How it's going down...

So much stupid, dramatic and hurtful shit has gone down since I wrote here. I'll sum it up eventually, but for now just have a look at the last-ditch effort I made to get through to her (which had no effect, as expected):

Having talked to [my therapist] and done some serious reflection, I've got some things to say.

I have to get all of this off my chest. In my heart of hearts, I want my saying this to jolt you out of wherever you are; but I have no expectation of that happening. It's the wishful thinking part of grieving the loss of this relationship. Or the bargaining, perhaps. In any case, I want this to all turn around. I want to be with you still. The last thing I ever want to do is hurt you, even if I want you to feel some semblance of the hurt I've been through. I want to strike a chord in you somewhere that makes you rethink all of this. Wish wish wish... Wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first. No matter, I have to get this off my mind, I have to get it out of me.

I missed a lot of the warning signs of oncoming depression. All true, all irrevocable. I certainly didn't handle it well either; I retreated into myself, into WoW, into whatever would distract me from feeling depressed. I quit looking after myself and became a paranoid, smelly, unpleasant person to be around. Such is the very nature of untreated depression. It's also true that our communication broke down, but the real kick in the teeth for me was how you handled it.

You are a narcissist, or at the very least you have narcissistic tendencies (which are amplified by the emotional upheaval of the divorce process). You admit to being a control freak, that should have been a clue for me; but where it really began was way back when we first got together and I offered you the books to read in order to help you understand what I was going through. Your persistant, flat refusal to do so should have set the alarm bells off (EVERY time you refused). When you tried to tell me that you weren't a "strong enough person" to deal with the depression, you really meant that my depression was inconvenient for you and that you couldn't be bothered to learn about it or deal with it in any practical way. It took a while, but I've finally teased out what you meant. The way you said it, it sounded like even YOU didn't believe it. You were saying it just to mollify me and justify to yourself what you were doing.

You're afraid of emotions. You really only want people when they're "happy". Oh sure, you'll tolerate a certain amount of ennui or whatever, but really you're just waiting for happy to come back. You told me that you'd been waiting for three years for me to "be happy". As if you had no part at all in that. Apparently it was incumbent upon me to be happy or else I wasn't being "your partner". I don't think you understand what it is to be a "partner", or a "wife" for that matter. You certainly weren't MY partner. You tried to be a facilitator, you tried throwing time at me, but you never wanted to get involved in any way. You tried to "wait it out". Do you think it might be depressing to have a wife who wants no part of your emotional life apart from happiness? It is!

As an aside, you really take after your father on that count, I think. I've never witnessed him expressing anything but "meh" and mild amusement. He's thoroughly bottled-up, I always detected that there was a wealth of emotions buried down under his insulation. You certainly do you best to insulate yourself against emotions. By contrast, your Oregon family is replete with emotion. Granted, your aunt and grandmother are mostly filled with sorrow and/or indignation, but I think that gives lie to why you can only tolerate them in measured doses. As I said, you'll tolerate a certain about of deviation from "happy", but not for long.

You're afraid of becoming truly, deeply intimate with anyone, because that involves getting into deep, emotional territory. When I was really down, you said you didn't know how to help, you suggested I go see [my therapist] and try to work it out. But what you were saying was, "YOU fix this problem, I can't be bothered with it." When you told me that, "this isn't working for me", that should have been another in a series of alarm bells. When the situation strayed out of your ideal, happy parameters, it was no longer "working" for you. You actually said that to me, "this isn't working for me". Working FOR you. Working FOR YOU. Another way of saying, "YOU aren't meeting my expectations". "YOU have to fix this." "YOU are the problem." It was a tacit profession that you were not in any way responsible for it and shouldn't be expected to deal with it. My life had become an imposition upon you. You wanted to help as long as you didn't have to do anything personally, like sympathizing.

This is not to say that I enjoyed being depressed and "making" you unhappy, but your attitude was all indignation. Where I would have tried to be supportive and compassionate, you distanced yourself from me and took it as a personal affront. It was always my understanding that in a marriage people become intimately acquainted with each other, all the ups and downs, the good and the bad. Worse still is that for each expression of your indignation, I took it as a sign of my own worthlessness and used it to beat myself down a bit further. When you told me that you felt repulsion at the thought of me, it very nearly drove me to suicide; but it was also a signpost pointing at narcissism (to say nothing of being thoroughly humiliating).

Even in the end-game, your continued series of unilateral actions all point to fear of emotions by way of narcissism. This whole one-sided, unilateral divorce... Being a control freak, you have to control the situation to protect yourself. You have to control access, we only talk when it suits you and only about the things you wish to talk about (in addition to forcing me out of the condo). When I tried to press you on your reasons for your decisions, you became angry. Control freaks / narcissists cannot have their motives questioned, otherwise you might have to admit some wrongdoing. You might have to reassess your actions. You might have to FEEL responsible for your actions and how they affect others, you might have to feel anything at all. Controlling perceived truth is very important to you as well, I imagine that "our" friends and your family know very little about the details of what's happened. But if they did, they would surely find out how childish and selfish you're being. Can't have that now, can we? Best to keep all of that on the down-low, strictly "between two people". You have an image to uphold, after all.

Your whole insistance on "being friends" after the divorce further proves my point. Being "friends" afterward would definitely relieve you of any feelings of guilt or responsibility over the whole affair. You cannot abide feeling like you are wrong about any of this. You've got this whole thing all planned out so that all I have to do is sign the papers and go away and you can get back to your perfect, little, self-affirming illusion of happy life. After all, if I should decide that I don't wish to be your friend afterward, that's all on ME and no reflection at all upon you. What a jerk I am! It will allow you to feel some righteous indignation (you've learned that from your aunt and grandmother). Likewise your insistance that you haven't taken any of this lightly rings disingenuous. Odds are good that you've actually thought about this very little, the whole thing smacks of knee-jerk decision making.

So now you're getting everything you want. I look at this photobooth picture of you and your Ultimate friends. You're drunk on happy. You've been bingeing on happy with your Ultimate friends who are only ever happy when you see them. Why suffer the sad guy when you can get yourself tore up on happy with the happy people? Geez, why suffer the sad guy at all? It's best to push out the spectre of emotions and just be happy. Best to push it out.

Treating our relationship (and by extension: me) as disposable once it wasn't to your liking was the deepest cut. Your total refusal to attempt reconciliation bears that out (because it would almost certainly require you to feel a great many things). You have run rough-shod over me repeatedly and I can't imagine that you'll ever appreciate how much that hurts. To the very end I've been totally in love with you; desperate to keep our relationship together. I factually KNOW that you cannot possibly understand how much this hurts, because that would involve feeling something.

Ultimately, you've done all of this in order to protect yourself. You're afraid of emotions and of intimacy of any depth. The very idea of becoming intimate with what I was going through must have been terrifying to you. Likewise you can't allow yourself to feel bad about anything you've done. You can't let it happen, you can't doubt yourself, so you harden your position and become even more unsympathetic, you become dismissive and cold.

I'm willing to bet that this state of affairs has dogged all of your relationships; after all, the only common feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is YOU. As long as this state persists, it's going to not only wreck any relationships you have in the future, it's going to prevent you from ever being truly intimate with yourself or anybody else.

That said, it would have been my great pleasure to become intimate with that part of your personal growth. Marriage is supposed to be a collaboration, a synergy. It would have been unthinkable for me to refuse to be a part of your self discovery and growth. Unconscionable! It might have been difficult, heart-rending work, but I would have done it. I would have been there. That's what marriage is: WORK. So when it came to it, you quit. You quit early on! The reason I became as depressed and paranoid as I did was partly because you pulled away. I definitely felt it and it terrified me. It ultimately prevented me from approaching you, how do you approach someone who's so emotionally disengaged? You were my wife! I loved you! But the more you pulled away, the more depressed I became, who could I turn to if not my wife? It definitely took both of us to get here, but you're the one who threw us under the bus. This divorce is all on YOU.

I sincerely, deeply, truly hope that you deal with your emotional issues (of which the narcissistic tendencies are only a symptom), because they're going to destroy your relationships. You are capable of such lavish affection and love, I miss it so very much. But when a relationship starts to get deeper than surface level (or stray from "happy", or whatever your "plan" is), you disengage and become a cold, calculating surgeon. You excise yourself from the relationship and ultimately discard it. Again, you do this as a means of protecting yourself from truly feeling things, and that is the greatest tragedy. You deserve to be whole and happy as much as anybody on Earth, but until you can genuinely open yourself to the rich pageant of emotions in yourself and others, happiness will exist only as a surface level veneer, a façade; real happiness will forever elude you.