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.

Cowardice, Divorce and YOU (me)

Well, I shouldn't be shocked, but here I am feeling utterly shocked and thoroughly devastated. Interesting aside: I cried so hard that I almost threw up! I don't recommend it to anybody, but it was an interesting sensation.

Jen has decided that divorce is the best way to "work on 'us'". Why do any kind of couples therapy when you can just get divorced? Easy peasy! This is all such bullshit that it practically defies description.

Naturally, my depression is the chief culprit, but she does admit that she doesn't have any idea how to relate to or deal with it. Then again, she actually said, "I guess I'm not a strong enough person to deal with the ADD and depression". This coming from a woman who is without a doubt one of the strongest people I've yet met; which makes this sound to my ears like, "I guess I can't be bothered to deal with your problems or learn anything about them". Refusing to do any kind of couples therapy all the while, mind you; which smacks of cowardice to me.

So, now I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself. I'm going to start boxing up all my shit today and move it into storage. After that, I don't know what. I can't sleep on my sister's couch for long, their place is just too small to comfortably accommodate three adults (one of whom is an intermittently blubbering mess). I have no job (still!), no money and - in a way - nowhere to go. Fuck my life.

Apologies for the Negative Nelly-ism.

3 weeks later...

So, I've been Colorado for nearly three weeks.

I stayed with my brother and his wife and their daughter for the first two weeks, which I loved. It was great to get to spend time with them and feel like I was part of a family. I got to help get their daughter on the bus and help her with homework and stuff. It was easy to "blend" in a bit with them, I felt comfortable there.

So, for the last week I'm staying with my dad and his wife and their son. It hasn't been bad at all, but it's not as comfortable. I haven't spent much time with my dad in the last 15 years or so. Also, their son is kind of a drama-king. He's 14, so it's not totally unheard of, but it's also a bit more than I can handle some days. It's a whole family dynamic which I won't get into here, but suffice it to say that he comes by it honestly via his mother.

It also doesn't help matters that I'm headed back to Seattle soon, to a very uncomfortable situation with no end or resolution in sight. I've exchanged some emails with Jen and had a couple of IM chats, none of which made me feel any better and some of which gave me anxiety attacks.

She says we have "living arrangements" to take care of. This, to me, sounds like "we have to move you out". I'm trying not to be too much of a pessimist about it, but I expect to be told to get all my stuff out when I get back. Ugh. I'm having an anxiety attack just typing about it. The job-market SUCKS, studio apartments (even rooms for rent) are pricey and I have a bank balance in the negative numbers. She may cut me a new check ('cos I never deposited the other one), but that won't magically get me a job or anything.

Speaking of jobs. I had one really good interview, but didn't get the job. A job which wouldn't have paid a living wage and wasn't even full-time. Ugh.

Anyway, I'm truly hating the idea of going back to Seattle, but I can't stay here either. Jobs are no better in Colorado than in Washington.

My therapist asked me if I still wanted to reconcile with Jen. I told her that I didn't know anymore. She said that's totally normal when a person feels hurt. It throws everything into question about a relationship. This didn't make me feel much better, apart from being told that it's normal to feel this way.

Guess we'll see what happens, eh? I have a week until my next appointment with my therapist. Jen's been to see her Microsoft therapist several times in the time I've seen my therapist twice. I'm sure she feels like I'm dragging my feet (psychologically speaking). Well, I'm not sure, but I suspect it. The pessimist in me wonders if the relative infrequency of my appointments will be used against me as a sign that I'm not committed to the process or something. What a dick I am!

Ugh.

Everything sucks and it's all my fault.

Seriously, if you don't want to read awful, angry crap, then turn away now.

NOW.

This post is entirely composed of non-constructive, angry blathering. I'm an asshole for posting it, but here it is.

So, I got really REALLY depressed last February. I lost an entire summer to it. I played retarded Warcraft and moped. I spent the better part of the fall doing the same thing.

Somewhere in there, my wife tells me that she's no longer attracted to me. Ouch. I'd become a depressed, fat fuck. I couldn't say that I blamed her, but it still stung like hell. It still does.

Instead of using that pain for introspection and then refocusing it into action for getting healthy and resuming therapy, I used it as an excuse to pummel myself even more and sink ever deeper into depression. Such is the way of depression. It sucks. Given that I had stopped sitting and stopped getting regular therapy, I wasn't able to intercept all of that shit happening. It just ran me over and dragged me along.

A bit later on Jen tells me, after some romantic overture or other, that she doesn't think of me that way anymore. OUCH. That's fucking great. See above paragraph for the repeating pattern. Pummel, sink, pummel, sink ad nauseam.

Now she wants me to move out. OUCH OUCH OUCH. My sister offered that I could sleep on their floor as needed, and I have done periodically. But they have a one-bedroom apartment and I know it makes them uncomfortable to have me there. Rather, I think it makes them uncomfortable. My sister denies it categorically, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm a big imposition on them. So, unwelcome at "home", an imposition away, I really feel like I have nowhere to go. NOWHERE. I also have no job. Jen wrote me a check for three grand, just to get me out of the condo (FUCKING OUCH), which is convenient for her, being that she's the one with a job and resources et al. I haven't cashed it, fuck that. I've looked at studio apartments, rooms for rent, but nobody wants an unemployed person. On top of that, I'm a good deal older than most people who advertise rooms for rent are figuring on. Let's see, rent to the student or the creepy, old guy?

So, she says she can't work on the relationship until I've "proven" to her that I can look after myself and that she's "reconnected" with whatever it is that she wants to do with her life. This sounds plausible, but it also sounds like she's looking for confirmation and permission to hammer in the last nail. Everybody I've talked to says that this is exactly backwards of the way these things are normally resolved. I have to take their word for it, I've never done this before.

It's my understanding that Jen has never had to deal with depression in her family before. With a couple of notable exceptions, her family is almost relentlessly content. Contrast that with my family: All of my sibs (except my youngest sister, as far as I know) have the same abiding, chronic, low-grade depression. I didn't think any of my family would know how it felt to want to throw yourself in front of a bus, but it turns out that most of them really REALLY do understand. Scarily so.

When we first got together, I offered Jen a couple of books to read that explain how these things work and how to understand what's going on. She declined. When we first got together I was getting regular therapy and was sitting at least once daily. I was on top of it. As things got worse and I quit being on guard about my mental state, I offered again. Declined. Now that things are all but in the shitter, I offer again. Now she says it's too late. How fucking convenient.

She said she never knew if it was depression or laziness or the ADD (or whatever). I tell her it's definitely depression, but I know (again, I feel) that it sounds like an excuse to her. Like I'm making it up or something. This has been a through-thread in my life: Whenever anybody questions what's going on with me, the explanation sounds like an excuse and they reject it (some have even said so. "There's no such thing as depression!" somebody said that to me once). The dominant opinion on the matter (according to non-depressed people) is that depression is bullshit. Just snap out of it! Oh, were it that easy.

Anyway, now I'm being paid-off, pushed out. No money, no job (I keep applying, I've had one interview for a job that isn't full-time and doesn't pay a living wage) and nowhere to go, really. Fuck me. I have to "prove" to her that I'm still worth being married-to. WTF? She says that she's not taking this decision lightly, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like she just wants to be rid of me and once I get established she'll end it.

So, here's a big FUCK YOU to 2009. You sucked and it was all my fault. So far 2010 isn't much better, but it has potential. Right now I'm an angry, depressed, fat, unfuckable asshole. A thorn in the side of everybody I come into contact with. A big cry-baby who's too lazy / crazy to look after himself. QQ more!

I have no clear ending for this, this is mainly a free-floating rant. Probably NOBODY* will ever read it, so who cares what I put in it. Hooray for that.

* - If you have had the misfortune to stumble upon this entry, I apologize. Nobody should have to read this.

Erm...

No update today! Nope nope nope!

Utter drivel.

So, it's been ages since I've written anything here. What have I been up to? Very little.

Things at the bike shop slowed down a LOT after Christmas, I was reduced to two days per week in an effort to save the shop some money. I was fine with this, frankly. You can only clean and arrange everything in the shop just so many times.

Even after my schedule adjustment things continued to slow down, so after a while I volunteered to "lay myself off" because it was almost more trouble than it was worth to spend two days per week trying to generate busy-work. There were no repairs and practically no customers. I'm officially "on call", but I've yet to be called. I'm told that business is picking up slowly and that when Spring gets into full swing I'll definitely be needed again.

What have I been doing with all my free time? Again, very little. I was unfortunately introduced to World Of Warcraft (the MMORPG) and have spent a good deal of time developing the talents and skills of imaginary characters rather than my own. It's amazing, if not precedent-setting, how addictive WoW is. I have logged on for the sole purpose of checking the status of items I put up for auction and three (or more!) hours later realized that I'd done NONE of the house-work I'd sworn myself to do. But I'd leveled once and done three dungeons! Ugh.

What else... I've been NOT sitting, although I've been reading some books that really make me WANT to start sitting again. It's amazing to me that even though I know without a shadow of a doubt that sitting will be entirely beneficial to me and those who have to interact with me (hiya, Jen!), I cannot get myself to sit on that zafu and DO IT! Argh! What the hell is that about? I suspect that it's the desperate throes of the ego trying to protect itself from the full-frontal assault that is zazen. Every single morning I think, "I could go sit right now. It's quiet and I've not made myself busy yet, this is the moment!" Then I turn on the TV (or worse, the computer and its seductive distractions) and don't sit. It's hilariously stupid.

All of this "free" time has allowed me to become something of a shut-in. I've been neglecting friends and family, neglecting myself (read: getting fat and even smellier!) and so on and on. When you turn to WoW (or whatever) for social interaction instead of riding your bike (me, I'm looking at YOU) or being with your friends, then you're altogether missing your life and probably making others sad. Even doing this feels like a distraction from doing things which need to be done. Of course, nobody is as hard on me about this stuff as I am, but the fact remains: I'm just killing time. This kind of "free" time is also fertile ground for me to over-think everything which - if it were a marketable skill - I could make bank on as a master of the art. Maybe I could give seminars.

So, this is my blanket apology to friends and family: I'm terribly sorry for having neglected and/or ignored you. You're all great.

LOL.
...and OUCH.