The Best Thing I Ever Did Was Stop Stalking My Ex…

So we broke up…

…it was not amicable, there was a lot of crying (mainly me) and bad things were said and done on both parts.

Then there was nothing.

A complete radio silence.

My life which was filled with one person for years was now empty, a big space left vacant by her which I desperately tried to fill, sometimes with drink, sometimes with drugs, but never really with anything positive.

None of that seemed to work, surprisingly(!), but then I found a new methadone for her and that was, her online presence.

She lived far, far away from me so there was no way I would ever bump into her in the streets where I lived.

My friends would tell me that this was a blessing, not having to see the ghosts of our relationship at every corner but instead I saw it as a curse as I desperately wanted to pull her back into my life.

She now had a boyfriend, a new job and even a new hair colour.

She was a person I no longer recognised, with a new life which I was desperately curious about.

The normal online ties were broken soon after the break up, I couldn’t bear to have her as a Facebook ‘friend’ and she didn’t want me as one.

Aimlessly grasping at straws, I started by Googling her name, new snippets of life information would list before me in the search results.

A profile on her new work website gave me an illicit insight into her new job which sounded dull but adrenaline rushed through me as I found this brand new information.

I’d often look at this biography which never changed and it would somehow soothe me.

Soon this short professional biography wasn’t enough, and like a drug addict, my tolerance grew, I needed more.

I’ll give it to her, she was clever with her Facebook settings, not much was gained there, but I would still type her name into the search box revealing a tantalising, small thumbnail which would change from time to time, him and her, her and him, her and her.

The obsession spread over Linkedin…

“Wow she has a promotion…”

… I muttered bitterly to myself, whilst I tried to piece together the dregs of freelance work to make ends meet as London cracked her cruel whip against my back.

It was when I found the Twitter that it got really bad.

A live stream of day to day goings on from her life.

“Jackpot!”

I thought to myself, now deeply embroiled in a strange warped world of what is considered normal behaviour.

I was completely addicted to looking at this stuff, it became embedded in my normal daily schedule, as naturally as I was checking my own e-mails, my own Facebook, I was checking hers.

I kept it as a secret indulgence, I never shared anything I found with my friends and would quickly snap my laptop shut if they walked past.

I think when you’re hiding things from your nearest and dearest, that’s when you know it’s wrong but I was lying to myself.

I remember thinking to myself,

“…this is fine because I’m over it and that’s why I’m able to look at this stuff”

but that was about as far from the truth as is possible.

I would often look when I was drunk, wake up with a hangover, bleary eyed and see the session of stalking I’d had the night before still all open on my desktop.

I would dig and dig until I found something that would particularly hurt me and it was quickly becoming a new-age version of self-harm, because that’s what happens when you go looking for things where you shouldn’t you’ll often find things which you don’t want to know.

I started to feel sick about what I was doing, it had gotten totally out of hand but I had almost resigned myself to a life of doing this, how would I ever break the cycle?

I tried half heartedly a few times to stop but would always resort back to it after lonely nights out that would end in tears.

Then one day it snapped, I was wondering why I wasn’t moving on and suddenly it became clear that this was the cause.

I resolved to never look at anything again.

It was a hard decision to make but I knew it was what I wanted.

It felt like letting go of a comfort blanket and truly saying goodbye to the relationship which was incredibly hard.

I set the first target of making it through an hour without looking, then two hours, then a day, slowly getting through one day at a time (a cliché I know, but true).

It got harder and harder as I knew more and more Tweets would be building up in my absence.

The weight upon me, tempting me to look increased, but then as time went by, it started to decrease again.

It dropped out of my daily rituals, the grip was finally loosening on me and the compulsion was no longer there.

I began to feel happier again and stopped comparing my life with hers which is pointless anyway as we are so different, hence why we broke up, and it felt good.

I still get tempted to look sometimes but I just try to remember how bad it was and how happy I am now and it spurs me on not to.

Editor’s Note: The author of this post has requested to remain anonymous.