My Old Friend

I have depression and I have learned how to deal with it by acknowledging I have it and that it will never go away.  This does not mean I spend my life in the doldrums, weepy eternally on the inside with despair and negativity towards everyone else.  I have good days.  I have great months.  I have really shitty weeks sometimes.

The way it works for me is depression is like another soul.  I can feel the presence of this entity.  She sometimes hangs around in the background and I just try to ignore her.  I acknowledge that she is there, I respect her, though I do not care for her visits.  She never tells me how long she’s staying.  She never has a plan to work through. She makes things mentally difficult and I feel like I don’t have a choice.  She literally steps in and takes over the controls. It can feel violating. When depression is ready to step from lingering to my left, I absorb her and its like I am viewing the world through my eyes and I can access what is going on mentally that she is going through but I don’t know why.  

I spend a lot of the time in depression now just seeming to walk around in a fog trying to pick up a bunch of shattered pieces to make them whole again.  And I do so like a concerned mother.  While I can ‘see’ what is happening to me emotionally, I literally can’t do anything to overpower it.  I have to just let it happen.  I have to just end up sobbing in the bathtub for twenty minutes over something that happened earlier that day.  I have to do my best to control the massive irritability that comes with it because its exhausting.   She sets up camp and I try to help her through whatever she thinks she needs to go through. 

I can see her out of the corner of my eye sometimes and I can tell her firmly to go away.  It works mostly but its temporary.  She’s letting me know she’s coming and with a mutual respectful relationship, she needs to respect my boundaries as well. 

I was recently triggered by seeing a former uncles name on facebook supporting his sons recent troubles by offering to ‘come on down there with a baseball bat”. He’s 60+ years talking about beating trashy 30 year olds.  It’s small town shit drama from the undereducated and idiotic.  So I told cousin not to invite other bullies to the playground because thats just stupid.  Then I publicly posted how “if you think children are too young to remember someone who beats the crap out of women, you’d be wrong because children see, hear and remember garbage.”  Shut off the app and walked away for two days.  When I was a small child this piece of shit used to beat my aunt and my mom.  He belongs rotting in jail and as far as I’m concerned it makes me sick to my stomach he calls his sperm donation “son”. Any of his kids.  He’s a foul asshole and I was severely triggered by his presence in my world. 

I have been feeling very emotional about being alone.  I really thought after COVID eased up I’d be out and about and be around people and it has made me realize, people just don’t want to be around me.   I take off a day two months in advance to be told three weeks later they have other plans and can I move my day off?  That takes two months to plan?  I mean I literally have no plans and they know it.  I tell them all the time how open I am.  I make suggestions for things I want to do with them and then I see them post pics on facebook of them doing the activity, with someone else.   When I have a long, bad day at work, I get to walk into my apartment and sit and cry before I have to do all the things I need to do because I have no help.  

I am watching literally everyone around me celebrate success and happiness and achievement and I am sitting here just thinking I’m supposed to feel grateful nothing bad is happening to me right now.  

And its bullshit.  

No one would be able to afford any of these life goals on their own. NONE. I can’t even plan a vacation because I have no one to go with. It’s so awesome watching everyone else get to go on trips and get new cars and take vacations, buy new furniture, have a fucking companion to share and talk to.  A coworker and my boss just got engaged as well.  Everyone around me gets to be happy.  I’m truly happy for them, I am.  I don’t want them to have less, I want to know why I have to fight for everything and just pray it doesn’t blow away while trying to tell myself there isn’t something glaringly hideous about me that makes me completely unattractive to others. 

Tried the very forward flirting thing, its a no. 

It’s always a no.

  

So I know why depression is here now.  I went from being triggered to a piece of shit human to reflecting on how right after that my aunt found a forever love. Someone that supported her and was her partner.  Raised her kids and had his own.  How even that piece of shit has a companion.  Someone who I am sure misguidedly cares for him.  Sure, I am very well aware i have friends that love and support me but if you think that is the same or a replacement, you’d be pretty ignorant.  

Before I always had that little ray of hope or belief that I would find someone in my future. I was going to be happy alone or with someone regardless but it sure would be nice to have at least one healthy relationship in my life where i wasn’t being controlled. I felt I was an attractive, healthy woman.  I don’t see why I should have to settle.  My bills are paid by ME. 

I have been relearning to trust my instincts over the past two years because the last narcissist really did a number on that realm and I can honesty say, that feeling of hope that I will have another relationship in my life, is non existent.  When I reach out my feelers to that area, its just            Gone.  Not a negative space, just like looking at big empty space.  As if that path I had in my life, all the achievements have been unlocked for what I need and the universe just swept away that road.  I can look at the space and still define its purpose though.  

I have to be ok with this.  I don’t have a choice. I can continue to put myself out there and I will hold on to what I feel my value is.   I am learning to try to find ways to be satisfied without human companionship but its never a replacement.  I now have difficulties imagining a man touching me physically and the word ‘asexual’ has been floating around my head quite a bit more than I would like.  

So this time when I noticed depression hanging about, I watched her for a minute and felt irritated because things were going SO well.... but when I broke down sobbing with that overwhelming emotion of being sad and angry and jealous and self pity and no one to turn to, 

She listened to me. 

She held me. 

We cried together and she reminded me that it was ok to feel upset, to feel angry and to feel shit on.  All very valid emotions to acknowledge and use to make ourselves better overall. 

I knew it was going to be a long difficult weekend for me with my depression but she is a valued friend of mine.  

Endings and new Beginnings

Well, we’ve had a plague.

We had a plague and my life has changed very little except I am busier at work more than i have ever been.  

It has been drilled into me in more ways than one that I have no option than to open my own business for my own future health, so mentally, I am pretty firmly wrapped up in asking the universe to open up for me to have this because I have been sitting on some serious stagnancy.  While reaching for other things that just won’t come to fruition, while trying to follow my instincts more, it is my last option.  

Literally for my survival.

 

And I fucking hate that.

I feel like the asshole kid who has to come back and clean up a mess they made while left to their own immature decision making abilities.  

I mean, I’m only 45.  People have been telling me to open my own place for 15 of my last 25 years of the job.  Ive wasted a lot. 

And since this space is specifically for my relationship journey, or lack thereof, it has come to mind a lot how much of myself I wasted on others. 

I look back at any, literally every, relationship I have had romantically, and see how it has held me back.  It’s a painful reflection. It means I have to confess the people I loved, were not nice people. 

In between relationships i have recognized where I was taken advantage of, in some cases on a criminal level. 

Rape.  

Theft.

Physical damage. 

Something happened recently where my ex husband “ranted”?, to my ‘son in law’ about how he was upset I went to marriage counseling with an ex but not him. 

SO. MANY. RED. FLAGS.  

I NEVER went to counseling with anyone other than HIM. 

We went to a counselor named Jennifer who was pregnant and the office was located behind a salon I worked at. 

We paid $50 a visit cash.  

I. Was. Floored.  

As was my daughter who was disturbed and felt it necessary to drop words like “incel” and “uncomfortable” in the way her father made her feel towards women. 

Emotions echoed by my son living with him who is, quite frankly, “done listening to him rant about mom”. 

we have been divorced over 15 years.

I NEVER cheated on him and you would be shocked and appalled at what that fucking asshole has put me through over the years I was with him.

We were married for 10 years, I was 18, 22 when I became pregnant so this was no, “emergency” wedding.  I left being born and raised in the Bay Area of California to move to St  Louis, after 20+ years, I STILL am having culture shock......Jesus Christ these people..... all for him.  

In the process he lost a set of Marine Corps dress blues, NOT my fault by any means.  

Bit of a refresher on the ten year span I signed up for....

He wanted to move back home after serving, ok.  I can do that.  California is expensive anyway.

He reenlisted and we end up in Fort Hood TX, baby on the way.

Baby comes, guess who I find having secret conversations online with women on Webtv? 

Me.

He is getting ready to get out on disability, I’m taking my baby home to California for the two months it will take for him, for us to “get right”. 

Surprise

I get a phone call from St. Louis, he isn’t coming, he ditched all of our belongings, he doesn’t want to do this.  

Oh hell no. 

 

I grew up with a father that didn’t want me and I was gonna be damned if my daughter was not going to know her father either did or did NOT love her.  

I feel really fucking stupid for believing after all those years he just didn’t “know” me. 

My dad did not want to be a part of my life and he showed me in SOOOO many ways.  This is a literal theme in my life now.  

This is what we label “daddy issue”, so thank you for giving that to us....

I knew K loved her and so yet again, I made a plan, I needed to save up some money to move back there. 

I had had custody of our daughter for 18 months and I needed two months max of pay to get where i needed so he took our daughter to his parents in St. Louis for the time.  I made him sign a paper in front of a notary public saying this was the deal.

I was visited at work one week later by a court server, telling me I was being sued for “child abandonment”

My bank account was wiped out for over two grand I had been saving up because he was still on the account. 

My mother at the time was a meth addict.  On disability taking care of a mentally retarded son, she was a “functioning” drug addict, a life of darvon addiction and severe psoriatic arthritis, she was hitting yet another bottom and another reason I needed out.  She also during the time did her best to spread rumors that I was on drugs and needed to be contained, I did none at the time, not even drink.  

People bought this.  

I did for me.  

I needed to protect my brother and her so I felt I could not fight back. 

So I move back to St. Louis, after a year we end up with another babe, i am full mom mode.  

We buy a house, we are doing life shit, he is talking to women online. 

I am 200 pounds of woman who just had a baby three months ago, who finds chatter with the bag boy at the grocery store and as were are leaving, I get asked “how long you been fucking him?”

Are you fucking kidding me?

I am taking the kids to *enter family fun place here* wanna go?

“No, I have blah blah blah to do.”

So I fill the kids and the wagon and head off for the day with the kids to come home to find blah blah bah hadn’t been done.  

Ok

We are done. We have grown apart.  I want out, you wanted to be tied to something. Got it, we are grown now.

We have a discussion in the garage, its mutual, it sucks but we love our kids, we can be mature.  

I tell him we can get this done with a mediation.  Easy. Peasy. 

I start a new job because I want to get into nursing. This is a career shift of ten years, its rough.  I have worked two jobs while he went to school to get a degree in networking,   

I befriend a guy at the work that I start to confide my unhappiness in.  

He is gay.  

K has been logging my keystrokes on the computer.  

Again.  

Tracking phone info.  

Like some kind of fucking asshole. 

I don’t care.  I’m out.  I’m done.  He can have the house, yeah, Ill take on that debt, I just want out.  I cant’ be a GOOD parent if I am unhappy.

so this asshole.....

Shows up at my work one day telling me our divorce is ready, I need to PAY HIM to get it finalized.  

Wait.

Listen to what this dick did.

He went to a lawyer an ordered that I have to pay HIM for health care insurance for our kids.  

He bitched in front of the lawyer that I should have to pay him for a month of rent while waiting for me to move out.

I shit you not, the douchebag lawyer himself laughed at that...

When he tells me I have to pay for this when NONE of this was necessary? No.. YOU pay for it.  

so to say 15 year later, he has had NO relationship AT ALL and to come up with this? And to scare my kids? 

To act like I didn’t give 110% or more ever didn’t exist? 

I was catapulted into a fear wrapped bomb of what the fuck he is doing to my son? 

K and I were together 9 months before marriage, its a shitty competition, believe me.  when my daughter voiced being upset by her dads words, i was taken instantly to a memory of when we were dating and he had happened to read my diary. He had gotten so pissed off and jealous of something I had written before I even knew him, i told him I was devoted enough to him he could burn it.  

I took my hello kitty diary out into the backyard and I doused it with lighter fluid in the bbq pit.  I handed him the lighter and solidly stood there. 

My moms boyfriend at the time, the one who would leave her for her best friend of over 20 years and cause her major breakdown, was at my moms window trying to tell me not to do this, it was stupid and K needed to calm down, i overheard my mom saying ‘Just let her do what she thinks she needs to do...” talking Ronnie out of intervening.,,

I burned that stupid diary.  and it didn’t matter. 

I was constantly accused of cheating.  Of looking for another.  Of finding better companionship,  we drove through Yellowstone national Park at one time while I sobbed the whole way while he yelled and accused me of NOTHING. I had sought a relationship with my kids. 

When I was working at a nursing home, caring for others who needed it, I got a call from my then husband at the time telling me he was throwing all of my belongings out on the street, after we discussed we would be divorcing, I had to leave early.  I had to leave that career. Because I was talking to a gay man. 

Four years later i enter into what would be a VERY controlling covert narcissist relationship. 

Which led me to the ultimate, narcissist.  

And I am still ashamed to say, still controls me.  

I am consistently being told the same message and ultimately i came home today with a message that seems pretty familiar.  

Me talking to me, reassuring, alone is ok.  

yeah its great to have someone to talk to , have someone to reassure you, have someone you support that supports you in what you want to do.

I mean yeah, you get to log onto Facebook and have it bombarded to you how great it is to have a love and support and special and a cheerleader and a lover all while recognizing that even after spending literal YEARS with people that I provide this to, if has not been provided to me. 

All I have to look to for inspiration in my life has had inspiration and support from others like myself. 

I don’t have that.  

I’m pretty scared and shameful. 

It’s pretty clear i don’t make great decisions.  

Did I tell you about the time i went out on an internet date with someone who years later asked how we knew each other when he began heavily trolling me, 

again ? 

I overtly flirted with a man today who has not interest in me.

Again.

Still hurts even though you know your just destined for failure.