It's Late, And I Need To Write

I have no idea what to write about, but I can feel the words and the tears welling up in my mind and my heart. I do not know where these things, the words, so often accompanied by tears of joy and sadness, come from.

I turned 44 yesterday. Birthdays are not something I have particularly enjoyed since I was about 16. That was a very bad year for me. That was the year I claimed PTSD as my own. Later, undiagnosed Bipolar disorder would emerge like a caterpillar becoming a twisted version of a butterfly. I lost myself that year, and the few years following are fuzzy with drugs and alcohol as I attempted to blot out feeling. I never did succeed in blotting out feeling. All I felt was anger; rage at a world that could allow this to happen to a child. I still rage at the world that allows children to become a victim first, and then, slowly, a survivor, if that is what you want to call it.

I finally have a date for my disability hearing. Two weeks after my birthday, one year after the medical review of my disability began, seven months after the “official” declaration of my medical improvement. I do not feel new and improved. I still feel like my life has been steamrolled like newly poured asphalt. It is just in Technicolor these days due to medication designed to make me stable and mad all at the same time. I do not think these bureaucrats have any idea what it is like to be up and down at the same time. That’s the stability I have achieved; I am manic and depressed at the same time. Does that mean that my symptoms are “managed” or does it represent the only balance I am going to find? 

As I sit here and listen to my Soundgarden Pandora station that plays everything I like from blues to what is now playing (The Red Hot Chili Peppers), I contemplate everything I have not accomplished with my life. Everything had seemed promising a few years ago, weird as my life is, but promising nonetheless. Now, I find myself wondering how to pay the rent next month. I find myself going up against new college graduates trying to find a job. The only thing I have on them is a few years experience. They have MBA’s, degrees in Accounting, Economics, Engineering. I have a degree in Sociology and Psychology. Interesting subjects but just not all that useful when one has worked in financial services for the past ten or so years. 

I have hit that strange place where I am so stressed out that I have achieved a sense of unshakable calm. It is not a pleasant calm. It is an acceptance of the inevitable. I just do not think I am going to be terribly convincing as a severely depressed Bipolar. I hide my illnesses from myself and others so that I may live a semblance of a normal life.This “skill” is not going to serve me well with a committee designed to find the flaws in my argument.

My heart is heavy and weary, and I feel a powerful need to cry. However, the tears refuse to come to my eyes and overflow down my cheeks. So, I remain stoic overflowing with feelings I cannot name, but like a teacup with a crack, they will come out as a trickle at first, and a flood next when the teacup breaks under too much pressure.

Rough Anniversary But I Got Through It

Well, I survived the anniversary. It was a different sort of survival than other break-ups I have experienced. I didn’t get this (depressed is the wrong word, although I did get a prescription for 3 months of anti-depressants) moody when I broke up with other boyfriends and one fiance. Somehow, even though the marriage only lasted about 4 years, I felt more like a failure than when I broke up with my fiance of 9 years. I have been doing a lot of thinking on why that might be, and finally came to the conclusion that I was blamed frequently during the marriage for it’s shortcomings. Usually, it was the fact that I have Bipolar disorder that was blamed. I cannot help that, but somehow, I felt that I should have been less “me” and more of someone who does not live with an Affective disorder. In my rational mind, I do realize that my ex-husband never really did try to understand the disorder, and that is what lay at fault was his lack of understanding, and the emotionally abusive nature of the relationship. I always felt that I was not quite the person he thought he had married, and he tried rather hard to “remold” me into someone that more closely resembled the actors in his little “fetish” movies (I do not need to rehash all of that. There are many posts about that issue). 

Being blamed for something you cannot control but can only manage to the best of your ability is terribly disheartening. When you have a “severe” psychiatric illness, you already feel different than other people, but to be essentially blamed for having it in the first place is not just disheartening, it threatens your self-image, your ego, your self-esteem, and other essential parts of who you think you are. You become your illness because so much emphasis is placed on it. I was not diagnosed in my 20’s when I was engaged for 9 years so the break-up was mutual and fairly friendly. Somehow the diagnosis made this one worse. I truly felt that it was solely my fault that the marriage didn’t work because I had to be hospitalized once (he got very angry when I asked him to drive me to the hospital; I didn’t understand that) because I was playing the “line up the pill bottles and try to decide if there is enough to overdose” game. I was trying to get myself to a safe place. I had already taken too much of my Seroquel and was falling asleep when I asked. He just yelled at me about being sick of all the drama, so I told him I would drive myself (about 45 miles) to the hospital even though I knew I would probably die in a car accident on the way. And, so the relationship went for 4 years. After a month of pondering, I have decided that my Bipolar was just a convenient way for him to take no responsibility for the failure of the relationship. And, I am still not sure about that. 

The Dreaded One Year Anniversary Is Here

Dissolution of Marriage

Today is the one year anniversary of the dissolution of my marriage. I have no idea how I feel today. I do not mean depressed or manic as those are mood states that encompass many other emotions. I am definitely not depressed (well not really depressed; I am always depressed), and I am definitely not manic (at least in any noticeable way). I am something else today. I do not know if I feel sad although I know that would be an appropriate emotion to have, I do not know if I feel somewhat angry that my ex-husband’s behavior forced my hand and made a divorce the only logical thing to do, or maybe I feel both sad and angry. Perhaps, it is a much more tangled set of emotions: I feel sad that marriage counseling didn’t work, I feel angry at him for not taking the counseling and/or my feelings seriously, I feel a certain amount of failure that, in spite of two attempts at counseling, the marriage still came apart. Maybe, I feel a certain amount of relief? That just seems so wrong to feel, though.

I know I am still angry with him for the behavior he engaged in that was really the root cause of the failure. I am trying really hard not to blame him; the behavior he was and is still engaging in is classified as an addiction in the DSM~5. However, it is very difficult for me not to blame him to some extent because I think that everyone has a tendency to point the finger at the other when it comes to things of this nature. He blamed my reactions to his addiction on my having Bipolar disorder (which he never bothered to become even remotely educated about), he blamed it on my lack of ego (if I had no ego, his addiction would not have bothered me to the extent it did, hello), he blamed my reactions on low self-esteem (once again, if I did not have some regard for myself, it wouldn’t have bothered me because I would have been a door mat). He pointed the finger at me and blamed me for his addiction. That still just flat out pisses me off. However, having been an addict of a different kind, I can see the behavior of blaming whoever and whatever is handy, and understand that is part of the nature of addiction.

He doesn’t and will never see it that way until he knows with his heart and soul that he has a problem. It is one thing to know intellectually that one is an addict. It is another thing entirely to own it, make it yours and yours only, and then get help. So far, he has only recognized it intellectually, and with me gone, he sees no reason to stop even though it will impact the next relationship and the next and the next. In many ways, I feel sorry for him that he just cannot see it.

I think also that I feel a sense of loss of self. I am not the same person who went happily into this marriage thinking it would be my one and only for the rest of my life. I have allowed myself to become jaded, cynical and suspicious of the motives of men, in general. I didn’t really realize this until several guys had hit on me, and my reaction to them was to question their motives. They could have been nice guys who just wanted to get to know me. I have been deeply wounded, and I do not know how to heal because the person who hurt me claimed they loved me more than anything else. And, I believed that……for a while. If he had truly loved me, he would have educated himself on Bipolar disorder, he would not have tried to change me from the boots and jeans type of woman I am into a woman who ran around the house cleaning in high heels like some mad version of June Cleaver, he would not have tried to make me look like the women he saw in Texas (of all places; no offense meant). Had he truly loved me, he would have let me just be me. But, he didn’t. 

I think more than anything I am confused. I loved him so I did the things I thought or that he had expressed would make him happy, and I received nothing but blame, emotional and verbal abuse, and shaming in return. And, he wonders why I divorced him. Had he really wanted to, he could have changed for me, or we could have compromised. I always thought compromise is part of a relationship. At least it was in the ones I have been in before him. I am also quite confused by his present behavior. It would seem that he wants to reconcile, and he is being the person he was (for the most part) before we were married. I have no reassurances, however, that he won’t go back to the person he became and, at heart, probably still is. Why can’t this man just be normal like everyone else I have been in long term relationships with? Why the confusing gestures and mixed signals? I dissolved the marriage for a reason, and in my experience, those reasons rarely change all that much.

 

 

Anniversaries

What is it about anniversaries of significant moments in our lives; both good and bad and some that are both at the same time? Is it the mind that remembers these times? Is it our heart that keeps these dates close? Or, are these moments so engraved upon our being that we cannot seem to forget? I only wonder as I have in the past when a significant date is coming up or has passed which of these questions is the true question. Or, if they all have correct answers.

On August 29th of this year I will have been divorced for one year exactly even though the process took a couple of months. What is bothering me is how I feel about it. I feel sad, but I also feel a sense of relief, I feel failure as this is or was the only time I got married, but at the same time, I feel the divorce was successful as it restored me to a form of equilibrium, I feel freedom, but also a sense of being shackled as I now have to start the whole process all over again, and I am not the free-wheeling 20-something that I used to be. I am now a grown woman that will not settle as I used to. I have my ways of doing things that will conflict with another’s ideas about how things should work. I have much higher standards than in my college years. I know exactly what type of man I want, and I am afraid that he got away when I decided to get married to someone that I share very little with. Hence, the divorce that I initiated.

I always believed that I would get married once and only once, and so I waited until I thought the right man had come to me. I still believe that I will marry once and only once because of the trauma that relationship put both of us through, the verbal abuse (he saw it as constructive criticism), the emotional neglect has only begun to heal, to suture those gaping wounds left in my heart and my mind. 

As the date approaches, I feel more and more anxious. I am concerned that I will not meet another man like the one I knew. The man who loved me so unconditionally that he even loved my mood swings, my paranoia, my anxiety attacks, and my being prone to fatalistic thinking. He loved me with all my quirks, strengths, flaws, and craziness. Nothing could rattle this man. If I was having a bad day, he hugged me, kissed the top of my head, said nothing and left, but I felt better. I told him one time that I loved him, only once. His response was “I have loved you for a long time”. He said it once, but he meant it with all his heart and soul. We only had to say it once. It did not need to be confirmed. That we loved each other just was. It scares me to think that there may only be one man like this, only one man who fit so neatly into my heart that I loved him without question, and he loved me in return. Here comes the “what if” question; what if he was the perfect “soul mate” for me, and I for him and I lost him to marry another who was anything but?

I do not like anniversaries at all, but at least now I am old enough to have gained the wisdom that time does not heal all wounds, but it does make them bearable. However, right now, with the date looming just a a little less than a month away, I feel like a scab has been picked off and I have become a member of the walking wounded. I think I have answered my question; these dates are engraved upon our being, and as humans, we will never completely forget. Forgive, yes, forget, no. I do not believe it is our nature to forget. I hope I am wrong about that.

It All Started At Birth ~ Rehab

It got a little painful writing my life’s story and the events that led me to become a very serious substance abuser.  I was trying to mask the feelings I had after being assaulted by my “boyfriend” at the age of barely 16. I did not know at the time that I had developed PTSD, and was verging on having what had been Chronic Depression become full blown Bipolar disorder. I just know that I felt dead inside while at the same time experiencing psychological pain that even years later seemed to much to bear. So, for about six years, I was a “what have you got” type of drug abuser until settling on morphine, cocaine, meth, and crack as the way to deal with my experience. However, all “good” things must come to an end. Sometimes an end that nearly kills you.

I quit doing all drugs (pills, morphine, cocaine, crack, meth) cold turkey. I did not know then that quitting benzodiazepines without stepping down in dosage over a period of time was incredibly dangerous and stupid. But, I would exactly call my behavior at the time intelligent, so it stands to reason that I would not know this little tidbit of information. So, I quit cold turkey; just stopped taking all the medications and street drugs. About five days later, I woke up to go to work, and I was hallucinating. I did not connect it with my brain basically short circuiting due to lack of the benzos that I took by the handful. After about two or three hours, I was feeling sort of okay, but not really. I had stopped hallucinating but the world around me was surreal. Cellophane flowers towering over my head type of surreal. I made it through the workday. I do not have any clue how, but I did it. Around 5:00 pm, I started feeling very weird again, and very, very sleepy. I was at the front desk, and I rested my head on my arms and closed my eyes. I became immediately unconscious. I remember something about that scared the living hell out of me; maybe it was the fact that my eyes were literally jiggling like being in REM sleep but much faster. I came to in a matter of seconds, and went home where my roommates had cleaned the apartment of all drugs. I do not remember going into a Grand Mal seizure. All I remember is washing my face to go to bed, and closing my eyes to wash the soap off my face. I woke up on the floor completely covered in water, and not knowing how I had gotten there or why I was all wet. I had been very fortunate in that I had a friend with me at the time, and he had seen me go into the seizure. I hit my head pretty hard on a small table that was in the bathroom, and my friend was calling my mother to let her know he was going to take me to the hospital. I refused still not really realizing what was happening.

I went to my mother’s house instead where she tried fervently to get me to go to the emergency room. I refused until I closed my eyes again and the jiggling returned. By now, I was starting to become scared so I agreed to go to the ER. Because I had hit my head pretty hard on the way down at my apartment, the ER doctors ordered a CAT scan. In the tube, I once again closed my eyes. I was exhausted. The jiggling returned immediately. I tried so hard to keep my eyes open. I was put into the observation ward just off the ER, and within minutes was unconscious and having another seizure. The last thing I can recall from that night was a bunch of faceless people standing around me asking if it would be okay to put Valium in my IV. I remember thinking why did I have an IV, and answering that yes, putting Valium in the IV was fine. I was out for the rest of the next 6 hours, and awoke very groggy (I have no idea how much Valium the doctors gave me), but feeling somewhat better. I found a nurse that hung my IV on a rolling stand and wheeled me out to the ambulance bay to smoke. Very cool nurse. I fell back asleep when I got back to my bed, and awoke to find my primary care doctor and mother standing over me. My doctor was saying something about going to a rehabilitation center that had a bed for me, and were awaiting my arrival should I choose to go. I chose to go.

This was, perhaps, one of the scariest and most insane places I have ever been mentally. I had not been sober in about 4 years. Literally not a day had gone by that I was not completely high on something since I was 16, and I was now getting ready to turn 20. I do not think that I would ever like to be in that “headspace” again. I had to write the fearless and soul-searing moral inventory of myself, who I was, who I had been, who I had started out as. I had to write every nasty thing I had ever done to another human being while in the throes of my substance abuse. I even shocked myself, though I should not have been shocked. I have always been a kind of gun without a safety. The first 2 months of sobriety found me depressed, scared, unsure of everything, and begging to get high again. If I fought with my mother with whom I was living, all I could think was that just a little morphine would fix everything. All I wanted were my pills and my needles. I thought I had gone insane. But, nope, not insane, just sober and looking at the world and my place in it with an uncloudy mind and clear eyes. I made it through about 9 months of the rehab’s therapy groups until I was reassigned to one that was full of drinkers trying to get clean. I wasn’t a big drinker. I was a druggie, a junkie. I couldn’t understand their dislike of me until one night a man said to me “Well, at least what I did was legal…” Then, I figured it out. What I had done was against the law and, therefore abhorrent, but somehow being an alcoholic was okay because drinking was legal. So, I asked him how many times he drove home drunk, and how many people had he managed not to kill while driving drunk. He shut up, and I left rehab. I did relapse a couple of years later, but that is a whole different post. This was painful enough  remembering all the things I did and said specifically to hurt people so they could feel the way I did. I lost a lot of friends and I lost myself in the process.

Depressive Episode ~ A "Life Choice"

I have been stuck in blue funk mode for about a month now. After about three weeks of just feeling awful about myself, the world, and my non-productive role in it, I finally broke down and called my psychiatrist to refill my anti-depressants. One has to be very careful administering anti-depressants to Bipolar people; they have been known to kick that person right into the manic phase of the illness. Although, at this point, I am willing to put up with a mixed episode. At least I will have achieved a balanced madness instead of this one-sided version of madness. 

I get very irritable and fatalistic when in the depressive phase of this lovely “life choice” as my Father put it in an email recently. I start to think no one really wants me around, and I start to wonder about what death would be like. However, due to a promise I made 6 years ago to the Universe and all it contains, I cannot actually go through with it. Being a Buddhist, I think that would be a really bad cause that would have Karmic retributions in this life and the next. I cannot believe that my Father called having Bipolar and having your brain swimming in toxic chemicals a “life choice.” Oh that just irritates the living crap out of me. It’s like when people say being homosexual is a “life choice.” How is a chemical imbalance in my brain a “life choice?” I most certainly did not wake up one day about 20 years ago, and say “I think I am going to have Bipolar disorder, and experiment with many psychoactive drugs.” A “life choice.” Hmmpphh. That tells me he doesn’t know the first thing about mental illness. 

And then yesterday, my mother calls, and the gist of the conversation is that I only contact him when I need money. That is so objectively and subjectively not true. I have spent 14 years of my life trying to penetrate his narcissistic shell. That’s about a 1/3 of my life that I have been trying to reach out to him, and let him know how I am doing, what I am doing, and whatnot. Nowhere in these letters have I mentioned financial help. Granted, he did pay for insurance so I would not have a coverage gap, but he stopped that, and I did not plead with him to start again. He was reimbursing for Medicare part B, but he stopped, and once again, I did not go begging for him to continue. No, far from it, I just sucked it up and lived on $126 dollars less per month. So, I sent him an email telling him how much it hurt for him to say that when everything I have written to him recently has expressed appreciation and gratitude which are apparently emotions he doesn’t understand. Neither is humility. And, of course, I mentioned that Mom had told me about his comment. Now my Mother is all chappy because apparently she now feels he won’t talk openly with her anymore. So, I fucked up yet one more time. I just really felt he needed to know that his comment hurt to the bone. So, I schooled him in what it is like to be Bipolar with PTSD, et al. Why does my mother attack me when I am down? That has been her M.O. my whole life. Attack when one least expects it, and not only that, attack one’s character. I mean, after all, I “chose” to be poor and mentally ill.

This state of existence is not what I had in my life plan when I was growing up. I had it very clearly laid out: undergraduate school, and from there my Master’s and PhD. That was my plan. To find a subject that I felt fulfilled me personally, and brought a comfortable income. But, no, that is not how it turned out. I have no idea what these drugs are doing to my cognitive abilities. I know the PTSD rears it’s really ugly head when I am under too much stress. I just do not know if at this point, I would be able to do the research necessary to write a thesis. I do not know if I can hold down a job. If my past history is a measuring stick, the answer would be no. But my parents fail to see this about me. My Father thinks I use him for money when in fact, I have not asked for financial help until now to take care of my teeth, but I am hitting my Mother as well. He is so focused on the fact that he has retire at some point that he can’t see that he makes in a day what I live on for a month. If anything, he is the one who is caught up on money. Every correspondence I receive from him mentions retirement and funding that retirement. He is the President of a fucking University. His salary is a matter of public record. In the 6 years, he has been president they have paid him 2.2 million dollars. That does not sound like hardship to me. But every email. every letter mentions retirement and money. I am not bringing it up. I do not want his money. I want something far more precious: his love and understanding and time. You cannot buy that.

Man, I forgot how irritable I can get when I am in a depressive cycle. I am just waiting for the anti-depressant to start working. That’s all I really want right now is to get out of this overly sensitive, irritable, angry, and sad mood. I do not think it is too much to ask. But, maybe it is.  I am not even looking forward to my birthday. It’s just another day. I have had 43 of these, and I do not see any reason to celebrate my life because my life sucks. Okay, enough of the pity party. 

Well,, my birthday came and went without pomp or circumstance. although a very odd thing happened. Upon checking the mail on my birthday, I was surprised to find a parcel/package locker key. Being a perpetually curious person, I wondered what it could be for since I had not ordered anything, I opened the locker, and there was this rather large box, with a return address that was very familiar. It was a birthday gift from my Father! I was in shock for at least an hour, maybe more. My Father has not sent much in the way of cards for Christmas or birthdays for going on 8 years or so, and the same goes for gifts. I am still in shock and awe at the gift……and it has been about 3 weeks. Now I am baffled because the rules have changed. I suppose baffled is better than depressed.

As I Was Cleaning Out a Bag Yesterday

As I was cleaning out one of my messenger bags to go get some groceries yesterday, I ran a across an old and very battered copy of my marriage license. I have never seen a piece of paper that represented so much hope and so much pain and failure.  It is like getting an ‘F” in Life. I still couldn’t bring myself to throw out this tattered, falling apart water damaged piece of paper. 

It started off really well, we many things are wont to do. And, then it began to go horribly wrong, This piece of paper represents that.

Lost And Confused

From confusion comes opportunity. (Photo credit: wasabicube)

 

 

So, I am not feeling particularly bad about divorcing my ex-husband right now. In fact, we belong to the same Buddhist community and he introduced to this form of Buddhism. Our community is divided across the city into smaller groups or Districts. I am now and have been the Women’s District leader for the group he had practiced with since moving here about 8 years ago. Upon the divorce, he made the choice (thank the powers that be) to move to another District because I sure was not going to give up my group because of him, although I did try for other reasons. But, I was shot down. So, at any rate, for the past month or so, I have been in and out of a fairly intense mixed episode. I cry at the drop of a pin, I am manic as all hell with the motivation of a seriously depressed person. It’s cool. Fucking rocks (pardon my French)……the problem is I still have to do shit.

 

Actually, sitting here listening to Pearl Jam’s “Ten”, the song “Alive” is playing. Always one of my favorites, ever since it was a new song (yes, I am an aging Gen-Xer, and was around to see the very beginning of alternative rock and Grunge.I am getting old…er). Anyway, this particular lyric has always gotten to me, probably because I have been Bipolar for 20+ years and did not know it. At any rate, here’s the lyric: “…..Is there something wrong, she said. Well, of course there is. You’re still alive, she said. Oh, and do I deserve to be? Is that the question? And, if so….if so… who answers…who answers….” (Pearl Jam, Ten “Alive”) For some reason, this lyric has always touched a nerve. Maybe because I don’t feel worthy of life, worthy of happiness (my marriage certainly validated that feeling), worthy of a happy life. Somewhere along the path of my growing up, I decided that psychological torture (both by self and by others) seemed to define the “norm” of my life. This is how confusion has been reached. Confusion is not a state I find my self in often. At least not about emotions. I just choose to not have them if I can possibly avoid them. 

 

However, confusion and complete discombobulation is where I find my self. I do not like it. I do not enjoy this. I choose not to feel for a reason. Feeling has caused me nothing but pain over my lifetime. I do not hold much hope for the same reason. Every time I have dared to hope, it has gone dramatically and catastrophically awry. I seem to find my self in a position where I am actually feeling bad that I divorced my ex. Neither of us put much into marriage counseling (it, I believe was too far gone by then), and as a consequence we paid co-payments for psychologists that couldn’t help by that point. Initially, I thought, he was falling asleep on the couch because he was staying up too late, and then, it gradually dawned. He didn’t want to sleep in the same bed as me. I have these questions that goes around and around and around in my mind: was it his porn addiction or my having Manic Depression that caused the rift? Was it a combination of both? Was it my reaction to what he saw as normal and healthy? He blamed the whole thing on me, always telling me that I was all talk and no action (I had actually been thinking of divorce for a year or so). 

 

Then, the “deal-breaker” fight happened and he threatened me with bodily harm. Lethal bodily harm. I have PTSD. I have an intense fight or flight mechanism; it depends on the situation which one steps up. I also have a fairly “distinctive” career as a substance abuser (see post: “Self-Medication” in the archives). When he said that I was lucky there were no lethal weapons in the house, he was clearly thinking about guns. Idiot. I felt this really scary calm come over me. I have only felt it a few times, and it always involved a threat to me of some sort. I just looked at him, and found him pathetic. I, mean, how dare he threaten my life? As if I was going to let him hurt me? So, I looked at him much like you look at a specimen of algae in Biology class. He had become a non-entity; something to be disposed of. I looked around the room from my position on the sofa, and I could clearly see at least 10 lethal objects not to mention the knives in the kitchen. I asked very calmly what did he mean there were no lethal weapons in the house, that I could see about 10 from where I sat. He was clearly out of his element. I had been a fairly violent child, and it got even worse as my substance use led me further and further down a very dangerous path littered with human land mines. I told him the conversation was over, and I was going to bed. It was 2:00 am. I spent an hour trying to fall asleep, and in that hour decided that I was leaving. He really fucked up when he threatened me because a vital part of my self shut down, and part of that part was my love for him.

 

Which gets me to where I am now. Confused. And emotional. I feel bad for divorcing him because I know he thought I would put up with his shit forever. No, sorry, even my self esteem has a point at which I say no more. I mean, he clearly was hiding from me. He would spend all day locked away with his computer and his porn. Didn’t leave much room for me. So, I filed the first of the paperwork 4 days before my birthday and one month after our anniversary. I have always had a great sense of timing. I think what is bothering me now is that I just don’t feel that bad about it. In my eyes, I was protecting my self from further damage. I isolate the word “self” for a reason. It was the “self” that was being attacked and damaged. I have spent far too much time in therapy, in the hospital, getting medically “stable” to watch it all go down in flames. Maybe that makes me a cold person, but I do not think so. It makes me a survivor, and it makes me someone who wants a life. I feel bad for him, but, at the same time, I do not feel anything. That’s new; I have never just not felt anything. Maybe its because it is the Holidays, and I feel so much that it feels like numbness.

 

Ritual Cleansing

Over Now (Photo credit: Wikipedia), One of my favorite Alice in Links songs, and very apt right now.

So, while I was sitting at my desk yesterday, I think, I looked up at the top of my bookcase for some reason. And, to my horror, i realized that I had saved my wedding bouquet and it was sitting rather blasphemously between a picture of my mother and one of myself, my sister, and my mother. So, I got up, took it down, and threw it out. What do I need it for? It had become useless clutter and a reminder of a failure.

Then, I was looking for construction paper the other day, and was rummaging through a file drawer only to find no construction paper, but rather a mountain of cards given to me by the one who shall remain nameless. I left them there, and figured I would go through them when I was feeling less emotional. So, this evening, feeling less emotional and more stable, I took them out of the drawer, and read them to the sweet strains of Alice in Chains on MTV’s Unplugged series. You know, I do not believe that he ever said, using his voice as an instrument of good, that he loved me. I do not remember a single time where he just said, “I love you”. Yet, he professed deep, and undying love for me in all the cards, even the ones he gave me after he developed his little problem with the Internet.

He never loved me. He loved the idea of me. He was in love with being in love, and when that passed, and the relationship settled into it’s routine, he lost interest. And, it was at that point that what started as a good relationship turned into one that made me sick. Not like icky, flu-type sick, but mentally sick. I became very fragile, questioning who I was, depressed because I couldn’t compete with the Internet (I was too real, I think). I lost myself. Now, I have to find her again. Never again will this happen to me. I do feel better for having thrown out the bouquet and the cards. They were evidence of a huge lie.

I Am The Dark Side Of The Moon

This is the Sine Wave. When it looks like this with equal frequency and amplitude, everything is ducky. It is like being on a gently rocking ocean.

So, my divorce is official, and has been for about 2 months. You would think I would feel relief at being out of a situation so negative and hurtful that I barely survived at times. I do feel relief that I am not being disrespected and degraded by some one who “claimed” he loved me and that he could handle the Bipolar part; he had dated two other women with Bipolar in the past, and in fact, his most recent breakup was with one of those women, they both walked out on him, not the other way around. I find that interesting. All of his longish term relationships have ended with the woman leaving the relationship. Hmmm. 

At any rate, I am finding that I am slowly almost imperceptibly becoming very depressed. I am still at the point where I can hide from people who do not know me well. I am on a fucking roller coaster. One minute I am crying like I lost the last pet on the earth, the next I am thinking ‘hmmm, the kitchen needs cleaning,’ and no more crying for a while. I know that I am still on the okay side of this mood swing because I still care about what I look like, engage in personal hygiene, that sort of thing. The very fact that I do not out the kitchen off until tomorrow tells me I have not fallen………yet. I may still be on the okay side of this particular piece of the sine wave, but that doesn’t mean I won’t slip off.

I know there are many ways that people with manic-depression have devised for themselves when they feel an episode coming on. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, and hooray for them, but what do you do when it blindsides you and cold-cocks you in the face? What are you supposed to do when you both belong to the same religious organization, and you see each other at community events? How the hell are you supposed to heal from everything he put you through and everything you did to him? It’s not like you can decide to be a Zen Buddhist (I am a Buddhist, as an aside), and go climb a mountain and empty your life of all desires both material and those that are more fleeting, and come back enlightened. I mean, hello, most people have some sort of life including myself as unhappy as it has been for a time now. We don’t have time to climb mountains seeking the “way.”

Besides the only thing I can see coming out of that is a lot more money in the savings account due to one’s lack of desire for earthly things. (Sorry to the Zen Buddhists, no offense meant). Then I stop and think about one of the key concepts of my sect of Buddhism, and that is to make a plan then take action on it. Making a plan is great, but what will it accomplish, what will it get you if you do not take action? Nothing.

So, my ex-husband and I had the mother of all of our fights about first week in June. It was one of those fights where you are yelling but then get quiet because you have become so angry, you are afraid to speak. I sat there and let him yell, and I yelled back, until he said “You’re lucky there are no lethal weapons in this house.” I got quiet real fast and kept my butt glued to the couch because within my immediate sight I could see about 5 lethal objects. The next words out of my mouth were calm and modulated. I stated that I had enough of this discussion, and I was going to bed, and he could do whatever he wanted. 

That night I curled up around my teddy bear (yes, I still have one), and I thought very hard about something I had mentioned before in passing fits of temper: Divorce. This time he had not just crossed the line, he jumped over it like he was an Olympic athlete. You do not threaten people with bodily harm. Especially those of us who have PTSD and a very strong fight mechanism. So, that night at about 3 am, I decided that come hell or high water, I was filing by Friday of that week. And, that’s what I told when he woke up the next day, and that is exactly what I did by that Friday.

I said all of that to say this: one can never be prepared for what is going to come unhinged in your mind that will set you up to break. I had been so unhappy in that marriage for two years, and I honestly thought I had worked through all the emotions. I was so wrong. I have been awful. I have been up for a few days then crashing out of the sky for a few more. I feel like the boy, Icarus, in the Greek legend who flew too close to the sun with wings of wax. I feel like I am hanging on to my sanity by the most light and gossamer of threads. I have become the dark side of the moon.