you realize how it could have been avoided. Ain’t that a wonderful way to twist the dagger in a little deeper, eh?

Emotional intelligence is considered a somewhat superior trait. You understand yourself and others, you are able to communicate effectively, to detect emotions in others before an outburst. But when nobody bothers to talk about how understanding someone else, someone who is hurting you, can be so incredibly excruciating. Understanding doesn't necessarily help with the fact that they are still doing those things to you. You can know why someone betrayed you and still feel like a low life. You can understand why someone couldn't love you properly and still wish they had. You can recognize someone in their pain and yet, decide that you were not worthy of being used as a means of expression by them. Understanding is not synonymous with forgiveness. But emotionally intelligent people can sometimes blur that line. They become so good at seeing the other person's perspective that they stop asking themselves what their own perspective is.

Patience can be a beautiful thing. Until you're using it to convince yourself that something doesn't hurt. And yeah, you can argue against your own feelings and emotions, fight yourself in your head; allow your thoughts to wander back to when someone may have harmed you, and build more defences around yourself than be angry at the one who specifically tormented your soul. You think you know what they've been through. You know they didn't have an easy childhood. You know they're struggling. You know they probably didn't intend for it to come across that way. So you forgive them. Then they do it again. And you forgive them again. 

At some point, you might even become ashamed of your own hurt because you understand theirs so well.

Your compassion drives you to treat your own wellbeing as an inconvenience.

Maturity doesn't mean becoming impossible to hurt. It doesn't mean understanding someone so completely that their actions stop having consequences. And it certainly doesn't mean accepting everything simply because you can explain it. People are complicated. You are complicated. Someone can love you and still do you harm. Someone can mean well but still inflict damage. Someone can be going through tough times and still be responsible for the way that they behave towards you. There are two things that can be true at one time. That may seem clear when you speak it out, but it becomes much harder when emotions come into the picture. Because sometimes you need a clear-cut solution. You need someone to be fully in the wrong so that you can be fully right in your actions. You need the betrayal to come from the villain, not someone who also made you happy, helped you, or made you laugh or loved you and just happened to become something else.

But the world doesn’t always hand you that black-and-white distinction. Sometimes the person who wronged you was also someone that you could understand. And this makes the act of moving on much more difficult. You might spend years looking for the ultimate reason behind how someone acted, trying to find peace with the hell of loud noises or silence that plagued your mind.

(It has been years, and I myself still stay awake at night, trying to figure out why they left me. How deeply I wish to be able to simply hate these people , ignore the things we went through together and just paint them all as the big bad wolves of my life. Yet alas; I still. . .miss them. How amusing, to try and explain a pain I myself don’t understand, or refuse to acknowledge. )

Sometimes it never does. Some people hurt you because they were hurting. Some because they were selfish. Some because they didn't know how to love properly. Some because they simply made a terrible choice.And sometimes, there just isn’t a reason. At least not one that would make you feel better. 

To try and understand the knife that cut you will not lessen the pain, dear friend.

This is when emotional intelligence becomes a bizarrely heavy burden. You're the one whom everyone comes to talk to, as you can listen to them without judging them instantly. You can see both sides of the story. You can calm people down. You can explain their behavior to other people without making them look like monsters. People come to you with all their problems. But who do you become when you are the one who needs to be understood? Perhaps you become quieter. You don't want to burden anyone. You already know what everyone else is dealing with. You tell yourself your problem isn't that serious. Someone else has it worse. You can handle it. And because of this, perhaps, you think you want to make them understand your own pain, in order to get them to stop sitting with you.

But knowing your pain or understanding it, does not mean you cannot feel it.  Knowing you feel lonely, does not mean the feeling is not there. Knowing what makes you feel anxious, does not mean you do not feel anxious.

Knowing you're overthinking, doesn’t mean you're not doing it.

Knowledge does not equal relief.

Sometimes, it is about understanding people, and then refusing to forgive them. Refusing to take their pain onto yourself. Their explanations, onto yourself. To know, in your heart of hearts, that you understand where they are coming from, but that you simply cannot accept it. Perhaps most importantly, it is about applying some of that emotional intelligence to yourself. You deserve to be as patient with yourself as you would be with anyone else. You deserve to have tangled, messy emotions without having to immediately put them on trial.

You’re allowed to be angry before you understand why you're angry, and you're allowed to be hurt even if someone had a reason. You’re allowed to leave something that you didn’t understand perfectly well.