Life in Waves

I didn’t publish anything last night for the first time in awhile because, I dunno, I wanted to not think about anything.  Kizzie and I watched the new episode of Grimm and then I went to bed for a fitful night’s sleep.  I just can’t stop thinking.

Life is coming in waves right now.  I feel sad and confused.  I feel angry and resentful.  I feel relieved and happy.  I feel like I’m feeling too much sometimes.  I don’t miss drinking, but part of me wishes I still did so I could just blot out the next few weeks or so while I get used to being alone.

I started the day on a rough note.  French vanilla creamer in hot coffee.  It’s gotta go.  It reminds me too much of our coffee mornings, back when we actually had them.  When things felt okay.  I think I’ll go back to doing it like I did before, and drink it cold.  I always did like it that way and it’s appropriate with oncoming Summer.

I wrote a list today that I emailed to my therapist.  It is basically a list of all the good things, the positive differences that come about with DSB gone.  It’s four pages single-spaced.  You’d think that if I could come up with four full pages of why it’s better to be alone than to be with him, that I wouldn’t be having any problems.  I guess that’s not the case.

The night is the hardest.  And the morning.  And around lunchtime.  It’s all hard, who I am kidding?  Even though I know he didn’t treat me well for the most part, my predictable life is gone.  I can do what I want now, and I am doing what I want.  I stayed out tonight ’till dark, and DSB would never have allowed that.  It worries me a little that I might mess up my sleep schedule, but I don’t know who I’m kidding with that one since I’m not sleeping anyway.

There are some things that have to be dealt with.  Like the big project boat sitting out in my backyard.  I’m tired of looking at it; get a big ol’ pang in my chest when I see it everyday.  I tried to tell Mom and the Big Dawg that it was killing the grass, but Mom cut straight to the chase.  She knows why I want that boat gone.

Kind of like all the welding projects he had in the works for people.  They’re all sitting up in my garage.  I can hardly stand to go in there.  I don’t know how those people are gonna get their stuff, half-finished, that they have already paid for part of.  I don’t have their contact information and I doubt DSB is doing anything about it.  It makes me feel a little sick to my stomach, but the Big Dawg said he would take care of any issues.  I’m supposed to just send people down to the bait shop.  He is saving me there, but that’s not unusual.  He saves me on a daily basis.

What I can’t seem to get over is why I was treated so badly, when I tried so very hard to make him happy.  I did everything around the house, cooked his favorite meals, brought him his dinner, refilled his glass, did all the grocery shopping, stopped almost every day and picked up (and paid for) something to drink, to eat, to have.  I rarely got more than a thank you, and I often got nothing.

Mom had Rock, our main employee and the son they’ve never had, over tonight when I was there.  We’ve always been acquaintances, never really talked about anything.  But you know, the things he said, he wants to help me anyway he can and he really does care.  It’s nice to have people who care and it makes one wonder why sticking to someone who obviously didn’t care for so long happened.

I was feeling really crappy toward the end of the evening and he came inside and ate dinner with me while QoB and the Big Dawg sat out on the deck, and we had a really good, meaningful conversation.  I felt a million times better after talking to him, and I know that was his aim.  He is going through something similar with his girlfriend, and we can just relate to each other.  I can see that in time I might start feeling like he’s my brother, too.  I don’t blame Mom and the Big Dawg for wanting to adopt him, at all.  He’s just that good of a kid.

It’s just nice to feel like people care, is all I’m saying.  I spent a long time feeling like the main person in my life didn’t care, no matter how much I did for him.  That is a bad and empty and hollow feeling.

I don’t want to feel that way anymore.

 

Now when  I’m feeling spunkier, this is the song I’d like to dedicate to DSB.  I’ll probably listen a few dozen times and then try and get some sleep.

 

Creating Fictions

 

I know now, my family saw right through him.  My excuses for why I couldn’t do something, be somewhere.  The reason was DSB.  I spent hours and hours and hours creating, in my head, this lovely relationship we had together.  Sure, it did have it’s high points.  He helped get me through one of the roughest bipolar patches I have ever had.  Does that mean that I owed him what he put me through after?

Surely not, but I can’t help but beat myself up that I went along with it for so long.  He never had money for groceries or to put gas in my car (that he used frequently).  This year, I tried to celebrate Valentine’s Day and our two year anniversary, buying him well-planned gifts.  I didn’t so much as receive a card.  Or even an acknowledgement.

He kept me from my family.  He badtalked them and tried to turn me against them.  At times it was almost as if he had succeeded.  I grew more distant from them, went to fewer family dinners, but bore the brunt of things when I decided to do things my way.  This IS my life, is it not?

I can understand couples wanting to do things tomorrow, but I will never, and I mean NEVER totally lose myself to a man, ever again.  I won’t give up what I believe in, I won’t forsake my family, and I will not allow myself to be bullied into doing any of the above.  I won’t take anymore emotional, psychological, or verbal abuse.  I will paint the picture as it is, and not hide all the desperately bad things from the people who know me best.

They’re not fooled anyway.  Only I was.  I was deluding myself into thinking we had something great.  We did have a deep connection, but it was all based on me doing exactly what he wanted me to do.  Things had to be a certain way.

The only person that has been allowed inside my house in the last two years, other than my mom, (and my dad once), is myself, Kizzie, Rascal, and him.  He isolated me and I am only seeing that now.  I am just so damn mad and disappointed in myself.

How many abusive relationships am I going to go through, year on end, until I learn my lesson?  Until I learn that being a couple d0esn’t mean I have to lose myself or what I believe in?  That there is doing nice things for your partner, and being your partner’s slave?  When will I get that?  I don’t know.

My hope is that I’m going to shake off the MEH soon and get started with building my life again.  I went to dinner at my mom’s tonight and just got home around 9:00.  DSB would never have allowed that.  But here I am, and I’m FUCKING FINE.  I’ll still get up in time for work tomorrow, still do my evening routine, still do the things I need to do to stay sane.

I was looking through “wallowing” in Google Images, and so much of it was things like, “Quit being a bitch and stop wallowing.”  Well, I’m not wallowing.  I’m thinking right now.  I’m thinking of what I want my life to be like, how I want things to go.  I’ve come up with three things that I am going to start implementing on a regular basis:

1) Walk Kizzie every day, even if it’s just around the property and back

2) Pay more attention to how I spend my free time and dedicate more time to meaningful activities.

3)  Say yes.  Say yes to invitations to do something.  Say yes when normally I would say no.  Just say yes.  Get out there, do something, be something.

I don’t feel super-positive right now.  I feel sad and angry and lost.  I feel confused.  What I don’t particularly feel is anxious, which is a big change from the last several months.  I feel like I am putting on a brave face when in fact my entire world is crumbling.

Because, ya know, IT IS.  The way I’ve lived the last two years of my life was not healthy.  And there was a structure and a rhyme and a reason to it.  And now I have to break through all of that and learn to be Rose again.  Rosa, Rose, Rosie…she needs to come back, through all of this bullshit.  A phoenix rising from the ashes, if you will.  There is a little tug at the back of my brain begging, “just come back, just come back.”  I’ve been single and  perfectly happy and healthy before.  I know I can do it.  What I have to do is to do it on MY terms.

 

 

 

 

When it Officially Fell Apart: 16:30, April 30

Do you ever find you get in the same argument with your significant other, over and over?  There are always promises to do better, to change, to love more and control less.  In our case, they never happened, those promises.  They never bore fruit.

Just fifteen minutes after writing my last post, Uncertainty and Anxiety, I confronted DSB about why he never shows me any affection.  This is a common argument.  He had no answers, but told me I was the most selfish person he had ever met, including his ex-wife.  He said several other degrading things, mean-spirited comments, and then I guess I goaded him into leaving me.  That’s how he puts it.

What happened was more like me asking why he would want to be with someone he felt so negatively about, and him saying “I guess I’ll leave then.”  We’ve had this roundabout discussion numerous times.  If you have so many bad things to say about me, DSB, then why the FUCK are you still here?  I think that’s a valid question.

He said more mean things, and even brought my beloved family into the mix.  After hearing him spew bile about just what he thought about them, and about how my family didn’t care about me, not the way I thought they did, I had enough.  I told him I wanted him out, just as he said he’d be out by tomorrow.

As Dad said, funny how ballsy people who get their checks on the 1st are, right before they get their check.  I agree, Dad.

Do I think he’d been planning this for some time?  Yes and no.  We’ve been trying to make things work, but as my mom pointed out, this was just yet another abusive relationship.  Having to be certain places at certain times, not being able to have company over often, not being “allowed” to go to my mom’s whenever I wanted, having to have “permission” to do so many things.  Controlling.  Very.  Add to that the yelling and the name-calling and the blaming?  Yeah, it’s probably an abusive relationship.

And like an idiot, I let it go on for two years.  Two years of him not paying a single bill, living rent-free, making me do all the w0rk, and trying to keep me from my family.  Badmouthing people I cared about all the time.  Who does that?

I’m now several hours post-breakup and I’m feeling very sad.  I’m crying a lot, thinking about the good times we did have and wondering what I did to fuck that up so badly.  Petting Rascal, who I will probably never see again after tomorrow.  Looking at the one picture he allowed me to take of us, some two years ago.  Remembering how deep those feelings ran, and to a point, still do run.

I feel like I am losing my best friend, but I know that a week or a month down the road, I’ll see things differently.  I know I’ll realize how negative he was for me, how much he hurt me, and mostly, how unloved he made me feel.  Unlovable.  Seems to be my thing.

I guess on an upside, maybe all 0f this anxiety will quiet down.  Maybe I can sleep at night and not be bound to my home, by someone who never wants to go do anything or see anyone or go someplace.  Maybe someday I’ll realize that I’m worth more than that.

But for right now, I’m going to be sad.  It’s the end of the DSB and Rosa era, and we did have some good times.  He did pull me through some bad times, but I don’t owe that to him forever.  I pulled him through some of the worst times in his life, with nary a thank you.  It just seems really sad that what always seemed like a fairytale to me ended how it did.  When he showed who he really was and I failed to speak up when he labeled me things I am not.

I’m sorry this is so all over the place.  I’m really feeling emotionally wrecked right now and I can’t stop crying.  I’ve talked to Mom and the Big Dawg, and I just got off the phone with my dad.  My mom asked me if there was anything she could do.  My dad asked if there was anything he could do.  Other than making this better, fixed, which is not possible, please just say a prayer for strength for me.  If you don’t pray, that’s fine.  Send a shout-out into the Universe or light a candle or chant.  I really don’t care.  I need to find some peace so I can heal, and that doesn’t look too likely, at least for tonight.

It’s all I can do to keep from running in the other room and telling him to stop packing.  I was laying in bed when I heard NCIS: Los Angeles come on.  That was one of OUR shows, and he is in there watching it without me.  This is going to take a lot of getting used to, but it will be easier when he is out of MY house.  MY HOUSE.

Dammit.  There is nothing more to say for right now.  I need to cry some more and then try and get some sleep.  I just wish I could stop crying and suck it up.  Sometimes, even T-women have to cry, right, Madre?  xoxo

 

Uncertainty and Anxiety

 

I have to keep repeating that, like a mantra, to keep from face-planting on the floor.  Because that’s what I feel like doing.  Giving up for the day.  This has been a uneventful day, but I have felt such creepy crawly anxiety.  As a matter of fact, I have been feeling ever-strengthening anxiety day in and day out since before DSB went to the hospital for his blood clots almost two months ago.

I can’t help the thoughts in my head, can’t make them go away, that’s for sure.  What DBT teaches you to do is to picture your thoughts as if they are leaves floating down a gentle bubbling brook, and just notice them as they pass.  I alter this exercise some by envisioning myself blowing the leaves down the brook so they go away faster.  It’s a conscious pushing away of these thoughts.

These negative thoughts that are not helping me. Maybe if I could make myself more willing, I would make progress.  I am willing in so many ways, but I don’t seem to be able to give up the belief that I can control life as it is happening around me.  That is not willingness, it is willfulness, sitting on your hands instead of getting up and taking appropriate action.  It is defiance and stubbornness, it is me personified.

It took 32 years of life circumstance and genetics to bring me to where I am now.  Have some of my life circumstances been less than stellar?  Of course, obviously, absolutly.  I just can’t get over the feeling though that I should stop being such a little bitch about it, crying all the time, and just get over it all.  I mean, some of this stuff happened over a DECADE ago.

Why can’t I let it go? Why can’t I trust?  I ask DSB about something, and when he says, “I’ll take care of it,” I don’t believe him.  I can’t believe him.  It makes me more anxious for him to say that than to just deal with it on my own.  So am I better off alone?  Or is it better to say yes to whatever this love thing is that we have, and walk down a happy path together?

I have doubts about me and DSB.  Will his health ever really improve?  Can I handle being with someone who has the health of an 80 year old?  When is the next shoe going to drop, the next hospitalization, the next list of things he can’t do?  The uncertainty with DSB keeps me up at night, as he shifts over and snores beside me. I love him very much, but sometimes I don’t know if that’s enough.

How and when will I know, if that’s enough?  Will I figure it out next week or will we be five years down the road and it’ll hit me?  It is healthy to have that much doubt in a relationship, to be so unsure, but to love someone so much?  Is it normal?  I mean, does it happen often to people?  I always thought I would “just know.”

Well, I don’t.