Every once in a while a song will find its way onto a playlist I’m listening to and it just feels like a punch in the gut. Like someone could take everything you needed to hear and everything you are so afraid of being told, and puts it to music. I was walking down Middlepath when I first heard The Collection’s “Bandages of Time”. It came like an angel almost 6 months after the worst breakup I had ever experienced. I had passed the point of sobbing endlessly to my mother on the phone, passed the point of isolating myself in my room with all of the Avenger movies, and passed the point of begging him to give me a reason for leaving so abruptly. I had no answers for the way he behaved, so I made them up in my head. I had an internal, stable, and global explanatory style, meaning I assumed it was all my fault, I would never be lovable, and I will continue to mess up every relationship I am in until I die alone. It was a dark hole, I know. I made many fundamental attribution errors, assuming the situation was more about me than the situation. I assumed that I had become such an annoyance that he couldn’t stand being around me, ignoring the fact that we had just spent 4 long difficult months apart, ignoring all the times he told me he felt unworthy of love, ignoring when told me he was a bad person and he was going to hurt me. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, it became true because he believed it would. He hurt me because he believed he was a bad person who hurt people and needed to distance himself from me.
In the Collection’s “Bandages of Time”, it says – ” I watched your eyes part tears like they were Moses / And your savior standing on distant shores.” It made me think of the distance between two people when they break up. They are the person you most want to seek comfort in, and yet the last person you can talk to. I wondered what we tend to fill that distance with, as it can range from misattributions to counterfactual thinking, imagining possible scenarios that didn’t happen. I was constantly being told what he might be thinking or alternate possibilities. What to do and when and for how long. Sitting in class now, with enough distance between me and the girl who couldn’t leave her room, I see our relationship in almost everything we talk about. As much as I wanted to show him he was a good person, it was lost in his self-verification. As much as I wanted to answers to my hundreds of questions, I was left with attributions.
In the end, I got tired of filling my brain with “what if”s. I got sick of the anger, the tears, and the wondering. While my attributions were vivid and the emotional amplification of the counterfactual thinking, as it was getting easier to thinking of the craziest scenarios the more space he put between us, I found my conclusions and closure in the fact that he left. Plain and simple. Like it says in the song,
“Well, I know that words could never ever heal this;
You must wrap yourself in bandages of time
And the truth will grow from pain that I have caused us
Till it falls from the vine
And one wind can’t blow us in different directions
One of us must do the work to row away
I volunteer my arms to break the wet reflections
If it’s you that needs to stay for some brand new day”
Cubbie's Social Psych Blog 