into emotional turmoil, believing that that was what life was because I accepted and allowed myself to believe that conflict was what life is about and that noone can escape friction and so if friction must be, let me be the winner of the friction competition

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to exist as conflict and as friction, always trying to up my opponent so I would win the Energy/value competition, no matter who I would have to take down in the process to establish myself as the winner, proving that I have lived a life of competition and spitefulness, while blaming others for being spiteful and evil not wanting to own up to my own spitefulness and the evil I existed in and as

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to compete with my husband for who was better and worse and that when I accepted he was better than me I moved into competing to be worse so I could win at something and not feel diminished by my relationship with him

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blame my husband for how I felt about myself, projecting on him my own self hatred and lack of acceptance instead of realizing it was my response-ability to stop existing as self hatred and lack of acceptance by starting to accept myself unconditionally and loving myself unconditionally so I would stop my existence as a beggar of reasons to 'feel good about myself'

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to desire to feel good about myself, instead of seeing it was this desire that kept the feeling bad about myself alive and kicking, while I kept myself separated from me as Life Here in Breath as Self Worth One and Equal with everything that exists

I commit myself to stop looking for reasons to love myself for, as I see and realize that self love is not about what I do or how I do it, it's a decision to love myself no matter what, to accept myself no matter what so I can in self honesty build Self trust and no longer lean on others or desire to lean on others to be validated as a worthy human being, as Life Here in Breath exists as Self Worth and I am the one who has gone away in separation through Self Judgements while Life was Here stable in the physical, judgement free in every moment of Breath One and Equal to What is Best for All and everything that exists.

I commit myself to investigate in depth how I have built myself into such separation and to stop my survival in and as separation in and as the Mind to stand as Life Here in Breath, One and Equal to existence and All There IS.