Raw and Unfiltered like Vinegar

So recently my long term relationship ended and I’m learning to handle things, as well as question who dropped me on my head. Relationships are hard, but breaking up is just as hard. We had lived far too long together making each other miserable and it needed to end. The abruptness of the universe saying what the fuck are you waiting for and pushing me out of the plane without a parachute was jarring to say the least, but fly or die right?

Things weren't good between us, so even though in my gut I knew to quote Abby Sciuto… "there was something hinky going on" my brain said shut up and bury your head in the sand a little longer. Then some things showed up that made the sand too hard to stay in, so I looked for what I already knew, ain't intuition a bitch. Of course I found several things, but the icing on the cake was the lovey dovey chats with a women, who as I read more and more was them talking about the meet up they had, but I stopped at first, mad, sad and betrayed, but my brain is wired to need to know the things, all the things so eventually, I went back to the beginning, read it all,but not right then. If something is broken and not an easy fix I want to take it apart to figure out how it worked, I need to and maybe that understanding will have meaning. So I stewed for a little bit, I cried, I packed up some clothes for him, I consider burning down the house or throwing his stuff out the window, I Facebook stalked her page and pulled her up on messenger, my rational brain said “don't do it” so I paused and wandered around for a little bit and ended up right back at my chair staring at my phone so I typed a message and stared at it knowing that with all their daily chats it would be noticed. So I sent it and waited a few minutes and then hopped back over to old Facebook and I friend requested the person sending love notes and sleeping with the person that I had shared over half my life with. Then I waited, it didn't take long for the text between them to start flying in, she wanted to know why his ex was sending her stuff ? Ex huh, not quite darling. There were I'm sorrys and I meant to tell you and it's you I love texts, but none to me from either of them. So I messaged her again with a little bit of my hurt. I said that I knew he didn’t seem to care about me, but that it hurt more than I thought it would. Crickets on messages to me, they had a few new messages between them and him pointing out that my message proved he didn't love me.

So I sat and waited, waited for him to come home from work, waited for an explosion, waited for my life to turn further upside down, waited for the flood of anger. The anger I was hoping for didn't appear, just a hurt and betrayal that I am still trying to figure out how to process now. The explosion never came either, 28 years of my life just quietly imploded, there was no real yelling, just sad acceptance of the end of an era. No apologies, no fight, no lets try and talk about this. Just the realization that the distance was so great that there wasn't a bridge, it had washed out while we were both just wandering along in misery and we didn't notice. The waves of emotion that washed over me made me physically ill and I rushed to the bathroom to throw up. As I crouched on the bathroom floor holding the porcelain throne of despair I remained there crying, unable to stop. After a short time he just said he was leaving and he opened the safe to remove his money and walked away. He left his pillows that were on the couch, the bag with items of his and focused on the most important things to him: his money and escape.

After a while I went back to my chair and did what I do best, write down my feelings. I crafted a message that I didn’t necessarily intend to send. I just needed to get it out of my system. I wrote a message to her about some of the truth of our relationship, not the whole unvarnished truth, the truth that would somehow allow her to continue their relationship. I'm still not sure why, because during the whole thing he seemed to care more about her than about me? Because maybe he could be happy ? Because it's been my job for so long to ease the path for him that I don't know how not to? Because apparently I like self torture? Part of me wonders if it was fair to give her only part of the story, part of me still wants to Paul Harvey her with the rest of the story. The angry person who was unhappy with everything, the man who felt perfectly comfortable insulting me to our friends time and again. The person who somehow managed to extinguish my light because the glare annoyed him. Part of me hopes she figures all that out for herself and the other part hopes she never does and that I was just not the person he needed to be whole. That he can be better, for himself, for our children, for our friends and family.

So now I struggle with questions, doubts, with self worth and how to keep moving forward without parts of my life that have been there as long as I can remember. I struggle with emotions that I’ve repressed for so long trying to stay strong and just keep swimming. Emotions that I don't think I was ever taught how to handle and they refuse to go back into their tidy little package.

As always I will carry on, I'll pick myself up off the ground and dry my own tears and buy my own flowers. I started therapy, because I recognize that I need it for me, to be a better version of me. Because I'm raw and damaged and I don't want to continue being broken and I don't know how not to be. I have found that my children will try to slay dragons for me, to make sure that nobody else gets to kick me while I'm down. They expressed that in the time since it's happened we both seem happier, that we needed to not be together and that helps. There is light at the end of the tunnel, it's possible it's happiness, it's always possible it's a freight train, I guess only time will tell.