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TIPPING

8 April 2018, 18:57

Today. It’s been ups and downs. I’ve been questioning my own progress. I’ve been questioning my own sanity. It’s been touch and go as to whether I think things will be all right. I’m scared that I’m letting everyone down. I’m wondering why I’m crying. I wonder why I can’t stop. I wonder why if I should let myself be sad. I can sporadically see out my fucked up eye. I tried to go to urgent care, but apparently on Sundays, they close at 5. So care I guess stops being urgent at 5 on Sundays. I wonder why all this is happening to me, but then I wonder why I’m wondering. Trying to figure it all out is useless. Trying to find answers is futile. The more I dig and try to figure out what the last seven years were about, the more lies I find, the more waste I see. I wonder what is the right path to take to be all right. I wonder why I can’t be a souless sod like him, and be able to just go on. I get in these episodes where simultaneously, I see hope and I see failure. I feel so much pain I can’t see straight, but then a minute later, I am better and things are going to be better. I google, I read, I reread, I bug friends, I try to remember what the therapist said, and what advice friends are giving, and what the reality of everything was/is/will be. The only things I know are, I am mostly done with Doug and the reality of all that, I still mourn for a fantasy future that I won’t have, and that I am scared shitless of the real future that I WILL have. Mostly that last one. It feels like I can’t make any progress… at least this week.

Before the Volvo blew up, I felt confident, if not a tiny bit trepidatious – I felt alone but not helpless, I felt finally, things were leveling out. Then the Volvo blew up. Boy, did the fucking world almost end then. I was so vunerable and desperate, I even contacted Doug, and that is one thing I shouldn’t have done. I fed his ego and his joy with all the pain I had. But I confirmed in a big way, he had no place in my life anymore. I knew this, but still let a door exist there between him and me. At least now that is gone.

Most all the recovery information seems like bullshit. And its very contradictory. And it gives you this fruity, new age, girl in the meadow, Summer’s Eve commercial bubblegum platitudes that probably help some people, but left me just frustrated at how this bullshit could even help. The only consistent things I see are, mourn, impliment NO CONTACT, and journal. Those are the three I have seen which really help. I fucked up the no contact, the mourning I got down pat, but that comes and goes randomly, and you can see the journaling is big thing with me. But, let’s take one list at random (google, google) and apply it to the real world of me.

This one…

Let’s take the 10 tips and see what’s up with that shit.

1. Do not hesitate to ask for help

    Yeah. Okay. Unless you have a ton of money for a therapist, and I really do recommend one, then this is a slippery slope. You end up bugging friends until they don’t want to talk to you, overshare with strangers, and generally piss everyone off with your pain and suffering. You start feeling that you shouldn’t talk to anyone, and that maybe you’re doing and feeling and saying everything wrong. So, you go silent, and turn it inward. Talking to someone and then talking about the same shit over and over again, until it lost its sting was the thing that helped me. Talking about it till it was funny. Talking about it till even I was sick of it. That was what helped. Telling the embarassing stories of Doug I wasn’t suppose to tell, telling the bad stories of his I wasn’t suppose to tell, telling the unflattering stories of him I wasn’t suppose to tell – that helped. Because the more I told, the more I started to recall. The more I recalled, the more I built a new reality of our relationship. The more I wanted help, it seemed, the more careful I had to be. I couldn’t get the help I really needed so I ended up stealing it here and there, and trying to jury-rig something that I could use to go to that would patch the current hole in my soul.

2. Declutter

    This one was really cathartic and I did it whilst drunk. I really just start tossing a lot of shit out. The problem with this is I was a drunk machine doing this, and probably threw away a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have. I think also under this, they tell you to get rid of the reminders, pictures, gifts, tokens blah blah. I had a HARDER time doing this. In fact, no I didn’t do this. Doug, for all his faults (and there are a boatload) did know what little things made me happy. He bought me things I still hold dear now. My collection of Star Wars stuff, my Doctor Who figurines, my Mr. Spock poster, and other little worthless things that hold so much value for me, there was no way I could get rid of them. I ended up not going into my nerd cave for about a month or two because I couldn’t bear to see the things without feeling so much pain attached to them. Now, I can look at them and love them. I’ve disconnected Doug from them (mostly). I like to think he got them for me because he loved me, but, I realize it wasn’t true, which makes me sad. I tried not to let the toxic nature of everything pollute the little things that I loved.

3. Keep yourself busy

    This is a really funny one. Are you fucking kidding me? You end up with NOTHING to do, no money to do it with, and sometimes nobody to do anything with. When he left, the amount of shit I had to do around the house shrank down to nil. I cleaned the house ONCE, it stayed clean. I didn’t have to shop NEAR as much. There wasn’t things to worry about, there wasn’t things to figure out, there wasn’t things to fix, there wasn’t things to anticipate. I had realized a good percentage of my life was in orbit of this man, worrying about what the fuck he was up to, what bad thing was happening that I didn’t know about, how was I going to fix his debt situation, should I clean the stuff he didn’t that he was suppose to, why was he upset today, why was he mad today, why was he unhappy today. All that disappears, all the things that kept you extremely busy and exhausted before disappears. And there’s nothing to replace it with. You’ve spent all this time trying to figure out HIS life, you don’t know what the fuck is going on with yours. I was trepidatious about going out, about doing things. I didn’t know WHAT to do, where I would be accepted, what the reception I would get trying to enter the world around me. I didn’t have a ton of friends or outside interests. When you tend a man who needed as much attention as Doug, your world becomes HIS. When you attempt something, oh say, like taking pictures of shelter dogs, that activity suddenly is criticized and mocked. You feel guilty when you have an outside interest because it takes away from what you give him. You feel like if you give less, he’ll love you less. So. Now ALL that is gone. You have NOTHING to replace it with. I’ve been trying slowly, but the things I like to do, aren’t really available to me, I don’t have things in common with people around here, so there’s no one to do things with, and a lot of activities that were regular joyful times, like the movies for one, you suddenly don’t have anyone you know to go with. Also, a big probably I had was, Doug was my best friend. I did almost everything with him. He was the thing I planned other things around. I modified my life to fit his. So, yeah. This is good advice… not. It leaves you feeling like a failure, because, you can’t keep yourself busy, and you can’t begin to even think HOW.

4. Find yourself again

    What flowery, new age, hippie bullshit. This is basically a nothing phrase. You, yourself isn’t lost. It was changed during your marriage or relationship. You did lose a bunch of shit, and if your anything like me, you vaguely remember what it was you were and you have NO IDEA how to get it back. I hate to tell you, I didn’t lose a bunch of ME. I did the things I liked and I didn’t change much as a person in that I still was an individual that was separate from him. The part I needed to figure out is what parts of me changed for the worse, what I needed to discard, what needed to be modified, and what all was just effected by him. And this is a hard fucking thing to do. You are plagued with his thoughts in your head, and if you were like me, the things that you like to do sometimes were entangled with what he was and what he liked to do. So you are doing more untangling than you are FINDING yourself, and the untangling comes with a bunch of crying and unexpected triggers when you are trying to figure out where you ended and he began. The whole do what you wanted to do is just bullshit, because you’ve changed and not all for the bad and its a slog of a thing trying to figure out “yourself.” It sound like a positive affirmation of a deal to do, but its not. It’s hard, it’s sad, it’s not as all like what they’re leading you to think it is. They should call it “getting pee out of the pool” because, honestly, finding yourself is more like getting the pee out of yourself.

5. Take the time to travel

    This is assuming your just a rich, idle, weepy, salaried, 4 weeks of vacation type of woman. Yup. We are all Julia Roberts in “Eat, Pray, Love”. That’s just a big bunch of horsehit there. OF COURSE, traveling would make you feel 100x better, cleanse your soul, and whatever. The closest we could come is Shirley Valentine in that one English movie they made us watch in creative writing class. So, let’s put this tip in the “yeah, whatever…” list. Because, we have jobs, we have responsibilities, we don’t have a ton of money, and we don’t have a ton of time.

6. Give it time

    Time heals everything. You know what heals everything? Death. And that’s what time brings. Time doesn’t heal. You heal yourself. Time just makes everything less memorable. Time provides the opportunity of a bunch of other shit pushing out the current shit your going through. Don’t count on time “healing” you. Unless you make an effort to understand and deal with your situation, time just pushes it farther away, it doesn’t give you the wisdom and understanding that you could have gained from going through the slog.

7. Things happen for a reason

    Nope. This is total and utter bullshit. Things in life are random and you have to deal with shit. Why your marriage failed, there’s probably a reason for that, maybe. Or maybe you just married an asshole and he just impulsively fucked up your life. This is the BIGGEST piece of crap they can ever tell you. Because it will keep you digging, keep you searching for a reason all this shit happens, and you may never find it, or worse, there really wasn’t one. It might have a series of random missteps or outright offenses done that will never have a reason behind it. Sometimes shit just happens, and if you think there’s a fucking reason, then it keeps you trapped, searching for the reason or the justice behind it. There isn’t any sometimes. Sometimes. It was just a fucked up situation that got fucked up beyond repair.

8. Find your focus
    This one isn’t really bad. I would add, find some OTHER focus that you can switch to than the divorce, the breakup, the loser you left. It tells you not to focus on hate or anger, and I say…. welllllll….. noooo. I’ve had to jar myself out of sadness and the “why mes” with some good old fashion righteous anger. When I felt myself soften, and miss him, I was reminded of an incident of him horrendously lying and manipulating me for his own screw up reasons. I would say, learn how to get unstuck. If you find yourself maudlin, find a reason to get mad. Or happy. Or concentrating on something else. Or change your scenery. If you find yourself mad, then find something physical to do to use that energy for something else. If you find yourself happy, then enjoy the moment, instead of worrying on how to KEEP happy. Hell, sometimes a couple beers and cry followed by a nap works wonders.

9. Try to forgive

    This one sounds good. and if you can do it, more power to you. I’m trying, but it’s getting less and less of a priority. Infidelity, especially, makes forgiveness hard. I wouldn’t beat yourself up though, if you can’t. In my case, forgiveness isn’t something he deserves, and at this point, it isn’t a main concern of mine. I do try to dull down the regret, and the self punishment. Because I deserve to be forgiven for not being smart or aware enough that I let him in my life, and I deserve to have a little regret for the future I wanted and the man I wanted being all a fantasy that I let blind me.

10. Don’t close your door to love

    This is the hardest. Because what will happen is you are suspicious of everyone, you are unsure of yourself and your own loveableness. He stole the trust that you had in yourself, your judgment and your own feelings. He certainly stole any trust you had for others. I would say this is the one to go the slowest on, set your own standards and keep to them. My standards of interaction are immensely high, and will stay that way until I decide to bring them down. This is just me. I have been the victim of a narcissist, so my healing has a lot to do with regaining trust in myself and humanity. So, YMMV on this one. Mine entails a lot of being by myself, kicking those to the curb who even innocently jokes about love/dating/intimacy, and drinking a lot.

This is just my take on this list that I found. And it did me a world of good to write all this. Exploring my own mind and my own experience. That’s what’s keeping the wheels on my wagon. Especially a day like today.