I know how I am.
I know the moods by now, even if I haven't learned how best to control them. My only way of mitigating the damage most days is to isolate myself. That gets harder and harder to do. This past year, when I lived with someone, it was almost impossible. Right now I'm in the grandparents house of my significant other, where I am unable to speak the language. My significant other is extremely sick.
I've tried to be helpful and take care of him throughout the day, but to be honest, I felt my patience ebb and wane; when I had had the same virus just two days before, he put me in a hotel room (that I paid for only 20 minutes after vomiting outside, because I wanted him to get dinner with friends he rarely sees), and then came back incredibly, could-barely-talk drunk at 3am, without his jacket, telling me he lost the rental car keys (he hadn't; but he told me he had and I worried about it until 8am when he woke up more sober and corrected himself), and without the water he had promised to bring me. He was still drunk / hungover the next day and so even though I was sick, I drove the hour back to his grandmother's. I had a fever alone and paid 100 euro so he could have fun, only for him to completely disregard me and stay out until 3am. I did want him to have fun, but not til 3am, not to the point where he lost his jacket and told me the car keys were inside.
So I'm resentful, I guess, that he has had his family and me waiting on him hand and foot, that he is being looked after, that I am spending my vacation in a house where I can't communicate easily with anyone and feel bored and alone in.
I'm sad because as the months and fights have dragged on, I'm equal parts caring for him and disregarding. I don't look at other people, but I do miss one presence of a past relationship. That realization hit me like a punch to the gut. And I don't know what to do about it, because there's nothing to be done- that person has moved on, happily, to someone who is better for him than I ever could be. There has never been any hint that they wanted me back in their life any more than they already have; they've never even visited me. I see them once a year and next year, I think it's better if I don't even do that.
I practiced for awhile, pushing them away and not calling or texting or writing as much. It hurt, but less so than when I don't and I wonder why they don't call or talk to me more. If I'm the one saying I can't do it, it seems easier. "I have decided not to eat chocolate" seems like a easier truth than "There is no chocolate available for you".
We never really found a good balance, in this world of supposedly being friends. We did for a few, fragile months. I was truly happy with my significant other (who had yet to show any aggression or resentment towards me at all) and happy with the state of my friendship with this person. But then when I visited, my annual pilgrimage, it all unraveled; he was dating someone he had never talked about to me with, who was intensely jealous, and when I tried to do my best to assauge that person's feelings it backfired, completely. I left feeling terrible, depressed, betrayed by my friend and the reality I thought I was living in.
The depression was compounded by several problems over the summer that turned my significant other against me, namely the catastrophic failure of a vehicle I had purchased for us. The failure was the car mechanic's, but it impacted my significant other's vacation time, and I had bought the car on my own. The summer months were nothing but fighting, and more fighting, and more fighting.
It wasn't until September, at new heights of tension and despair in my romantic relationship, that the urge to kill myself and the pleasure I was finding in suicidal ideation had started to fade. I found in China the confidence I'd missed. A rekindling of wants that I wanted simply because I wanted them. Making plans, following through. Being impressive, even on small scales, even to myself. I liked that. I needed that.
But in the depths of these terrible fights with my significant other I realized that only one person, in my entire life, had wanted what was best for me. Had loved me for who I was and supported me to constantly be a better self for my own sake. Who nurtured my artistic side and tried to make me see my self-destructive habits, and to counter them with healthy ones. I had only been loved so honestly by one person, and in turn, I had treated them second to all of my own impatient wants and needs.
Yes, I was sick. I was sick and then traumatized by Josh's death. I was not supported by family through a time I needed them. Yes, there are a hundred reasons about why I was not as good as I could have been, and I live the consequences of all of them.
I feel stuck. I am stuck down this path because there is no where else to go. I had decided to hope for the best, even with the problems, with my significant other. "If housing is not this hanging axe over my head; if the van was not here anymore" kept being this mantra. If these major problems were resolved, then we'd go back to being strong and kind with each other. His resentment against me would finally be put to rest; my anxiety about imminent homelessness would not spark fights on my side.
But the realization, the stuckness, the laughable, absurd uselessness of all it, won't leave. In China I realized I love someone else, when I am finally able to be the partner they might have asked me to be (admittedly he deserves better than that even), but only years after his love already faded for me and he has found someone who is perfect, in all her own talents and complexities and challenges, to grow alongside him and treat him as he always should have been.
And I am the-partner-I-should-have-been to someone else, who doesn't always appreciate it. Who once disrespected me by hitting me in the face with a brochure, who when he gets angry tells me I am crazy, that I make things up, that I better get myself "fixed" before I have children. Who when I try to show him the things that matter to me, like a child bringing in leaves from outside, barely flickers interest, but throws rages if I don't fully invest my attention on him when he demands it. Who whines if my body is not willing to have sex. Who resents me when I have to work late or travel for work, who resents me when I ask him for more help around the house.
He does have good qualities. Great qualities. Wonderful qualities. He is intelligent, beautiful, witty. He likes to dance and sing when nobody is watching. He is an amazing memory for historical facts and figures. He can be as lovely as he is awful, and I'm not strong. I'm exhausted. The only strength I seem to have is in continuing. Because I know there's nothing that can be done.
I can't wreck the happiness of someone else I care about; it would bring them no joy to hear about my feelings. I think I have hinted at it already, and he willed ignorance, and I'll let him. What good does honesty do? And what would I even be offering? Would I really leave my life and career (the only thing that I seem to do well at these days) to go back to him, a person who doesn't want or need me? All I'd be offering him would be complexity, mess, problems, loss.
If he'd ever wanted me back in his life, he would have made it happen. That's the kind of person he is. Instead he tried to install me in some new form, some new position, even if it bucked social convention- also because that's the kind of person he is. But it's not working.
As awful as it can be sometimes, those good moments, those flickers; when my significant other holds his cousin's infant son, when he plays with and kisses the dog. When I see a tenderness I used to think would always be available to me at least at the ready for others, I think about how we could make a family. Nobody is perfect. He might grow with time. Maybe I can give him the four years to learn that my old love was not able to give me. Maybe we could return to those feelings, those moments, where I believed he loved me truly for who I was- accepted me, flaws and all.
But more and more I think, the loves most of us have, are relationships born of compromise. Maybe my compromise with the universe is that I can accept never being really seen or understood by the person I am with. Maybe I can keep this sad, lonely part of myself on its own, and let him and the rest of the world interact with the person they want. I have become a fantastic salesman at my company. Maybe I can improve yet more on selling myself.
With this person from my past, I could be my sad and lonely self. The problem was at that time, that sad and lonely self as all I was. And it overwhelmed him. I've tried to change myself, and change has come over time on its own anyway; where I was once nothing but raw, negative emotion with a veneer of glitter, I am at least more balanced than I was, more of the time. But I think the lesson learned was that there are parts of me nobody will ever really see or understand. Maybe nobody is supposed to. Maybe we are all, a portion of us, incomprehensible to others, and it's some bizarre niche insanity of mine to run around hoping there's someone in the world who will "get me". What does that even mean.
So there. That's my 2019. And maybe the rest of my life. A tangled, troubled love that many times makes me feel small. But one that offers me the opportunity for stability and building a family, more than anyone ever has. Because even though in his rages he threatens to leave, he hasn't. Maybe that's the pearl underneath the ichor and silica; where my old love stayed until he could not bear it and there was nothing to be done besides leave, at least my significant other is loud about his displeasure. Even if his anger and words hurt, it would probably hurt more if he left. Probably.
I just have to tell myself I
I just have to not talk to my old love, not because I don't want to be his friend, but because it brings no joy to be deceitful. And I feel deceitful. I haven't done a single thing, but I feel treacherous by existing.
I just have to not talk to his family anymore, not because I don't care about them or miss them or think of them often, but because the person in his life deserves my memory to fade so she can be his one and only. And I have to learn not to have this family I think of as family.
I am getting better at being alone. Even if I don't want it to be the case, it's true. The constancy of a relationship, dysfunctional as it can be at times, has taught me to value my times of "self" and to try to nurture the things that only I want. I'm not successful at it, but now I see the point, at least.
And the depression has mostly faded, to where I don't think I'm quite at risk for flinging myself out of windows or walking in front of fast-moving vehicles or tying myself to heavy luggage and going into a lake (this is the one I used to think of the most).
I do think I'll get by. I'll be okay. And if not- well, then that's how things go, but I probably will get by because if I've gotten this far, I can go a little further.
Someone told me once that I don't know how to be happy.
I honestly don't know where or how to learn to live my life if this is the truth, and the more things happen, the more I think it might be.