Chapter 66

When you’re on the blame train, you blame everything. You lash out at the world because in your unbiased wrath you’re blind to the objective positives and negatives in your life. Although, blaming everything will occasionally hit the target at what’s really causing everything to crumble before you, you’ll likely hurt those helping you more than those who didn’t. For me, this would hit the hardest with my relationship with the girlfriend. 

In the first years of Optometry school, while I was struggling with my studies and looking for things that are to blame for the surprisingly difficult studies, she was right in the crossfire. Our relationship was already very strained at this time. We’d become a long distance couple since she moved back to Toronto and it was working out very poorly. She was not the type to get into fights with me and because of this we never fought, but even then, there was now a big disconnect. It has become glaringly obvious to us now how physical distance can be a big issue in relationships. 

She tried very hard to alleviate this issue. She wanted us to work as much as she could. In her mind, I was her forever home and she didn’t like the cracks that were showing on the walls. Luckily, her nursing program allowed for some transfer of her university undergrad courses and her studying schedule was relatively light. So, deciding to put effort into us, she got her driver’s license and drove up almost every other weekend to see me. It was easy to see that she wanted the distance between us to close as much as possible. 

Me on the other hand? I was heading down a different road. I was thinking about all the things as to why I’m not performing well and I, very stupidly, came to the conclusion that I was spending too much energy trying to keep a long distance relationship alive. Yeah, that’s right. The Blame Train was about to derail.

The reasoning was something along the lines of this: 

I used to excel in my program. Now I’m in this new program and I am no longer excelling. 

It must mean something is holding me back. I am the same so it must not be me. It can’t be the program because if I’m struggling with it, I may think myself incompetent. If I am incompetent, then all the things I’ve worked for in undergrad would have been for nought. So it must be something else. It must be…

My relationship!

Our situation had changed and now we were no longer a dynamic that supported each other. She can’t be here for me now that she’s in Toronto and I’m in Waterloo. This must be the reason! Furthermore, forcing the relationship that’s just barely hanging on is mental energy I can’t sustain or afford. 

There was some truth here. Every phone call and skype call cost time. Every time we hung out online it was also completely isolated between just the two of us. Instead of just being there for each other physically, we’d have to dedicate time to specifically talk over the internet. Hanging out slowly became more and more like a chore. It didn’t come naturally to us anymore. To also understand each other’s day the best, we’d have to explain everything back and forth. It was just always a tiresome game of catch up. Needless to say, this resulted in a lot of back and forth with our relationship. 

As a matter of fact, just in the first year of the Optometry program, we almost broke up once. Almost. I was nearing midterms of the winter term and while I was cramming for my neurology examination, specifically studying about palsy’s, when the girlfriend called me and told me she is in the hospital. The reason? She had a CN7 palsy (also known as Bell’s Palsy). This condition caused her to see double. The worst part of this is that this palsy also numbed half her face and denied that half movement and sensation in general. I remembered this because I had literally just learned about the palsy from my study notes when she called me. It was strangely coincidental. 

Now, on its own, Bell’s palsy wasn’t such a huge deal. I mean, it was a big deal but it wasn’t usually life threatening or anything. But here’s the issue, around a month into our relationship, the girlfriend had come down with another palsy. That time, it was a CN3 palsy. During that time, we were literally just in the beginning of our relationship and hadn’t figured much out. So, in the end, her dad was the one who took care of her and brought her to the hospital as well as looked after her. I was there too, but I was much more of a passive role. The incident was strange but had disappeared almost as quickly as it presented itself. Honestly, we never paid that much mind to it. It happened, it got better, we moved on. The doctors said that as long as she didn’t have another one, she should be all good. 

Unfortunately, now that the girlfriend has had her second palsy, within 5 years of the first, it looks like her health was not past her nor us. Having 2 palsies within 5 years was known to be a risk factor for multiple sclerosis (MS), a demyelinating nerve disease that was most prevalent in females in Canada. This was problematic. 

While the girlfriend wasn’t really moved too much by it, I was freaking out. She treated this second palsy like the first one, which is to say, by not taking it all that seriously. In fact, she kind of thought that it was fortunate because now she can defer her exams to a different time due to health concerns. I, on the other hand, having learned about this recently in class, was thinking about all the horrible ways that MS could affect her in the future. 

Therefore, our relationship’s rocky status was going to have to wait a while to be dealt with, I had to be there for her now. Had this not happened, I think we probably would have broken up before the school year ended. But since this incident came to be, we kept moving on with our rocky relationship into the summer. 

During off-school times (like the summer term), things got better. I didn’t have a reason to be in school for the summer terms anymore and therefore, I got to spend it at my girlfriend’s place. Thinking back, I don’t think our relationship got better because we were spending more time together but rather because I wasn’t stressed out from school. Which meant that this, once again, was all about me. I had a selfish romantic life, remember? It was always to do with me. All the girlfriend had done was support me and all I had done was screw things up again and again. I took the stress out on her because I couldn’t accept that I wasn’t unique and standing out anymore. 

Anyhow, the first summer term in Optometry school was actually pretty good. I had survived finals and passed all my courses and now I got to enjoy my first term off in the summer since first year university. Back in Toronto, I stayed with the girlfriend at her mom’s place in Toronto. Her mom didn’t mind and my mom wasn’t really budding in. It was nice. We were steady again.

This got even better when an Optometry event came up in the form of the American Optometric Association’s “Optometry’s Meeting”. This event took place in Washington D.C. and the committee hosting it gave all optometry students travel grants to attend. Seeing as how the travel grant essentially covered all my costs of going to this event, the girlfriend and I decided to make a trip of this. With that, we took our first vacation together.

We planned to visit New York for a few days to sightsee and then make our way to Washington D.C. afterwards for the conference. Honestly, it was quite a blast. I got to meet other optometry students from across the U.S., check out some cool kiosks at the conference and got a whole bunch of free food at almost every single event. I even attended a 5km marathon with my other Canadian Optometry friends. The conference was catered to because health care was a huge deal in the U.S. and this event was no exception. The big pharmaceutical companies spoiled all of their doctors who attended and luckily they couldn’t distinguish the students from the full fledged doctors. 

It was so nice of a time that it made me feel more optimistic about my program. By the end of the summer, the girlfriend and I were on the best terms we’d been on and I was actually looking forward to the next school year. But then, when it came. Everything came crashing down and the cycle that we had been on being unsure about our relationship picked up right where it left off. 

The second year of Optometry school was the hardest and had the most content heavy. Because of this, I was more stressed than ever before and needless to say, my relationship hit a rock bottom at this point in time. It became apparent that the girlfriend and I would always try and spend as much together as possible but it would somehow still fall short of being meaningful. Once again, it was made clear, there was only so much support you can offer someone when you’re not in the same city. 

This time however, we’d break up. 

I broke it off because somewhere in all the stress was a blame train still pointing at her for my own inadequacies. When we broke up, it was visually painful for her. She really didn’t want it to end. She truly loved me for all I was and wanted us to be together. However, I didn’t see it that way. I saw my career path heading in a direction where she couldn’t follow and it bothered me. 

Now, I know it sounds like I just breezed through quite a substantial event but there’s a reason for it. It was a big deal but it didn’t take. Here’s the thing, we’d been together around 4 years at that time and between all the palsies stuff and other firsts we’ve had with each other, we came to depend on each other a lot. Because of this, after breaking up, we kept running back to each other again and again. 

To save you the trouble of reading through 4 recurring stories of breaking up and getting back together, I’ll just tell you that all in all, we must have broken up a good 4 times during all of my optometry school days. 

The longest breakup would last a few months and during that time, we’d even begun to date other people. However, for some reason, we kept coming back to each other. On my end, it always seemed like during the breakups, I’d always be exploring my own problems and never finding an answer. I kept denying that she was and had always been my missing piece because it made no sense.

She never did any of the hobbies I did and never even attempted to pick them up. The closest we got was that she picked up the flute sometimes, reminiscing about her high school days when she was in band. Even then, that was a far cry from music as I knew it. She wasn’t a private lesson kid so she was only as good as the public school system gave her the opportunity to be. 

She also wasn’t a cynic like me and didn’t think about the world in dark undertones. So how did she really fit into the mold of my missing piece? I would always tease her that she had no passions in her life. She would then jokingly say that she only had one passion and that I was her passion. This was a joke and a cop out when I first heard it but in time I would realize that this was actually the answer. I had brushed it off because I considered passion to be something you needed to work hard for and liking someone didn’t qualify. But years later, I would look back and realize that her passion for me was way more difficult than anything I’ve done with music or any of the other hobbies I did. I mean, for every breakup we went through, it ate away at her soul and yet she kept coming back. Through all the breakups and all the heartbreak, she kept investing in me. 

The mental toll and strain she endured to stay believing me never wavered. This was true passion. In relation to all of this, it turns out all the sweat I’ve poured into my hobbies were nothing but a droplet in an ocean. She was someone who would love me almost unconditionally and take me back every time I had stumbled and fallen. She gave me something I never got from my parents and also had never even asked for. I kept thinking she was holding me back but in truth, she was my bedrock for which I built the foundation of my world on. In university, amidst all the stresses of life, I was simply too much of an idiot to realize that. Honestly, it’s a miracle she dated me for as long as she did. I really did not deserve her. 

I had made the mistake thinking that our relationship’s rocky nature had always caused me to stress out and underperform in school when in truth, it had been the other way around. I would be stressed out from school and then take it out on our relationship. The relationship had been nothing but positive for me. 

On the blame train, it’s a chaotic toss up of everything in your life. In the end, oftentimes you’ll find that you’ve pointed the finger at the wrong things, hurting those who are the most positive in your life. Only with age did I come to realize that there’s never an end to the tracks. 

So what next? Well, when you’re on the blame train and throw the blame on pretty much everything, you’re bound to get a few things right. While this may seem like it would lead to some type of epiphany and overcoming of obstacles, it really didn’t. In fact, it did the opposite.

When I realized what was really to blame for all my stress, it had already been too late. While I wasn’t happy with wrongfully blaming my relationship for my shortcomings in school, I would be distraught with rightfully blaming, at least in part, the true reason for my shortcomings.