Out of Character

I don’t know what my character is anymore.  Along with that, I don’t have confidence in my ability to judge other people’s characters either.  Perhaps this is coming off of a good seven years of being wrong in my judgment and multiple people being out of character and my being too blind to see their truth.  I use to lean on the fact that I didn’t judge anyone and just let them show me who they were.  Lately (or just lately I have realized) that many people show me sooner than I recognize.

Perhaps giving too many chances is the only thing I am guilty of.  I actually hope that is what it is.  The thought that I was so clueless to all that was happening around me for so long makes me feel disappointed in myself.  I know it isn’t my fault when people lie and take advantage of me but I should see it at some point, right?

I’ve written so much about my ex-Dom that even I am exhausted at all the signs I didn’t see that sent me crashing into the wall he leads me to blindly.  But his character was good.  He was kind and caring and supportive.  he wasn’t an honest man, but I knew that and I was a part of so many of his lies it wouldn’t be fair to judge him on honesty.  Perhaps those times he was kind and supportive and my friend, lover, and Dom were the times he was out of character. I am not sure I will ever know or if it is even important for me to know.

For me, my character seems to be on some sort of revolving wheel of sorts.  I want to be “of good character”.  I think honestly most of the time I am.  I have regrets of times where my character could have been questioned and my justification was weak.  I try to keep on track with it.  I have a wonderful friend who sits on the porch with me drinking tequila and smoking a cigar and his words and philosophy makes me want to be a better person.  His character is true.  He makes me want to be a better person.  He is rarely out of his character.  You can depend on him always showing up with no surprises.  I like that in him.

When I slipped from my character that I was comfortable with I ended hurting other people.  For one person I broke the confidence of others.  Keeping secrets and confidence was something that I always prided myself on.  I could take things to the grave and never have a need to tell anyone at all.  It was almost my reputation.  I ruined that by trying to keep Sir’s love.  I gathered intel from others and allowed him to download it from me as easily as inserting a thumb drive and pressing a button.  At the time it felt right.  My alliance was to him.  The others were secondary.  I was wrong about that though.  I allowed my character to dip onto a slippery slope of lies and probing to get the info he wanted.  Looking back now – it is shameful.  I knew better.

The consequence of that was that I lost a lot of friends.  They started to doubt if they could trust me when they saw how close my “friendship” was with him.  I would give just enough info about him that they wanted to get them to open up to me.  I learned what he wanted to know but I also learned what I wanted to know.  Sometimes that was painful for me.  I guess that was my karma.  In the end, that strategy was the one thing he couldn’t tolerate when he was on the receiving end of it.  Interesting.  It was fine when he was gaining information he wanted but when someone else gained information from me about him, he thought it was repulsive enough to cut me off completely.  More interesting than the one strategy I used to bring me closer to him and more important to him was the strategy that ended my relationship with him.  Karma is a bitch!

Lessons learned are not always easy.  I walk away from that experience with a lot of regrets but also try to find pride in myself that through much thought and self-loathing I am able to see where I faltered and can be sure I will never make that mistake again.  There are plenty of other mistakes I know I will make and hopefully will learn from those lessons as well.  Hopefully with a little less heartbreak and it won’t take as long for those lessons to sink in.  I hope to be more observant, more in the moment, more true to myself than to others, and more conscious of who I want to be and who those actions will make me and to know the difference.

Bottom line and as simplistic as it gets, I hope to someday be the human my dogs think I am!