I wanted to post something more insightful today, but I still feel like I’ve just been through a bomb blast and am crawling over broken concrete.
All I have to give you, reader, is another pictorial representation of the paper factory in Krsko. Take it as a visual metaphor for the way I’m feeling.
That's my soul up there
.
“But, M., ” I can hear you say, “your soul is pure GLAMOUR!”
Exiled Stardust 
I love pictures of old, broken-down buildings. It’s true that they can sometimes be metaphors for how you’re feeling at certain times, but it also makes you think about the history within the building.
I have a strange love for that hideous paper factory, I really do.
You won’t like this but…..
Get a grip woman! You don’t know him; he doesn’t know you. You were strangers, brought together by the easy yet baseless sense of intimacy and familiarity that all social media engender, and indeed rely upon. This was never a relationship based on anything like friendship, as his peremptory dumping of you proves. You are a feminist, yet you are allowing yourself to play the role of the stereotypical female who cannot go on without a certain male’s approval, a male, moreover, whom you took to task for what you saw as misogyny. You rightly couldn’t let it pass, tho’ maybe you could have worded it better. Learn from that. You may say, ‘it doesn’t matter whether it’s male or female, I’d feel the same if it were a woman’, but the fact remains, you are letting yourself feel utterly worthless by taking all the blame and regret on yourself, as women have done since time began.
Fuck him. Be strong. You’re better than that.
I understand what you’re saying, and I understand you must be fed up with me by now, but it doesn’t change my feelings.
Feelings aren’t logical, unfortunately. Throwing logic at them doesn’t chase them away.
About the issue I confronted him with, yes, I know I am right and I won’t change my mind about that to please him or anybody else.
But emotionally I am suffering and continue to suffer.
I also feel guilty for making my friends and any total strangers who might be reading this to suffer.
I wanted it to be a real friendship. It’s useless to pretend that I didn’t. It’s useless to pretend that real people are not behind those words on the screen.
But:
I’m not to blame here for “allowing myself” to “play a role”, any more than I “allow myself” to be a member of an oppressed class.
The male-dominated world does demand that women seek male approval. Unless one has the resources to live completely independently of that world, and few of us do, one cannot blithely ignore those demands. We have internalized that need for approval whether we like it or not (and believe me, I don’t like it). I try my best to fight it, to not let it take over my life, but some of it remains no matter what I do. I can’t pretend otherwise. To pretend would make it even worse, because then I would be in denial about my situation. And one thing I value above all others is to see things clearly.