Well, hello!
It is eleven days shy of nine years since I’ve cracked open this page. Nine years has brought me a marriage, a son, a reconciliation and amazing co-parenting relationship with my ex and his wife, two higher education degrees, a loss of a parent, the loss of old friends, the beauty of new friends, new jobs, a worldwide pandemic, and the same sarcastic me.
I feel the need to write again. I have so many things rolling inside of my head that I need an outlet-a place to ruminate. I spend so much time inside my head, and I know that writing has always been my catharsis. I’ve been away from it for far too long.
I am at a place of massive change. I have always lived my life in a growth mindset knowing that you can’t live a positive life in a negative headspace. You attract what you put out. I’ve decided that during my 40th year of life, I am putting out the energy to bring me the things I deserve in life, and all of them are good. This is in all aspects: my mental health, physical health, and my financial health, as well as my relationships with others. Too often do I feel like I’m pouring from an empty cup. I’ve decided this year, I’m filling my cup first and then others can reap the benefits of the overflow. I am only one me-and I can only do so much. I need to treat myself with a little more kindness and give myself the grace I am extending to others.
Part of my shift of focusing on myself was when I found out my best friend of nearly three decades was diagnosed with lymphoma. While it isn’t all that shocking considering his line of work for so many years, it definitely came as a shock because even his blood work wasn’t detecting the nine-inch mass in his abdomen. His discomfort of this growth was what drove him from the sofa in his comfortable, beautiful, sprawling home to the dingy confines of the emergency room. We had been chatting on the phone and he was describing his symptoms. I told him it sounded almost like a gallbladder attack, he was concerned it was an ulcer, but he was also looking at an upcoming retirement/new year’s party. He told me before we hung up if his pain got any more persistent, he would go in. I guess the gnawing feeling drove him in. He called me two days after his arrival at the hospital to drop the bomb of his diagnosis. I felt oddly relieved to know what was going on, but terrified for the road ahead.
Now, I know he is the strongest and healthiest person I know. I know he will persevere and get better. I know without a doubt he will beat this and be better than ever. I just hurt so much for him and his family.
I’m not trying to make his diagnosis about me in some covert-narcissistic fashion. His diagnosis is so terrible, and I hate that this is happening to one of the best people I know. I will say that I think that when someone is diagnosed with something severe like cancer, often times the people around that person bottle up our fears and thoughts and put on a brave face for the person who is ailing. I do my best to put on that brave face, make him laugh, and joke about him not infecting me with his gross cancer; but I think that it’s necessary for us to laugh through the absurdity of it all, and for someone to be wildly inappropriate about it. It lightens the mood, and while we can state the unfairness of this, to laugh is to heal. Nobody wants to spend their time, especially when they’re sick, not laughing or finding things to be silly about. Something like this makes us stop and see that life is entirely too short, it’s never fair, and we can only be better and get better by supporting each other and surrounding ourselves with others who are going to tow your line when you can’t do it yourself.
Which brings me to the other relationships of my life. I’ve been in a relationship for almost an entire decade at this point. We married two years in. I wish I could say it has been eight years of wedded bliss, but that would be a lie. There have been struggles, fights, addictions, and far too little communication. Even as we sat in our marriage counseling during 2022, I felt that it was just the final desperate attempt to resurrect what I felt had died two years ago.
I told my husband in October 2020 that I wanted a divorce. He promised he would kick his addictions and be the person I know he is capable of being. That lasted all of three months before he relapsed. Still, I saw major improvements with his demeanor, and definitely saw improvements within our marriage. However, there were some old habits that came back, causing a deeper chasm in our relationship. It wasn’t just substances, but it was him inviting other people into conversations that no married man should be having with people other than his wife (unless those boundaries were set and this behavior was allowed. Not that I’m totally innocent of this myself-I had a couple of inappropriate conversations myself during a point where my husband was in the throes of addiction and neglecting our marriage.) I could feel myself and our marriage slowly deteriorating over the year. My apathy growing stronger with each passing day.
By September 2021, I was ready to file the papers again. Again, many promises to change and quit drinking, stop talking to other people, and some changes being made. Unfortunately, we had to do some major renovating to our home, which has saddled us with a lot of debt. I tried to work on myself in individual counseling (which was more of a coworker with the counseling credentials chatting with me for free), and each conversation always showed me the key to my happiness is to get out of my marriage. While I still love my husband, I know I’m supposed to love myself more. It was my love for him that made me try marriage counseling to begin with. I don’t think he ever bought into it as much as I did because the counselor was shining light on the glaring disparities of our marriage. While no marriage will ever be 50/50 (nor will it be 100/100), the other party should be helping their partner by putting in the extra when needed. Rather than listen and actively try to make changes, he doubled down and said we were “attacking” him and that because the counselor was female, we were all just a bunch of man-hating feminists.
I’ve been putting in so much more, and for so much longer; not that it is a contest. However, I’ve built up so much resentment for how much effort I’ve put in, and how little he has. I feel like the times where he should have shown up for me, I have been left high and dry. I don’t want to divulge specifics, but there were so many instances where it should have been him, and I had to rely on someone else; or even myself.
Reflecting back on all of the counseling of 2022, it was like watching a train approaching someone tied to the tracks. Nobody is ever going to “win” in a situation where it is just toxic all the time. I’m not the best version of myself, and my kids are seeing this real-time. I tell them in our times alone that they need to find someone who treats them better and prioritizes them. I’m struggling to prioritize me, but as I work more, I’m finding that I am going to land on my feet and will be okay. I just have to know that everything unfolds as it should, and I need to trust that things are going the way they are supposed to.
Still, due to lack of finances and how expensive everything has become, and largely the fear of not being able to care for my children on my own, I’ve stayed. Stayed in a place where I feel no love, feel like I’m unseen, unheard, and remain unappreciated. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold on. I’m reminded of a quote from a book called “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky that says “you accept the love you think you deserve.” It’s not a closely guarded secret that I grew up in a very loveless home where it was loud, scary, violent, and full of darkness and dark energy. I’ve allowed myself to carry some of that darkness into my adulthood and I am now going to let it go. I’m letting go of my pain and trauma from my childhood. I’m letting go of the sadness I’ve carried with me. I’m allowing myself to be loved in a way I never could imagine, and it’s starting from within me. I need to love me more than the fear I have allowed myself to stay stuck in.
I know 2023 will be my year of rebirth, renewal, and renovations within myself and my life.