About You Without ‘You’

This is a writing exercise I did for fun (aka procrastinating on homework with external creative endeavors) in which I wrote about my experiences with someone without using the word ‘you’ once; i have no clue whether it is good or bad writing.
[below: text from aforementioned ‘someone,’ received and read at 2:25am 10/21/2015]
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Was it giving up or self preservation? I spent so long praising myself for my ability to hang in there, to be patient and ride out the moments that felt so bad. I have a history of quitting, it’s something I’m sensitive about, so there was a certain amount of self-admiration associated with standing there and just taking it. Probably martyr aspects, I took some kind of satisfaction in over apologizing during inflammatory situations, breaking down too easily, playing at playing dead. I repeatedly told people ‘the pros still outweigh the cons,’ and they did for longer than anyone who knew me could understand. I didn’t know the last reason on the cons side was the final con, the factor to tip the scales, until it happened. The reality is that the various points of contention were worsened by the situation, exacerbated by the attention. There is no more attention as of now, I put an end to that for the time being. This is a tricky spot for me to be in, because for the first time in a while, neither self destructive, nor self care decisions elicit a response. This makes motivation difficult, because if I’m not performing the action for a specific audience that’s guaranteed to give it some sort of attention, the action loses its intrigue. It did not matter whether the attention was positive or negative, just that it was there was enough. Obviously I can still exist, arguably better than before since I supposedly have so much more time now that this element is eliminated from my days, but like I was saying, motivation is an issue when there is no more external accountability. Physically, this shift does not impact my days at all, I still go to the same places, do the same things, see the same faces. I walk around as I did before, but now I either feel light, free, and determined or empty, lost, and broken, often both within the same walk. Perhaps it was this way before I made this decision as well, and I now just have a concrete reason to blame. It was not a physical matter that I put a stop to, but an emotional and technological one. The lack of physicality, of face to face and voice to voice was contrasted by the few physical encounters and their drastic difference in tone. It is perhaps due to this lack that it was able to continue for as long as it did. When primarily reduced to text, one stops being a person in the minds of others. When reduced to text, it is easier to manipulate the circumstances and convey only as much as one wants about only what one wants. This benefitted the situation in the short term, but over time the lack of willingness to engage in other forms of communication altered the shared reality, because of the drastic contrast between the written exchanges and the physical encounters. I did not give up because I wanted to, but because I needed to. Conversely, I will not pick this up again until I can want it instead of needing it. We broke up in early July, it’s late October now and I think that this almost week had been the longest we’d gone without exchanging words since we first met.

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