You may believe you have been running toward love and have been thwarted more than once. The truth may be that you may have been running away from love and, in so doing, naming yourself a victim. Therefore, you convinced yourself and found someone else to take blame for the love that you yourself deflected.

You may be confident that someone rejected you. They may have, and yet you may have instigated it. You are not the fall guy no matter how much you may feel you are. You are the instigator. You set yourself up. It’s hard for you to believe, yet you ejected yourself from love, landed in an empty field while lingering embers prevented you from forgiving another for your flight. Yes, you set yourself up.

Better to forgive yourself for casting lots. You couldn’t stay in the closeness, so, surreptitiously, you constructed a plot where your precarious position would topple, love gone all kerflooey.

There are two particular things in life for you to learn. One is to take responsibility. Your responsibility isn’t to assign blame. Your responsibility is clarity. Your love wasn’t ousted. You shooed it away. Tension regarding abandonment rose, and you offered a sacrifice to the altar of yourself. You decided to continue the run of bad luck referred to as failed love. You decided to disappear and made it look like a kidnapping.

You bet against yourself and won the bet, as luck would have it. You won the bet by losing. You freed yourself from possibilities. You chose the certainty of disavowal. You closed shop. You went home to your lonely apartment where you set yourself apart from happiness in the world and nursed your wounds.

Awaken from this dream. You dreamed it. It’s yours to awaken from. You opened the dream like an umbrella and went under it. You chose the separateness you didn’t want, and yet you chose it for the illusion of loneliness. You made certain you would know loneliness inside and out, cluck your tongue, shake your head, denied again.

Come out into the open, and define yourself in a different way. You want to hail yourself as a new person. You are ready to leave a beat-up old illusion behind you. The old illusion is that you lack the ability to maintain love. Now trade in the old model of yourself for a brighter one. Meanwhile you serve, and you come out all right.

You defrauded yourself and another for the sake of safety. You dropped the love in your heart too soon so your failure was secured, and you called it betrayal.

I wanted to make two points.

The first point is that you liked to think you had a responsibility to assign to anyone but you. You cried out: “Who's doing this?” And so you looked around for the culprit. In this case, you probably chose your love interest who, in your terms, may have dropped you without remorse. Or possibly, you hatched a plot assigning your outrage onto another man or woman who entered your erstwhile loved one’s life.

The second point I wanted to make is to suggest that you now look yourself squarely in the eye and admit that you set yourself up. No longer do you foist off responsibility. Now you claim it. If you cannot honestly claim the responsibility onto your shoulders, then at least take it off someone else’s shoulders. Notice I say responsibility, not blame. If you still can only insist and persist that the onus falls to someone outside of you, then say that the culprit is life, that life delivered the unwelcome news to you. And then you can say, “So?” And then you can smile and become self-realized, for you realize on your own that it is you who chose a fall guy and that you pulled him out of a hat.