“One Day This World is Going to End As Your Lies Crumble Down.” (TW)

Note: All lyrics for Face Down by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus can be found here.

The month of December went out quietly, thankfully. We had no further incidents together. I managed to pass my classes, as did the Sister, and we both made the Dean’s List. This was an achievement to me, at least, and I know it was for the Sister. I don’t recall if the ex-husband fully commented on my being on the Dean’s List, but I know he was pretty proud of the Sister. There she was, a girl who hadn’t gone back to school since high school, achieving the Dean’s List at her local community college. I think he felt that it wasn’t really a good achievement of mine, honestly, and that hurts. I was pretty proud of myself and after I told him and didn’t receive the reaction I wanted, I shut the fuck up about it. In fact, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it since then, so obviously, his lack of reaction did not do me any good.

The Sister and I were effectively housebound for January. We didn’t have any jobs. I had stopped going to my call center job the night of TH’s party. I had to work the next morning, but I just didn’t bother showing up. I told everyone I formally quit, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was too much with school and all of the stress from my ex-husband and our relationship. The Sister was able to procure me a job as super secretary at the Mentor Center in our school, though, because that was where she worked. I was effectively the right-hand man of the woman who ran the center. I would also be assisting with mentoring students and assisting the program in putting on events, but my official title was secretary. I enjoyed the job, overall.

TH spent a lot of time at our house, on the phone with us, or chatting online with us. He knew how we felt about being stuck in a house. And while I may or may not have told him exactly how my relationship with my ex was going – though he wasn’t dumb enough to not see how I was degenerating – he knew things weren’t going well. It was that month that, one night, a friend of mine asked if I could drive her to work at Big Y. And on a whim, after dropping her off three towns over, I called TH to meet me in a public place because I wasn’t ready to go home yet. And we sat in a Wal-Greens parking lot and just talked. I told him how things were pretty bad. I told him how I felt. And he just listened, with my car running and music on low, to everything I had to say. He was good like that.

This became a ritual for us. After the house was quiet, I would sneak off to Wal-Greens and just sit with TH, talking. I was gone for hours sometimes. Other times, since he would meet me at a halfway point with a Walgreen, I was gone for less time. It was a form of cheating, I think, on my ex-husband because I felt exceptionally guilty afterward. It was the emotional kind of cheating, but it was also giving me a base. I was able to recover, a bit, from the feeling of hopelessness and depression that was overwhelming me. And even though I had a therapist in whom I could trust with everything going on, I still held back. I was worried she would judge me for emotionally cheating on my husband, I think, but above all, I couldn’t help but wonder if she would tell him what I said. He found her through his insurance program at work.

As though the ex-husband was aware that I had long since grown unwilling to do anything with our marriage, he began to start harping on the two of us buying a house. His belief about that being what “married couples do,” was not the actual reason. I think this was his attempt at solidifying his hold on me further. If we owned our own home, then the Sister would no longer live with us and his hold on me would be complete. While I hate to ascribe the notion that he wanted to “do as adults do” and “grow up completely,” considering his behaviors prior to his suggesting this, I can’t help (now, as I did then) believe that he was doing this as a final attempt to fully push me completely under his sway. No longer would I be able to sneak out as capably to spend time with people who reminded me that I was a human being, too, and no longer would I have the assistance of the Sister to defuse the mounting tension and stress in my life.

I was terrified of the thought and dragged my heels accordingly.

My emotional state became very, very tenuous as the month of January went by. I began to worry that the reason things were so horrible with my marriage was because of things I had done as a youth. I was not a pious, virginal, sweet teenager. I did many things that I am, to this day, rather ashamed of. I said many, many things that came back to bite me in the ass in some form or another. As I tried to figure out why things were happening the way that they were, I began to believe in a Westernized [and incorrect] version of karma. I began to think of things as “you did this, so this is why this is happening.” It was not a very good frame of mind – never mind the fact that it didn’t even remotely convey what karma actually is. This should show that my frame of mind was more in line with blaming me, the victim, for what was going on in the house between my ex-husband and myself.

In a misguided effort to explain away my karma, I turned heavily towards divination.

I’m not saying that my turning towards divination was the wrong idea. It gave me solace in a mentally healthy way. However, the questions I was asking my Egyptian Pyramid Oracle were not the questions I should have been asking. I was worrying too much about the past and how it was intruding on my present and future. I should have paid more attention to the little things – the reading I gave to TH denoting that if and when he broke up with his girlfriend, he would sleep with her again; the reading I gave to the Sister in which I showed her that the world she was crafting would end; the readings that showed that the card I had once initiated as being that of my ex-husband (Djehuty) had changed dramatically (Sutekh).

Depression works in mysterious ways on everyone. To stave off her own round, the Sister spent nights with her ex Demon Boy. To stave off mine, as best I could, I played with my divination cards and spent an extraordinary amount of time with TH. To stave of his, the ex-husband stopped paying our bills, minus the car and the insurance, and bought useless things. We were all having a hard time of things.

Hey, girl, you know you drive me crazy
one look puts the rhythm in my hand.
Still I’ll never understand why you hang around
I see what’s going down.

TW: Alcohol/Alcoholism
Since TH, the Sister, and I were all having excessive amounts of issues to deal with and no one to coherently do so, we all turned to alcoholism. I have had massive amounts of drinking related issues previously, of which is slightly documented in these entries. But every night, I turned to a drink or six to make it so that I could get through another day. I know this isn’t healthy and I also know that I was incorrect in doing so. There are days, now, where the thought of drinking puts me off entirely. I drink still, but not nearly as often. I’ll have a drink here and there, responsibly, but back then? It didn’t matter. While the three of us were sitting in the kitchen or watching a movie in the living room, we all had drinks. The Sister’s were huge, half-and-half drinks; TH’s were usually about the same. I don’t remember if I poured massive amounts of alcohol into my mixers.

It doesn’t matter.

We all had demons that we couldn’t face for whatever reason and we chose childish behavior to deal with those demons.

There are days where I wonder if my ex-husband was even aware of how much drinking any of us did. He had to have been aware that I had begun drinking again. I didn’t exactly keep it hidden. But, I honestly can’t remember a time in which he said he was worried about it. Maybe he thought that by pushing us to buy our own house, it would go away? I honestly don’t know. If I had begun drinking again in Texas, without anyone around to diffuse the situation, he would have said something and it would have become another epic argument. However, while we were waiting for school to get started, he didn’t say anything to me. He made snide remarks about being immature but he never explicitly said what those remarks were about, so while I could chalk it up to some weird way of acknowledging my problem was back again, it probably had more to do with the general situation as opposed to this particular one.

One night, while the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, my ex-husband was upstairs, but the Sister’s boyfriend was over. He had bought himself a fifth of whiskey because that’s what “men drink.” I made a joke about how I wasn’t allowed to have any whiskey – my high school friends had banned me from it. It’s a long story and it will probably be discussed in future shadow work entries, but I tend to be more of a tactless ass after drinking whiskey than usual. So, as a kind of dare, the Lumberjack gave me some whiskey. And that was really his big mistake.

That was the night I made a Lumberjack cry.

As I said, we were all sitting around the kitchen table. I had my Pyramid Oracle out, but I don’t think any of us were paying attention to the cards I was pulling. TH, the Sister, and I had been drinking vodka and diet Coke for a while by then. I would shuffle and pull out a card. Almost on a dare, the Lumberjack shared his whiskey with me. Considering the fact that I had a black out previously because of mixing types of alcohol together, it shows, to me, how very far gone I was at that point. I didn’t care if I had to be rushed to the hospital. I didn’t care if I didn’t remember huge chunks of my life. I didn’t care at all. And that, really, is what makes it so much worse when I drink whiskey. If I’m at that low of an ebb in my life where I will consciously drink some, then whatever bits of me still care will just magically dry up. And I stop caring.

It takes a while for whatever inner preservation or inner voice that prevents me from saying things to stop working. It takes a while for whiskey to do as it should. It doesn’t really matter if I’m excusing my behavior because of what I was drinking or if, as I strongly suspect, whiskey just lowers my fucks to the magic number 0. Either way, I’m not nice. And the Lumberjack was completely forewarned. As my mom always said, “Forewarned is forearmed.” However, not in his case because I don’t think he took my warnings seriously.

During all of this time, the Sister had been letting little things that irritated her about him drop between us. She’d mention a little thing here – “he breathes through his nose so loudly; why?” – and we’d laugh about it later. Then, she’d drop another hint – “our sex life is so boring” – and it was with this fuel. Under no uncertain terms did I explain to him that showering daily was good, that wearing plaid flannel shirts had gone out in the 80s, that missionary was not the only position in bed, that video gaming was a passion, not a lifestyle, and that breathing was a privilege and he should do it more quietly. I was… cruel. I was nasty. With all of the pent-up emotions regarding my ex-husband that I didn’t dare let out deep inside of me, I used that fuel to make a man cry for all the true items no one had ever said.

I think, at one point, my ex-husband finally came downstairs to protect the Lumberjack. The two of them were very buddy-buddy at that time. I shut down then. I went back to my cards and lost interest in making a man cry. Instead, I went back to trying to divine shit like why this was happening to me and where it was all coming from. I know now, of course, that everything that happened then was unavoidable. As with the loss of my job in August of 2011, it was fated. And that’s all the cards ever told me.

This was fated.
/TW

Cover up with makeup in the mirror
tell yourself, it’s never gonna happen again
You cry alone and then he swears he loves you.

One of the things that I’ve tried to figure out the most was why I did half the shit I did during those hellish three months in 2007. I’ve sat around and pondered them to myself, often, and thought, Why did I do this? I’ve looked back often, and not just because of these entries, trying to ascertain what was going through my head at the time that I made X unchangeable decision and went with it. I’ve come to a few conclusions here. I don’t think I ever consciously made a decision to do a damn thing back then. I just went off gut instinct and survival. That’s all I was really trying to do – survive a really shitty fucking life – in the best way I knew how. Drinking offered solace because when the ex-husband wanted to fight, I was too fucked up to care anymore. It didn’t hurt so badly if I was numb, right? The next steps that I made to preserve a modicum of myself are less savory and possibly, I will be judged harshly for them. But there are things a person will do to stop the pain, to stop the horror that you don’t realize you would willingly do until you’re doing them.

It’s not an excuse; it’s just the truth.

Periodically, during that month where the Sister and I were housebound, I was able to take our car to do things. They were extremely rare moments, honestly. I wasn’t really allowed to touch the car that was in both of our names unless I had permission, which was why my midnight Wal-Greens outings with TH tended to not be announced in any form. We ignored the reality – the missing gas, the missing time, the fact that I was not home – on all ends. I’m sure the Sister deflected questions on my behalf, but she didn’t know a damn thing about what was going on between TH and I. She didn’t know that I was retaining a bit of my emotional self with my midnight chats with TH because I didn’t tell her where I was going or who I was with. The Sister can’t lie for shit. And knowing this, I sacrificed a bit of our friendship to save myself. I don’t blame her and I don’t hate her for it. She didn’t exactly tell me she was cheating on her boyfriend with ex Demon Boy (never mind because I would have reacted badly). We both harbored secrets from the other that neither one of us have harbored again or since.

We tell each other everything now.

I went up to New Hampshire and I took TH with me. It was nice. We were away from both of our terrible situations. We were away from everything. We spent the day singing songs and talking about things and enjoying a peace-filled day. We ended our day together with tentative kisses. I was the provocateur. I knew TH would never make the first move and I knew that I wanted to know what that was all about. I had come to terms with the idea of only ever kissing my ex-husband for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t let another second go without kissing him. I think we were listening to Metallica and we were in a Wal-Greens parking lot. (It’s a joke now.) And then I dropped him off at home and drove around for a while before going home.

I came home to the Sister screaming, “OH MY GOD,” in the computer alcove. I went running upstairs, dropping off my packages and my good humor in the kitchen. I ran upstairs – it was night – and demanded to know what the hell was going on. “He broke up with [name redacted] and now she’s threatening to commit suicide!” She was screaming. We had both advised he break up with his girlfriend for months and he had always politely listened to our advice without following it. My good mood was definitely gone. I felt guilty. I hadn’t taken into consideration what sort of effect our kissing would have on anyone. I had thought I could go home with a boost – someone else cared about me and not in a possessive, scary way – but I hadn’t realized what sort of thing I was causing in his life. I felt guilty. I fell to the floor, shocked. The Sister gave me a play-by-play of his conversation with [name redacted]. I was in shock all night and into the next morning.

Guilt swirled around me like a cloak. I was wearing it for cheating, emotionally and now physically, on my ex-husband. And I was wearing it because I broke up a couple that should have broken up a long time ago. Really, in either of those instances, I don’t think guilt should have played into anything.

School started up again, which gave the Sister and I a welcome reprieve from being housebound. We both enjoyed our schooling, truth be told. I guess we’re exceedingly odd people who are interested in what we wanted to major in. However, non-school problems kept cropping up. One night, while I was getting ready to go into our night class (History of Witchcraft) that TH, the Sister, and I were all taking together, I saw TW my rapist /TW walking by. And I froze. Internally, I froze but physically, I was off like a fucking shot. I went outside and ran around the building and I just about wanted to run all the way back to Texas and say fuck everything. There was a message here, of course, and the message people told me it was, well, that wasn’t right. The real message was “foreshadowing.”

I was going insane. I couldn’t think or feel properly at all unless I was near TH. The Sister helped to offset what my emotional responses to what they should have been. I had every right to freak out about the situation above, but I should have paid more attention.

The first time I slept with TH, I was happy. It was nice. It was different. It was like I could feel something and like, I wasn’t really an unwanted dishrag anymore. I felt… I didn’t feel whole. That’s not quite right. It was like things were smoothing out all of my rough edges. The pain that had been accompanying me for months was gone. I was all right for a while at least. It wasn’t like other moments where you first have sex with a significant other where you’re nervous about fucking up and then, after, you’re all embarrassed. It was just… it was nice. And I felt better for a while.

TW: Rape
That very same night, the ex-husband did to me what he said he would never do to me. He had made joking comments of which I disapproved of. “Wifely duties,” was what he called it, but he had never traveled far enough outside of who he was as a person to do something like that to me. He knew how screwed up, still, I was because of the experiences I suffered in high school. And he knew that I was not a whole human being because of those experiences. He knew that Octobers were the worst. He knew that I still grew depressed about it. However, due to other experiences with rape victims, he seemed under this mistaken impression that my sexual anorexia was due to not having orgasms. What a laugh. It had nothing to do with the orgasm. It really didn’t have anything to do with flash backs, really. It was just… not something I cared to do.

So, he wheedled me. And he bothered me. I don’t know if he knew, somewhere deep inside, what had happened earlier that day. But, I told him no. I said I wasn’t in the mood. And he said that was always the case. I want to say that he held me down and I fought him valiantly. I want to tell people that I was able to scratch his face and hiss in anger at him as I fought him away from me, inevitably failing. But, I saw his face. I saw his face and the look on his face brooked no arguments. I never told him it was all right. I never agreed. I never said anything. I just lay there with tears in my eyes while emotions of what happened to me in high school swirled around me. “Wifely duties,” was exactly how he was seeing it in that moment. It wasn’t an act of forcing someone to do something they weren’t willing to do, to him. It was him just doing as a man in a married relationship is supposed to do in order to procreate and feel better about the world.

Afterward, I waited until he fell asleep, frozen on inside and on the outside. In a weird freak of emotion, I felt like I had cheated on TH somehow. What a laugh. But, that should explain how fucked up my world was then. My relationship, according to my insides, was actually with TH and I had to stomach a horrific situation in the mean time. When I knew he was asleep, I slipped downstairs and the Sister was on the computer. I had half a mind to tell her what the ex-husband had just done. I had half a mind to tell the world, but the words caught in my throat and I locked myself in the bathroom. I wouldn’t go to school the next day.

I took a shower very carefully. I know how it can be, after you’ve been raped, and the feeling of dirt being overwhelming. I remember those days where I would scrub myself with a stiff-bristled brush after I was raped in high school and I was careful not to follow that example. I locked the experience in a vault in my mind and wasn’t very surprised when I saw all the blood seeping from between my legs. It wasn’t that he had been rough, aside from the initial entering with no lubrication. He had torn me a bit because my body had resisted even while my mind shut down. Carefully, carefully, I took a warm shower – not super hot because that may have exacerbated my feelings – and I dressed in warm, bulky clothes to hide myself.

I slept on the couch that night.

I bled for a week.
/TW

A pebble in the water makes a ripple effect
every action in this world will bear a consequence
If you wade around forever, you will surely drown
I see what’s going down.

I stopped sleeping, after a while. In a twist of fate that I cannot even convey, I began to have the worst possible dreams about my ex-husband. It was like my waking life wasn’t nightmare enough, so my mind had to make my sleeping life just as awful. In fact, the nightmares were worse. Without fail, the ex-husband would find out about my cheating or about some minor infarction or not know anything at all and he would kill me. He was always choking me to death. I think my mind chose this because he had a weird fascination with erotic asphyxiation that had been brought about because of a previous relationship (the “one who got away”). Even as I write this, I can still remember those dreams and the feeling of being unable to breathe when I woke up, clawing at my neck to get his hands off of me. What made it worse was the night he dreamed the exact same thing.

He woke up, crying and clutching at me. And I woke from another spate of choking nightmares to that. I flinched as he was trying to cuddle me to him, crying into my hair. I remember looking at the ceiling, not sure if I should say anything to him because I was sure that this was it. Instead, I asked him why he was crying and he told me back the dream I had just been having, verbatim. “And I killed you,” I remember him sobbing at me and that’s when I knew that this wasn’t some fucked up emotional response. This was real. There was a part of him that wanted to kill me and choke me to death.

On my old blog, I wrote about this. A very old friend who is extremely Christian said, “Symptomatic of occult involvement I’m afraid. I’ve seen it happen to a workmate.” At first, most rational people who scoff at such a statement, but I didn’t. I was long since far from rational at that point. But, while the Sister and I were very busy trying to figure out why my ex-husband had changed so dramatically since we moved in together in September, demons had come up. We had watched one work on her ex Demon Boy before. And while I wondered if it was possible if the demon in Demon Boy had brought reinforcements to infect my ex-husband, I don’t think so. I honestly don’t. I think the ex-husband invited something in at some point, knowing or otherwise, and this was what we had to deal with: the aftermath. This explained, clearly, why the Pyramid Oracle deck had gone from his card being the card of wisdom and guidance and positive male influence to chaos and the bringing of death.

It was around that time that the ex-husband changed completely for the worse. I guess I was the catalyst.

I was out, on one of our midnight chat sessions, with TH. I was in his car and he was telling me to run away. Both the Sister and TH, by this time, had only ever told me to get out, get out, run away, go back to Texas. But, I was honestly frightened of what he would do when he found out that I was gone. I knew he would attack the Sister. She had told him, previously, that she had back up in the form of her dad, her grandfather, her uncles, and her brother, but I was so frightened of my ex-husband that I didn’t think they’d be able to hold out against him. And I was worried what he would do to TH. I didn’t know his family or what they were like. I didn’t know anything about them except that they were people who lived in the same house with him. They had guns, I guess, but I didn’t think it was enough to stop him from doing something crazy to TH.

And he was a firefighter – part of the boy’s club. It was yet another problem that runs rampant in small towns with police, fire, and EMS. They get together and they can do no wrong. They all bleed the blood of men and women who are first responders. What I would have said, had I gone to the police, would have sounded crazy. And I think the ex-husband may have done that on purpose.

“Take money and stash it,” they said. My mom told me to get a duffel bag to bring my “essentials” with. I was told to get a throwaway cell phone so I wouldn’t have to rely on the ex-husband’s largesse to communicate with people he didn’t want me to. But, he would have found all those things if I had tried to hide it. Even if I had hidden it in the basement where I would never go, he would have found it. If he had the smallest inkling of what was going on, he would have found all the things I was hiding and it would have been worse for me, I think. If he really was possessed by a demon, it didn’t matter how good at lying and hiding I was – it would have found all my plans.

It was then that the ex-husband began to say, “I would let you divorce me, but then I’d have to kill you.” All in one breath. If he wasn’t saying that, then he was telling me what he would do to my friends, my dogs, my family if I went missing. I knew better than to run away.

So, anyway, that night I was with TH and he was telling me what I should do. Or what I could do. And that’s when the ex-husband called. I shook and started to cry. I flung my phone. It would stop ringing only to ring again. You know how in horror movies the phone will ring constantly? And if it goes to voicemail, the caller will hang up and try again? He did that to my phone something like 17 times before I turned it off. And I cried and cried to TH about how I didn’t want to go home. He tried to persuade me to go to his house, to hide the night there, and then we would go back in the morning with reinforcements and get my things and get me out. And I was even more scared of that. I was terrified of bringing more people to get hurt into the situation.

Invariably, I went home because my dogs were there and I was honestly scared he would kill them.

I should have been more frightened of what he would do to me.

The entire time I was gone, the Sister was attempting to force rationality down his throat. It wasn’t working. The thing about being rational is that you have to want to be rational and while she was being calm, explaining reality to him, he wasn’t having any of it. When I came home, he immediately pounced on me. In no moment was I left alone with him, however. The Sister knew better than that. She was worried about what he would do to me – we both were – but she was in more of her head to know how awful things could be. He screamed and yelled and bellowed. I cried and ran away, literally. I ran up to our room, unable to face the insanity that was on his face or maybe just the fear that he was pushing in my heart. I locked myself in our bedroom, which was too much. He got out a screw driver and began pulling the door of its hinges.

I remember listening through the door, crying quietly in a heap on the stairs. And I remember the Sister trying to get the screw driver away from him, telling him that he was being crazy and ridiculous. At one point, he threatened to stab her, just like he had in the kitchen. And I remember her saying something like, “Oh, we’re going to go through this again? Do I have to remind you of who will kill you if you touch me?” And maybe that was the glass of cold water he needed. He stopped trying to take the door off the hinges, at least. I think, too, the Sister told him things that night that put him on high alert. I don’t know what she said when I wasn’t there and we never talked about it, really, until years later.

I was at my wit’s end but the fear of leaving made me stay.

I see the way you go and say you’re right again,
say you’re right again
Heed my lecture.

The night TH went out to the club with his ex-girlfriend (and can you guess what happened then?), the ex-husband and I got into a fight. We were coolly ignoring one another. I decided to go out and take a chance. I was going to buy a duffel bag and I was going to get a cheap cell phone. I was going to squirrel money away. I had to get out. I went to tell him good-bye and I did something that irritated me. He pushed my face away with his fist. I can’t quite tell if he meant to do it that way, or if I just pissed him off enough to not quite know what he was doing. He used too much force to get me away and pushed my jaw (which isn’t at its best after seven years of braces) out of alignment. I went upstairs, trying to get a hold of TH on AIM but he was gone. I blogged about it and then went to Wal-Mart. I didn’t get anything I had intended.

TW: Cutting, Razors
I bought razor blades instead.

I had been a cutter all throughout high school. I have the scars on my left forearm and my biceps to prove it. Most of my other scars have disappeared and faded with time, but those ones will probably always be around. There are days when I look down at the scars and I am disgusted with myself for what I did. There are days where I look at them and I am relieved that I didn’t intend suicide, but just a release. I vary. In this case, I was looking for a release. My emotional well-being had long since frayed and drinking heavily every night wasn’t enough anymore. I had quit cutting, cold turkey, in 2002, but it was easy to go right back to it. The same patterns can be… relieving when you’re in a situation that there’s no guidebook to.

The Sister was also a cutter, although she had never actually quit. If she was faced with a situation that is beyond her scope to handle, she will cut. Mostly she hasn’t lately but she has had her moments. Back then, that night when I bought the razor blades, I assured myself that I would not let the Sister know. It would be my dirty little secret, like everything else.

The next day was both bad and good because I had my coping mechanism all ready to go. It was bad because I had to listen to TH’s ex-girlfriend tell me about how they were back together, which they were not. I also had vivid flashbacks of all of those stupid divination readings I had given him in which I explained that it was pretty normal for people to sleep with their exes after the break up. I decided it wasn’t going to hurt – though it did, oddly enough – and cut myself a lot. I told the Sister about it later when I cajoled her into accompanying me to the liquor store for a fifth of vodka to add to my soda. She jumped on the cutting bandwagon. It didn’t dawn on me until much later that she had her demons hanging around that she wasn’t able to exorcise. And I didn’t know what they were.

TH found out pretty quickly what I was up to and he took my razor blade away. I don’t know what he thought he was going to achieve with that. It didn’t matter. He was wallowing in his own well of hate and self-pity. I’ve thought a lot in the years since that time about what it was that could have drawn him into my and the Sister’s web of horror and depression. I don’t really know if it was the relationship he had just ended or things he’s never told me. He did a lot more fucked up shit than me – who was abusing prescription meds, drinking heavily, and cutting – back then. He said once that he “wanted to try some new things.” And yeah, he was 18 and ready to explore the world. But, some of the things he’s done remind me of someone with a death wish. I usually end up blaming my fucked up life and situation for his depression. It makes sense. He falls for a girl with the shittiest luck and the shittiest home. It’s bound to drag anyone down.
/TW

Face down in the dirt, she said,
“This doesn’t hurt”, she said,
“I finally had enough.”
One day she will tell you that she has had enough
It’s coming round again.

One night, TH came over to drop off a book. The ex-husband, the Sister, and I were all watching TV. At this point, my ex-husband became obsessed with people calling before they would come over. It was yet another thing he wanted to have control over. Mostly, no one ever came over except for TH and mostly, I asked his permission. But TH surprised me by coming over to return one of my ex-husband’s books. Later, he would tell me that he was planning on TW: Suicide committing suicide that night and wanted to say good-bye to me. /TW He came over and he hung out for a bit, upsetting his plans. The Sister went upstairs and I walked TH to the door. The ex-husband went about turning off lights and getting the house ready to be locked up for the night.

I said good-bye to TH outside, joking about how my ex-husband was probably watching us. Of course, my ex-husband actually was watching us. He had suspected since October or November that I had been having an affair with TH. It was kind of amusing because it was only true at that time and not before. Anyway, we joked for a bit and I watched TH pull out into the swirling snow.

When I came back inside, my ex-husband was standing in the living room, surrounded by the darkness. I remember freezing in the kitchen doorway, staring. As Scully, in the episode Irresistible of The X Files, saw Donald PFaster much like this demon after he kidnaps her, so too did I see my ex-husband in similar guise. I blinked. He was still demonesque but his shape resumed that of the man I had married. It was then, really, that I knew I was not married to that man who wooed me with fixing his truck and a leather bomber jacket. The man standing in my living room was comfortable with the darkness deep within himself and that scared me more than anything.

I hadn’t married a paragon of virtue or of lightness, but I hadn’t married a demon either.

On the 3rd of March, I made the decision to run away and I was going to take TH with me. I told him that on the 1st of April, I was going to move away. I was going to run way, more accurately, and I wanted him to come with me as well. He decided he would. It was better than having him stay up north and die slowly without me around. When put that way, really? How can you say no to helping a woman run away from her mentally and emotionally controlling soon-to-be ex-husband? Aside from deciding that I was running away, I put no real thought into it. I didn’t even think about filing for divorce until after I was in the vicinity of my mother and the constables who loved me best. (I worked with them all at my condo job in Texas so while they knew my ex-husband, they preferred me to him unlike every other civil servant down there.)

The ex-husband was still friends with Demon Boy, who I had refused to allow near me. I had broken off our friendship after his doing something out-of-hand after the Sister, my ex-husband, and I moved in. He wasn’t allowed in the house and for the most part, everyone accepted that. I think he came over once after I told him to take a long walk off of a short pier. It just wasn’t worth it, at that point, to maintain a friendship with someone who was, probably, literally a demon in human disguise. And quite frankly, our friendship had been just about over for years. It had just been the time to get rid of him easily. I’m actually surprised the ex-husband never tried to force me into remaining friends with him. Maybe if the Sister wasn’t around, and her sensibilities regarding him, he would have.

Now, I’m not quite sure what Demon Boy said to the ex-husband to cause him to be suspicious. I don’t know and frankly, I don’t care. But something caused my ex-husband to get incredibly worried and install a key-logger program onto the computer. It caught snippets of my conversation with TH, but we were careful. TH reminded me that key-logger programs were something my ex-husband would know about so we rarely discussed our actual relationship online. But, anyway, the ex-husband came to me and demanded to know something – I forget what. And what bothered me the most was he was asking me all of this while I was in the bath, the cuts on my body as obvious as the sun rising in the east, and I turned the tables. A moment of self-preservation kicked in and I went on the offensive.

I showed him my cuts. I told him I was depressed. I didn’t tell him how he made me feel. I was careful to dance around the truth of how he had been treating me. I was careful to dance around every little hint of how I felt, what he had done, and everything in between. And I’m grateful I never said anything to him about it because things wouldn’t have gone “as smoothly” as they could have. The ex-husband offered to go into counseling with me and I refused. I told him it was over and he… he actually believed me. Instead of attacking me, instead of doing all the things he said he was going to do in previous moments, he said he would let me go.

That night, TH came over without fear of what my ex-husband would say. And the Sister rejoiced silently beside us. The Sister, TH, and I watched movies and laughed off the emotional roller coaster we had all been riding on for months. The ex-husband left the house to “spend time with friends,” but when he came home at five in the morning, he hopped directly in the shower. The Sister and I cast knowing looks at one another. It wasn’t hard to figure out he had been to see one of his lovers. I don’t think he went to see the wife he has now – but they were engaged within months of my leaving and before our separation was finalized – but we’re pretty sure he spent those few hours with the “one who got away.” We laughed at how “circumspect” he was trying to be and failing.

Getting a divorce is difficult in normal circumstances, but it’s harder when your ex-husband tries to flirt with you to keep you around or attempts to sleep with you one final time. It’s even harder when your ex-husband screws you over on how much money you can pull from the joint account you share. It’s even worse when he has a lawyer on standby and you don’t, thereby screwing over your debts report when filing for divorce. I think, honestly, if I had stuck around, I could have gotten a lot from our divorce, but I was too intent on getting back to Texas where I could recover and be safe. Divorce sucks for everyone involved, but it doesn’t help when the actual victim keeps her trap shut and the non-victim portrays himself to be one. “She’s taking the car. She’s taking my dogs. She’s still living in our house together and won’t leave.” Wah. I told TH we had until April 1st to prepare things to leave and that’s when I was leaving… no matter how much he whined at me to leave early.

Even though I got the shit end of the stick, the Sister got it worse. She had a deal with my ex-husband that if we broke up, then she would still have a home with my ex-husband. But he renegged. And that was around the time I told the Sister where the money she gave him went – not to bills she owed on, which was why our electric and gas was behind. To help her out, I ordered some oil without paying, putting it under my ex-husband’s name. Turn about was fair play.

I had to leave a lot of things behind. And the things I left behind, my ex-husband trashed. There are things that I miss. A cross-stitch my grandmother did for me when I was a child of the Last Unicorn. The Sister tried to salvage some of my things from the cleaning spree he and “the one who got away” did after I left, but a lot of things got thrown out or destroyed. There are days where those things hurt me, wound me, beyond all measure. That cross-stitch was a part of my childhood that I lost because of my ex-husband, first because I forgot to try to shove it in my Neon, and second because he destroyed it and threw it away like it was nothing special.

After moving to Texas, our separation paperwork was finalized about his birthday. He called to tell me and said that his birthday was “simply awful.” He was trying to play the victim, but I was 2,000 miles away then. I had my mother and TH. I had people who cared about me. And while a lot of the firefighters ignored me and didn’t so much as breathe in my direction, the EMS people knew my ex-husband for what he really was – a lying, charismatic jerk – and were friendly. The cops were nice to me, too, and I didn’t have to worry about telling them anything, at least. I could live in peace. So, while he whined about how his birthday was terrible because our separation was finalized a day or two before, I told him to go to hell because my birthday would always be awful since he had married me on it.

Our conversations were less civil after that.

The last time I spoke with him while in Texas, I told him I was pregnant and it wasn’t his. I wanted him to know from me so that it would be completely clear he really was infertile. I also didn’t want the rumor mill to go hog-wild up there without me there to deflect it. The child, my son, is definitely TH’s child. TW: RapeThere is no question unless women’s bodies can carry rape children around for nearly twelve months. /TW

My relationship with my ex-husband was hell on earth for a while.

But, I came out and I survived.

“I Wear This Crown of Thorns Upon My Liar’s Chair, Full of Broken Thoughts.” (TW)

Note: The lyrics for Hurt by Nine Inch Nails can be found here. You will notice a discrepancy in my title and the lyrics, as I chose to utilize the lyric from the video I posted.

Note: I will attempt to place specific trigger warnings prior to a triggerable incident. However, I cannot make promises if I’m in the thick of this, as I assume I will be.

This is the entry I’ve been dreading since I began to do this shadow working. It’s this particular aspect of my past with my ex-husband that makes it supremely difficult for me to move on in any context. This is where I get to show everyone that not only is he at fault in the downfall of what we were together, but I also get to show you how I managed to survive. I did not do good things in order to survive. I was not a nice person to other people in order to survive. There are days where I look back in my grief and pain, in my terror and horror to those moments where I knew what I was doing was not about living in ma’at but about survival. I am not a hero in this. No one came out of this situation as a hero. We all did what we needed to in order to survive.

The Doorbell Demon incident was a turning point. Prior to this, it was easy to shrug things off. It was easy to assume that my ex-husband was just having a bad day or he was having a bad week. Working for the company that he did wasn’t exactly a cake walk. He saw a lot of things that ate him in a place that I had no ability to heal. However, he’s always been a control freak. Whether that is a quirk of personality or a quirk of how he was raised, I honestly cannot say. All I can say is that he began to try to influence both myself and the Sister in what we thought, what we wore, and what we believed. At one point, he accused the two of us of the Doorbell Demon incident with our very occasional, far-between rituals together. As he had allowed us to have a ritual at Samhain in the house, then that meant we had asked for something to enter our house. We made it worse by practicing divination.

Odd thoughts for a supposed Taoist, if you ask me.

I’ve said before, rather nastily, that he proclaimed his religious affiliation with Taoism. I don’t know a damn thing about Taoists or Taoism to be honest, but from the bits and pieces I’ve gleaned over the years, he was not a Taoist. After the incident with the Doorbell Demon, his beliefs were intrinsically tied with his childhood religion of Christianity. He professed otherwise, but how often he was to denigrate both the Sister and I for our divination practices, our rituals, and our beliefs say otherwise. I don’t think he ever went so far as to quote that stupid, incorrectly translated Bible passage about not suffering witches to live or anything at us, but it was pretty obvious that’s how he felt about it. It was easy to place blame on an outmoded Christian belief – that by seeking alternative forms of religious practices is to “invite the devil” in your home – but it was really and probably just attached to his conflicting, angry roil of emotions.

Whatever the case may be – demon, monster, abusive – we all suffered for it.

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real

The Sister really integrated well with the friends she made in college. I’m more of an outsider, wallflower persona so I didn’t mesh nearly as well. She was quite fundamental, from my perspective, in that group. She has this knack to bring people together that don’t necessarily belong. It’s weird. I don’t know who suggested that we all go to the Goth club on Fetish Night, but this sounds like something the Sister would suggest. The ex-husband, the Lumberjack, the Sister, and I were all going to go, meeting up with the college friends we had made. Plans are all fine and dandy, but they end up breaking all the time. That wasn’t going to necessary prevent the Sister from going to Fetish Night, though.

I believe it was just prior to this group date that the Lumberjack broke up with the Sister. She was inconsolable for the first few days after the break up, but I think the ex-husband’s “on high” proclamation that she must have fucked something up there that made her get over it. She wanted him back because she didn’t want to be alone – not because she loved him, not because he was the best sex of her life, not because of anything other than the fact that she wanted to be in a relationship that was not with ex Demon Boy. I feel this so hard it’s amazing. That’s probably why the ex-husband and I were together as long as we were, honestly. It doesn’t matter. The first part of the group date plan got a little fucked up because the Lumberjack. The other was because of my ex-husband.

His best friend, who we had lived with prior to our move to Texas and his best friend’s move to join the air force, came up for his first visit to Massachusetts since joining the air force. He had one night to hang out with his best friend and that night was Fetish Night. The plan was that the ex husband, his best friend, and someone else would all meet up with us at the club a little later. The ex husband and best friend decided they wanted to stay at home and play chess or maybe they were going to do their roll-playing online game thing together. I don’t remember. But, it became that the Sister was my date and we were going out in style.

Here’s the weird thing about this. The ex-husband was nominally okay with this. I think it’s because his best friend was there, so he couldn’t quite fly off the deep end in front of him. I honestly do not know. However, the really weird part was how much the ex-husband freaked out over the Sister’s outfit. I was wearing a long slinky skirt, boots, and a tube top that barely covered my tits. She was wearing a pink-and-white corset with a pink skirt that was kind of see-through. Technically, we were both wearing the same amount of cloth on our bodies, but it was the Sister’s outfit that made him flip out. “You can’t go out in that,” I believe he said at one point. This illustrates a few things to me.

He had realized that he needed to begin controlling and manipulating the Sister. I think he decided this because he had begun to realize how much influence she had over me, possibly in regards to our tacit agreement about how ridiculous his Doorbell Demon shtick was. He thought he would start with innocuous things first. He apparently had not actually met the Sister in any way prior to this. If there was one thing that she would never budge on, it was going to be how she deemed fit to dress up when going to a club. He had realized that he had fucked up in letting her live with us. This point is dependent on his being aware, even in the remotest of his consciousness, of his controlling behavior. But he realized that he needed to start forcing his opinions on her, possibly because the Lumberjack was no longer around to do so.

Funny story of all funny stories, guess who showed up at Fetish Night.

During the month of November, our computer stopped working. I don’t remember what was wrong with it, honestly. It could have been a virus. It could have been the Internet. It could have been a lot of things that caused the Sister and I to be unable to use the Internet. In my more Machiavellian moments, I wonder if the computer was broken at all and this was just another attempt of my ex-husband to control the two of us. To me, it is sad and depressing to even remotely be able to think that about someone who you used to profess love for. However, it would be one more act that he committed in an effort to get whatever he wanted.

The computer was down for about a month. And in that time, I began to very quickly become the introvert I used to be. I had an online blog that the ex-husband had complete access to. He was able to read it at any time he chose and he could easily, easily find out what the password was. I never kept anything hidden in that blog, but I think he thought I did. I did not create certain categories that he would be unable to see. I did not create a new blog to bitch about him in. The blog, however, was yet another way in which he could not control me. I could write and say whatever I wanted, when I wanted, on that blog. So, really, it would not surprise me to learn that the computer was “broken” for that long on purpose.

So, in that time as I became more and more introverted, more and more quiet, more and more lost in a world of fantasy that I created in my own mind, I finally broke. I had to speak with someone outside of my home. I began to talk, at this time, with TH on a more friendly basis. He was, you see, part of that group of college friends. The Sister had other people she reached out to, but I chose TH. I don’t know why or how or when, really, but he became pretty fucking important.

The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

As I’ve said, I’ve always had a very wallflower persona. I may have been a core component to some high school groups I belonged to, but I didn’t really say anything. I was just a figurehead, or more appropriately, I was just always there. To not have my presence in that group would have been like walking out of the house without socks. This may have been the case, later on, with numerous groups of friendships I had. In fact, there are days when I think of how much the Sister got along with our group of college friends and how I had one or two I spoke with frequently. It was this intense desire to keep my trap shut about everything, to internalize anything I was feeling at any given moment, that I ended up bottling up a lot of stuff.

The month of December was hell.

The original start date for my depression of that year was October. I know that clearly. I had not prepared myself in any way to contend with working, going to school, a mentally not-all-there husband, and the memory crush of a really awful month. I think I was able to push back the side effects of that time period and all of the non-preparation I did for that month after years of being away from really having to face any of it. (I know I’m being hopelessly vague but my next shadow working series will contend with how much October sucks and why.) However, after the disaster with the Doorbell Demon and the Sister relying heavily on me to fill in the “I don’t want to be alone” gap that the Lumberjack’s leaving created, I had no real-time to at least mourn or at least attempt to confront my pains head-on. And it was easier to put it off in the face of the oddity of my ex-husband’s behavior.

TW: Depression/Suicidal Ideation
I let that depression eat at me in many ways possible. I did very little eating. I did very little speaking. I did very little of anything except to either read or watch television. I did learn how to knit, although I’ve forgotten most of what I learned back then. (Even though the Sister has re-taught me twice since then.) I did a lot of things with my depression except to face it. When I finally began to realize how morbidly and frighteningly depressed I was, I began to experience severe suicidal ideation. As someone who had been a cutter and depressed before, I knew the signs. It would get to the point where I would fantasize about taking the Neon out for a drive and wrapping it around a tree. When I realized what was happening, I knew I needed help.

I don’t know who began the conversation first, myself or the ex-husband. I remember trying to address what was happening to me with him. It wasn’t the first time in our relationship that I had tried to explain my feelings to him and failing utterly. I may be good at writing things, but I am not so good at saying those very items out loud. The worst part is that after confessing that I needed help, that I was scaring myself, and that I needed some fucking help in all of this, he said to me, “You’re behaving like every other section-12 I’ve ever had to transport.” This is a double slap in the face. A section-12 is a mentally ill patient and paramedics do not take any section-12′s comments, concerns, fears, or statements seriously. Maybe this has changed in the last seven years, but back then, that’s how it was for my ex-husband. And that’s how I’ve come to see it in most paramedics.

I bowed my head low and said, “I need help,” in the face of his accusation.

I was reaching out and trying, and he was accusing me of making everything up. I honestly don’t know what caused him to say what he said. And I can only speculate about how he actually meant those words. I can only comment on how I felt when he said that to me, which was that my problems were not real, they were imagined, and that I was not important. He quickly realized he had messed up and reached out to a therapist in our area and got me in to see her a month later. But, the words had been let out. He had said something very, very, very fucked up.

It hurt. /TW

I still had a month until therapy, though, and in that time I tried to use my friendships as a good bouncing off point to ease the ache. I made it abundantly clear to TH that I was morbidly depressed. I honestly don’t know if he was able to figure out what was actually causing the depression – holdovers from past traumas coupled with an unsupportive husband – or if I told him. It doesn’t matter. He didn’t really say anything, which was a boon. He just listened. And he had the best hugs to provide: broad shoulders for crying and snot, gentle hands to relax the tension in one’s back, and the right noises to keep the skittish from bolting. I didn’t have to tell the Sister anything. She lived with us, heard the fights, and invariably I told her about them on our way to school or late at night. Besides, it wasn’t difficult to discern that the deep bags beneath my eyes were simply from lack of sleep.

The Sister had her own stuff at this time that’s important. She got back together with the Lumberjack. This was a bad idea all around. She’ll admit to everyone that this guy was a mistake, not the capital M kind, but it was just not a good idea. I’ve stated before that this was an act to get away from her ex as much as possible and the Lumberjack was his total opposite. She succeeded in that regard. However, the Sister is a very passionate person in all things and the Lumberjack was not. I think his passions went to Naruto and the Dresden Files. Part of me believes that some of the aches and pains she began to suffer during this time was due to the fact that she was forcing herself into a situation that she had no business forcing herself into.

One night, she just fell the fuck over in the middle of our kitchen. The paramedic didn’t react. Her boyfriend didn’t react. I rushed over and started flipping the fuck out. I wasn’t the one who was supposed to know what to do in a situation like this. My ex husband was supposed to be jumping up and doing his paramedic thing. However, I think at this point he had decided that everything and anything that the Sister said was a lie or a made up story. I think he also felt that whatever she did was a lie. This is a recurring theme, I think, with him. It’s possible he was aware that she was already cheating on the Lumberjack with ex Demon Boy and maybe he thought her guilt was forcing this on her. I don’t think that; I think she was in some damn pain.

We took her to the hospital – as I said, she was in a lot of pain. Neither the paramedic nor her boyfriend stayed with her. I did. I read Timeline by Michael Crichton to her, I think. Or maybe it was another book about time travel. She still had a lot of kind of wacky ideas in her head placed their by ex Demon Boy and time travel was something she was still very interested in then. I don’t think she is now, or not nearly as much as she was. I held her hand as they made her loopy on drugs. I did my best to get the nurses to listen to me when they tried to give her 4cc’s of morphine. Drugs react fast in her and I wanted them to give her a half dosage. The mean nurse wrote down 4cc’s after I told her not to do that. The nice nurse who administered it gave her a half dose, which was even better because we found out that the Sister was allergic to it. It was also really great that the nice nurse was carrying around some anti-morphine shit in her pocket because she had had 2 people experience allergic reactions to it that night. Later, we made jokes about how she would never be a heroin addict.

That was the first real time we told official people we were sisters.

The next week, I barely passed through anything. I was in my own little world. The Sister did not bother telling me about her reopening of her relationship with the ex-Demon Boy. Later, I would get incredibly suspicious. But at that time, I was very much lost in my own head. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but my own misery. It was around this time that I was asked not to use my cell phone so much because we “didn’t have the minutes.” It meant that the two out-of-state resources I had – my ex-Christian friend and my mother – had suddenly become off limits. TW: Suicidal Ideation I began to feel extremely isolated and more depressed than before. The thought of wrapping my car around a tree was looking very very very appealing. /TW

I was invited to a party, actually, by TH. His girlfriend-of-the-time had decided on a huge, huge party for their six-month anniversary. Never mind the actual feels of what TH wanted – something quiet and romantic – but she decided, “His house will be empty of parents and little brother. Yes, we need to have another excuse to behave like children.” It’s one thing to behave that way when you were TH and most of the people we hung out with were 18. She had a kid and was only a year or so younger than me. She had no right to behave like some moron who was going spring breaking for the first time. But, I had been invited. I said “no” because I had to work and then because the Sister wasn’t going to go for whatever her reason was and then because I was sure the ex-husband wouldn’t like it.

But, I had to do things for myself, sometimes. There were moments when I could stand up and say, “I am a human being and I will do things like human beings.” As TH pointed out to me at one of his last minute, “please please please come to my party because everyone is friends with [girlfriend's name] and I want someone who is my friend there for me.” And I was one of his friends… so I went.

It was nice. It was that night that I realized why I had always felt like I knew [girlfriend's name] before that. She was a year or two younger than me. She had gone to the high school down the street. And she had slept with my boyfriend-not-boyfriend in my bed. It’s more complicated than that, obviously, but that did not predispose me to liking her. The fact that she treated TH like complete shit after taking away his virginity (yes, he’s slept with two people – me and her) and using him like everyone else in her life? That really didn’t predispose me to liking her any more. It would only get worse with time.

So, I went to the party for a little bit. I wasn’t there long because I had to drive back to my own house. I had a while to be free and quiet and without anyone else around. I was looking forward to the drive home when TH walked me to my car. We both talked a little bit in the ice cold of winter, snow on the ground and sparkling under a very lively moon. We hugged and pulled back and there was a moment where time froze. You know those moments? Time freezes because you will it to or just because it forgets how to move forward. And in that moment, I could have kissed him with his girlfriend inside and my husband at home and it would have been much too insane. The moment passed and we ignored the awkwardness of our final goodbye. We didn’t say anything about that almost-kiss.

Stress is a funny thing. It makes people do insane and crazy things. I began to get severe nervous stomach issues. I’ve always had a nervous stomach. Even though TH and I had not kissed and even though my ex-husband was completely unaware, it made me nervous. Coupled with the fact that finals were coming up, I was often feeling incredibly nauseated and generally nervous. The Sister was having her own issues with nerves since, you know, she was busy cheating on the Lumberjack under our noses. We all had our problems. None of us would have known what the ex-husband’s were since he didn’t confide in us. It doesn’t matter what we were all feeling at this point. There’s still no excuse.

The ex-husband and I were arguing about the dishes. I believe the Sister was making dinner at this moment. I think we had requested that he do a load of dishes because she needed something to cook in. I don’t remember. He told us that all we did was go to school, so we could do the damn dishes “once in a while.” This is hilarious – I did the dishes a lot. The Sister did a lot of our cooking, so she was mostly exempt. This left dish duty to the ex-husband and myself. None of us were good housekeepers (though I would like to think that the Sister and I are better at it now) and we knew that going in. The ex-husband and I had volunteered for most of the dish duty and I had promised I would clean the bathroom. (I like cleaning the bathroom, I guess?) So, at this point, I felt that the ex-husband was pretty fucking obligated to the do the dishes especially after telling us we were lazy layabouts, more or less.

TW: Threat to Personal Safety
We started fighting about it. The Sister was behind me at first, I think, and he turned with a sharp knife in his hand. I think I had started maneuvering myself out of his way or I had been leaving the kitchen because the argument wasn’t doing anyone any good. I don’t remember. I just remember turning around for a final snotty remark when I saw him holding a knife towards the Sister’s midriff. I know I didn’t realize that he was threatening her with it right away. And I know for a fact it didn’t dawn on me until much later that he had started the threat at me. I don’t remember what she said to him about it, but she does. “What are you going to do with that? Do you know how many people will kill you if you so much as touch me?” I think he may have said something snide about her having no one in her life. I blocked out the rest, I know, but the Sister says that it continued along the lines of, “I am not under your thumb. I will scream to high Heaven and tell everyone what you did. And my father, my grandfather, my uncles, and my brother will kick your ass from here to the equator.”

Or something.

I don’t remember.

I don’t remember him threatening me.

I don’t remember him as anything but holding the knife while the Sister stood in front of me. I was back towards the door to the hallway and she was between the stove and the kitchen table. I don’t remember… it’s a theme. I block it all out. And I know it’s for my safety because I’ll wake up one night, screaming as my mind goes over the edge. The man who swore to love and protect me was threatening me. And when my best friend got in his way, he threatened her, too.

He played it off, of course. “It was a joke.” But is threatening to stab someone ever a joke?
/TW

At the end of the month, TH confessed he had feelings for me. I know I openly reciprocated. I remember writing a very cryptic blog entry about it in my old blog, in which I mention that I wouldn’t say a damn word in case the ex-husband was monitoring me. I do know that I internalized the fear and anxiety of someone who was cheating… even though I wasn’t cheating. It felt that way, in a way, that I was doing wrong. And after his threatening our safety, I began to really fear the ex-husband. I internalized this with more nervous stomach. Everyone thought I was pregnant, at school, and I laughed at them. I laughed like a hyena in all of their concerned faces. “I can’t get pregnant; the ex-husband said so.” I’m not sure if I told anyone that, specifically, but that’s how it was.

I can remember running to the bathroom one day in between finals. And I can remember trying to throw up. And I can remember TH’s [girlfriend's name] coming in to check on me. And I knew she wasn’t there because she wanted to be there, checking up on me, but that she had been ordered to check on me by TH. And I was grateful that someone cared as to why I was throwing up bile in the toilet.

“You’re Killing Me, Killing Me; All I Wanted Was You.”

Note: All lyrics for The Kill by 30 Seconds To Mars can be found here.

One of the issues I have found in finishing this project up is that, as I grow closer to the end of my time with the ex-husband, I find it harder and harder to be as neutral as I think I should be. This, I feel, is borne out in my last post on the subject (linked below) in which I feel that I was more accusatory and victimized than I had hoped the entry would convey. To me, part of the point in shadow work is to be able to look at the whole experience objectively. I’ve spent the last six years ignoring the victim I had become and being angry at the whole of it. By entering the realm of shadow work, I should be able to see it all from each perspective, I think. In not being able to do so, I worry that I’ve failed at the work in question.

A few weeks ago, my co-worker and I were discussing one of the telltale traits of an emotional abuser. This trait is that, invariably, they will separate you, whether you know it or not, from your friends and loved ones. As I thought about my and my co-worker’s conversation later, it really hit me that, if nothing else, my ex-husband is supremely guilty of this. I’ve said it before, in various arenas, that there would never have been any evidence of his abuse because it was all the mental and emotional variety. However, after this conversation, it was really brought home to me that I really am an abuse victim and that I survived, magically. What makes it ten times worse, as I’ve mentioned to the Sister about this particular blog entry arc, is that I have to come to grips with the fact that I was a victim. Me. A victim. I was victimized. I let it continue on and on, well past the time when I should have said, “hey, I’m done now,” and that really irritates me.

By not being made to remember what an emotionally abusive person will do to you, I was able to shrug the whole thing off easily. I can’t shrug it off anymore. I have to face the facts: I was a victim.

If I ever had to legitimately guess as to where my ex-husband made the mistake, it would have to be with the Sister. For months and months after moving up north, he had been on me to become friendly with her. While I’ve outlined some of the funner highlights of what an emotional abusive person will do, I’m left with the evidence of his failure based solely on the Sister. He pushed me to be friendly with her. He allowed her to move into the apartment we lived in. This leads me to believe that he was not consciously aware of the emotional abuse, which is possible. You don’t just wake up one day, I would assume, and say, “I’m going to emotionally abuse my long-term girlfriend/wife today!” If not for her living in our house, I honestly have to wonder if I would have ended up dead, either by my own hand or his.

Really, the Sister saved my life.

What if I wanted to fight
Beg for the rest of my life
What would you do?
You say you wanted more
What are you waiting for?
I’m not running from you

We moved into the new apartment together, the three of us. It was a matter of days before the Sister and I went back to school. We were both going for our liberal arts degrees with a focus on history since we’re both humongous geeks. My passion is Russia, Medieval England, and ancient Egypt; her passion is the Civil War and Victorian England. It is through her that I’ve come to realize that as much as I want my history degree, I never knew what I wanted to use it for. But, she gave me the idea about fact-checking and I can get behind that. I could look up random facts. In a way, that is exactly what I do at my job now, but that’s a different tale for a different time. Both the Sister and I began matriculating at our local community college (local being a completely relative term as the school we were going to was a 30 minute drive through ridiculous amounts of traffic) with a new lease on life. We were both pretty excited and positive about things.

One of the ways that the Sister has saved me is by going to school with the intent of making new friends. That was not my intent, at all. I wanted to go to school, get my damn degree, and leave. I didn’t want to be nice to anyone. I didn’t want to do anything with anyone new. I didn’t want to have discussions, hang out after classes, or anything. I just wanted to be that asshole with the heavy backpack, a frown perpetually on her face as she walked from one building to another. The Sister was under this weird impression that she needed more friends – I believe this was a holdover hang up from her ex Demon Boy – and so, she made new friends. She demanded that I meet them and it was through that initial meeting that my life changed irrevocably in numerous ways.

School and my job took up my life, which didn’t go over very well with my ex-husband. He was needy in a way that I can’t even begin to describe. The weirdest part is that he really wasn’t needy before as all of that. He may have required that I be the center of his universe, and vice versa, when we were in Texas, but “needy” isn’t really how I would describe him. However, there were people and places that I was a part of that he was not a part of, for once. Even our jobs, in Texas, were nominally tied to one another – and he would often regale me with how I got the job at my condo’s front desk “because of him” – so we were one functional unit, not just on the island and with the people, but even so far as the condominiums we each worked for. With me going back to school and having a job that took me off to it on weekends, I had no time for him to be the center of my world. And frankly, as much as I hated the job thing, it was kind of nice to be on my own for the weekends… even if it meant I never had a day off and that 90% of the calls were ridiculous.

That first month of us all living together – September of 2006 – was a honeymoon period. The three of us were getting to know one another in ways that we hadn’t had to get to know one another. I had been living with the ex-husband for almost the entirety of our relationship at that point, but I had never seen him as a paramedic before. This was new. As we got used to our new schedules, living with a new person, and generally trying to survive what we were putting ourselves through, the ex-husband’s job was already beginning to take its toll. He would come home from the job and just stare some nights. Other nights, he’d hop into the shower with his boots, pants, and shirt on. And still other nights, he would come home and smoke my entire pack of cigarettes after claiming to have quit. It was eating him alive.

The thing about paramedics is that they will only ever meet you on a really bad day. You may be able to meet a firefighter or a police officer on someone else’s bad day and not yours, but that’s not the case with paramedics. You will only ever meet them when you or someone you love is hurting, was hurt, and are having a very bad, no good kind of day. I believe it was that month that he came home, staring blankly at the walls. He said, “I had to transport a vegetable today to Boston. The boy… he was twelve and his mother beat him so badly that his brain barely works. And all because the system thought a mother was a better care provider than a father.” I remember the haunted look on his face as he told me in paramedic language – using words and acronyms to distance himself from the situation, like “vegetable,” that he had to see – of all the horrors he could. No names. No specifics. Just generalizations. And it ate at him. I don’t know if the Sister saw this eating at him as much as I did, but it did.

And I honestly believe that’s part of the reason he was the way he was at the end.

With new friends came a whole rash of jealousy the likes of which I cannot even begin to convey. Both the ex-husband and I had been insanely jealous towards one another and towards opposite sex friends in previous years. However, I had rapidly revised my stance on jealousy over the years. I used to be, before I was with the ex-husband and his constant cheating on me, a rashly jealous person. If you so much as looked at someone, then that meant you were thinking of leaving me and I didn’t have the tact to shut my trap about it. However, one of the positives of his cheating on me, as if there could be any, was the fact that I managed to learn how to temper my jealousy. However, one of the side effects of being a chronic cheater is a sudden and intense belief that your significant other is cheating on you. I wasn’t, but it was a conversation that happened often. With the addition of new names in my and the Sister’s vocabulary, it became commonplace for him to demand if I found anyone good-looking or if I was looking for My Ex-Husband Number 2.

There comes a point where, when constantly accused of cheating, you begin to think about it.

The thing is that I was in a nasty, nasty, and deep sex-depression at this point. I think this, more than the fact that we had new friends, was why he became so jealous and would lash out with it. As someone who had been raped and molested, I have severe issues with sex. As in, I don’t have it. It will have been a year in July since the last time TH and I had a sexual encounter. As the Sister has often said, I was “in a sex-camel phase.” Yes, well, this phase had long-lasting consequences. I’m still reaping the benefits of that, but that’s for later.

Now, let’s talk about the changes. At the end of September, all of our college friends hung out together at a party. The Sister and I took our significant others of the time – she was with the Lumberjack – and everyone got along. The ex-husband brought a friend for one of our single college ladies and they hit it off. (Considering how that relationship ended and what I know of that person now, I wonder if their relationship was as bad as she made it out to be. But, there were times where the stories I got from the Sister about that girl’s relationship with the ex-husband’s work buddy could mirror shit the ex-husband had done to me. And if there’s any truth in that, then I wonder if it is just a paramedic thing or if my ex-husband was only friendly with people like him. I don’t know.) The ex-husband was slightly mollified that nothing would happen between me and any of these new people. He also seemed pleased that I had friends and we went off with the understanding that no one but him meant anything to me, minus whatever the Sister’s and my relationship happened to be.

The month of October is a bad month for me and it was no different being back in places where memories are stronger. That was part of the reason I was such a sex-camel. But there’s so much more to October… and I’ll get into it one day with these entries, when I get that far. But suffice it to say, I flew very deeply into myself and prevented myself from caring. The ex-husband’s jealousy rants began to take off about then, I believe. And I think it had to do with the affair he was having with his paramedic partner. I’ve met her and as with all the other girls he was with “behind my back,” she was tall and reminded me a bit of “the one who got away.” He also began talking to “the one who got away” around that time.

November was when the shit hit the fan, though.

On November 2nd of that year, the Sister and I attended a haunted tour of our college with John Zaffis. During that tour, while on the grounds of the college and in one of the basement areas students are not allowed to go, I saw a little old man who I dubbed, “Father Time.” I think the Sister saw him, but I’m uncertain. He followed me home and I was frightened. Dead people, astral people, whomever or whatever this old man was… I didn’t know him and prior to this any “cracking out” I may have done was fantasy living only. Nothing had ever followed me home and I was at the point where I was never, ever going to see the dead as much as I may have wanted to. (My father was dead so, you know, wanting to see the dead was kind of important.) I admitted to the ex-husband about this man following me home and he flipped his shit. The argument we had about it later was of epic proportions.

I don’t really remember the start of the argument, but at one point, he said to me, “This is why I shut down every fucking house I’ve ever lived in from spirit fucking contact. But our house was pure and I didn’t have to do it. And now? Now I have to do it, thanks to you.” The ramifications of this statement hit me like a slap in the face. I can remember crying in the entry way with him on the stairs and screaming, “Thanks to you, I’ve never fucking felt or seen my father in all the time we’ve been together when before, he was a constant presence in my life. I hate you.” It was as though he was taking my father away from me all over again.

As a child, and as a teenager, I had been able to sense my father’s presence. My mother and my little brother, to some extent, had similar experiences with him after his death. But in all the time I had been with the ex-husband, I had never felt him around me unless I was alone on the beach or with my mother. I just thought our relationship was changing or something, but to learn that the man I had tied my life to was the reason he had stopped coming around? It really and honestly felt just like he had stolen away my life in that moment.

In a kind of repentance for being with the ex-husband for so long and being without contact with my dead father for so long, I think this is why akhu veneration is as important to me as it is now. The psychology behind it holds, as well as the fact that I do enjoy venerating some akhu. But, now as I think back on it, I think the reason it’s so important is because of those six years where my father’s ghostly influence was incredibly minimal.

The argument could have, and probably would have, escalated but the Sister diffused this argument, as she would in future with the rest. I hate it when mommy and daddy fight. She had told us this was what she would do whenever we fought. She had wanted to do it when living with a [previous] married couple, but I don’t believe she had ever had the ability. All I know is that it was what she was going to do with us, as she had forewarned. And for a while, it worked. It stopped the rages in the two of us for a while. There’s something ridiculous about a 24-year-old woman whining this at two other adults.

Come break me down
Bury me, bury me
I am finished with you
Look in my eyes
You’re killing me, killing me
All I wanted was you

For a minute, let’s break while I talk to you about the Sister at this time frame. Her story is intensely tied to my story and it’s tantamount that some things are known before I move on.

The Sister, as anyone who has been reading my blog for any length of time knows, was diagnosed as bipolar disorder, type two in 2007. We were living together prior to her official diagnosis and she was not on any medications for depression. She did have Ritalin because she is also ADHD. It is because of this living together pre-diagnosis that I am incredibly able to handle her disorder and be her buddy. If I could survive her deep depressions and her insane manic episodes prior to medicating them, then I can survive anything she throws at me.

One of the joys of her diagnoses is that she also suffers from extreme paranoia. This started due to her ADHD and people being unable to follow her conversations. Quite often, she would stop in our conversations – as she does less so now – to ask me if I understood how we went from discussing window treatments to a philosophical religious conversation. I have almost always been able to follow the pathways of the conversations, as someone who has lived with ADHD people all my life, and as “a buddy.”

Since she was undiagnosed as bipolar for so long, quite often, she will have days where she thinks she is “crazy.” The diagnosis is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, we have evidence as to why she would hand over her bank card to me, periodically, and say, “Stop me. I want to buy a tuba.” And we also have evidence as to why the next day, she would lie in bed as little more than a blob and hate the world. However, the diagnosis is public knowledge and now, most people are less likely to listen to her about anything real. They tend to equate bipolar disorder with “liar,” “manipulator,” and “story teller.” While previous doctors, prior to diagnosis, probably just thought she was psychosomatic with her aches and pains or possible a hypochondriac, now everyone chalks it up to her bipolar diagnosis.

In one instance, she was never listened to because she was a hypochondriac. In the next instance, she is never listened to because she is bipolar. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

I tried to be someone else
But nothing seemed to change
I know now, this is who I really am inside.
Finally found myself
Fighting for a chance.
I know now, this is who I really am.

In November, the Lumberjack was a constant feature at our home. If the Sister wasn’t going to the boonies where he lived, then he was spending the weekend at our home. The Lumberjack is exactly as he sounds. He was a very tall, meaty guy who favored jeans and flannel shirts. He was incredibly simple in his wants and desires, but he was also incredibly complicated as an individual. He and the ex-husband became very close, very tight friends during those weekends. They would talk and giggle and just generally have the manly version of pillow fights and scary story-telling whenever the Lumberjack was over. It was around this time, not long after our haunted tour at the college, that the doorbell started ringing for absolutely no reason.

I have to assume that the ex-husband had “spiritually shut down” the house by this point. I know he didn’t ask either of our opinions on it, but neither the Sister nor I were pleased. I’ve already illustrated why I was not happy about this above. The Sister disliked this idea because she has had her own ghostly happenings with her grandmother. She liked feeling her close by and I don’t really fucking blame her. It was these little visits the Sister had with her grandmother that could bring her out of some of her deepest funks. But, the ex-husband had his own ideas on the matter and we were not asked our opinions on this. So, anyway, the doorbell began to ring after this and I laughed heartily. At one point, I believe I said it was my father since he had a habit of ringing the doorbell at the house I grew up in whenever his cat wanted in.

My ex-husband wasn’t particularly pleased with this. Whenever the doorbell would ring, he would run to the door to see who was there. At first, he went the rational route. He thought some kids were playing around or someone was mistakenly at our door. However, no one was there. This happened a few times during one of the Lumberjack’s weekend visits. It got to the point where my ex-husband completely, and with back up from the Lumberjack, decided that it was a “demon” who was ringing the bell. Looking back at it now, I often wonder if he wasn’t correct in this summation.

Earlier, while thinking of some of the other bits I need to discuss with this entry arc, I have had to wonder if a demon didn’t actually end up taking over the ex-husband at some point. Maybe he was correct in his [possibly mistaken] belief that it was a demon at the doorbell. It didn’t matter. Both the Sister and I made copious amounts of fun at the two of them. “What?” I believe I said at one point. “It’s the fucking Doorbell Demon?” I went to the door and looked outside, opening the door. I called out to the alleged “Doorbell Demon” and found nothing going on, felt nothing outside.

Life would go back as normal, I suppose, but the Sister and I would remember this moment years later and giggle uproariously. It was either that, or I scream in horror at the pain and terror of the next few months.

To be continued…

“Just Gonna Stand There and Hear Me Cry.”

Even though he often told me that moving back up north would “fix things between” the two of us, the real reason that my ex-husband wanted to move back up north was because he was never comfortable if he was too far away from his family. I never really understood his insane need to be near his family, considering all of the things they had put him through. The worst part was that it was because of me that they had any real relationship to begin with. If I hadn’t come along and explained to him the importance of family, then I can only imagine how horrific things could have or would have degenerated between him and his family. I find it very ironic that because of me, he fixed the issues he had with his mother… and that made him her perfect little angel again… which made him ten times more resistant to the idea of living in Texas for the rest of our lives.

The problem with moving back up north, in my eyes, was the fact that I had a lot of PTSD that I was not over because of high school. This isn’t the story for those things, though they will come up sooner or later. The thing is that my mother told me moving back up north was a “bad idea.” She did that, again, with me this last time I moved back up here, but her reasoning has entirely been the same. “It’s bad for you; you can’t survive up there.” She was right about that the first time, with the ex-husband. I couldn’t survive up there, but not for the reasons she was harping about.

The real reasons why I couldn’t adequately survive up north are enumerated in a few little ticks. The ex husband; his mother; his family. I think if I hadn’t been nearly as close to them as we were, we may have been all right. But, there is the fact that my ex-husband very really went pretty damn close to insane towards the end. So, he is also included in the entirety of why, by the end, I was going to run away to my mother in Texas without a note, without even a slight comment in his direction.

When we moved back up north, I had a set of blinders on from the beginning. In looking back now, years later, I can see all the things that I had been fearing that were happening. We got married; immediately, he starts harping about moving back up north. I always worried that he had married me for the express permission of trying to… force my hand… into moving back up north. If we hadn’t gotten married, it would have been the final straw between us. And there are days when I just go, “Man, I really wish I had stuck to my guns before he married me and things turned really bad.” But, I made the mistake. I moved back up north and I suffer the guilt from that every day.

The worst part was that, by this time, I knew who he was and what he was able to do. He could sell hay to a farmer. He could make you do and believe anything he wanted you to do or believe as long as he was right beside you. I cannot begin to convey how manipulative he could be or how his charisma made it easier for him to get what he wanted – thus why, I think, he was the favorite of the family. His charisma made him instantly liked and adored, but it only really worked when you were around him. If you had a few moments alone, as I had when he had gone up north to visit his family just before we got married, you began to see the holes in the story. But he had to get near you in order to make you forget about those holes. So, even though I say that I “wish” I had stuck to my guns, I don’t really think I had much of a choice in this. He would have made me see his way and been very convincing or compelling or what have you about it. He had already decided that we would be together “forever” by that point and I couldn’t just so easily walk away.

It’s so insane cause when it’s going good, it’s going great
I’m Superman with the wind at his back, she’s Lois Lane
But when it’s bad it’s awful, I feel so ashamed I snapped

One of the biggest lies of our marriage, besides our marriage itself, was in how the ex-husband got me to move back up north. He constantly harped and enumerated on all of the “great things just waiting” for us to move back up there. And then, really, he forced the issue by beginning to job hunt up there in the paramedic field. The problem, really, was that he was mostly looking for fire fighting specific jobs since he hadn’t finished his paramedic training. He could easily pass the national registry tests mandated by Massachusetts, but he never finished his clinical training. So, on that one little sticking point, he began looking for both paramedic jobs and fire fighting jobs. And he “found one.” In fact, there was no job but he applied for it and “got it.” However, when we made the 2,000 mile move up north, of a sudden, there was no “funding” for the position he had been “hired for.” And now, he was jobless and I had been ripped away from my comfort zone on a lie.

But I had forced him into swearing that when we moved back up north, I would go back to school. I had been itching to go back to school, but with the working hours I required at my base rate of pay to help us pay for our car, I couldn’t afford to go to school. And I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it with the few hours of sleep I managed while working full-time. So, I told him that I would go back to school to get my history degree and he would support me while I did that. I was very specific with what I required out of this deal. I should have, probably, made more demands, but I am one of those people who are very much forced into blinders when something important rears its head. I wanted a degree and that’s the only bargaining chip I threw in there. I go to school; he works full-time and pays for all the bills. I should have been more specific… maybe he wouldn’t have stopped paying on my credit cards and the cell phone in my name. But, then, he was supposed to have had a job when we moved back up north to pay those bills, so… the horrible credit I currently suffer probably would have happened anyway.

The thing is that if you start off a “whole new life together” on a pack of lies then that’s what you get for the rest of it.

Who’s that dude? I don’t even know his name
I laid hands on her, I’ll never stoop so low again
I guess I don’t know my own strength

We moved in with his parents because we didn’t have any start up capital to live in our own. That wasn’t really so bad at first. I hadn’t had to live with his parents before, however, and living with his younger brother would take some getting used to. His little brother had a lot of issues, but the biggest was the fact that he was severely ADHD and suffered from severe Asberger’s syndrome. We were also bringing our three dogs into their four-dog established household. It was going to take a bit of getting used to, especially since we were all moving into a three-bedroom ranch where privacy was not really a big thing on the builder’s to-do list back in the 50s. After having had an entire half a house to ourselves, more or less… there were a lot of changes.

I tried very diligently to just focus on going back to school… and finding someone to talk to.

This is actually how I met the Sister. She was dating or living with VB by this time. And of course, one of the “best” things about moving up north [for the ex-husband] was that he would get to be with all of his little friends again. I had no real friends remaining up north. I had spurned most, if not all of them, when I had started dating my ex-husband. I will admit that I didn’t really want to get to know the Sister. The boys kept going on about how we would get along great because she was “a pagan.” (Amazing how if two people profess to be pagan, then they must be besties according to outsiders.) But really, the whole reason why I didn’t want to get to know her was that I didn’t want to have to like her and then have to get rid of her when VB finally did his usual thing of breaking her heart. Considering how much my ex-husband had been screwing around with my friendship with my [now ex-] Christian friend, it seemed like this could be the ultimate result. So I decided to hold her at arm’s length.

Ha.

There are a lot of things that I should, at least, mention as being grateful that I was able to take away from my relationship with my ex-husband. My friendship with the Sister is the only thing that really bears any weight when I measure it up against the other things: owning my first car; my dog, Jasmine. The Sister was there throughout the rest of this story and she’s still around. I have a friend who will not judge me for my religion. I have a friend who knows the horror of my relationship with my ex-husband and will let me rant about it when I need to. I’ve parceled it all out to different people over the years, but never explained the entire story to anybody and that includes TH. While he may have heard things from the Sister or possibly in passing during our conversations about things, but even he doesn’t know how horrific it really was towards the end there. But the Sister was there… and that relationship, I thought all those years ago, would dissipate or fall away as the rest of them had.

So for that, I should admit, at least, that I am grateful.

While living with his parents, the Sister would take me out once a week so that I “got out of the house.” In case no one has been paying attention the last three years, I’m an insane home-body. You have to literally drag me out of the house to get me to go anywhere that is not a room in my house. This was unacceptable to the very sociable people who were my ex-husband’s family. So, she would take me out and we would go swimming at her grandfather’s or have rituals at her house or just generally not be in our different living situations for a while. The one time I tried to do this on my own, I learned a very valuable lesson: don’t do it.

I reached out to a few friends I had left over up here. I didn’t have many left over from high school because of my ex-husband and our relationship. But there were a few left that didn’t judge me so heinously or harshly. I reached out to that one and hung out with him a few times. According to MEH, he was fine with this even though the guy in question was a boy who I had been in unrequited love with for years before I got together with my ex-husband. I’m not sure if this was an act or if he parlayed his fears of what “could have” happened into his little brother’s ear. Either way, the one time I brought that friend to the house for a barbecue, MEH’s little brother was very verbally abusive towards us until I was forced to bring my friend home.

Later, MEH’s little brother both physically and verbally attacked me.

Whatever fractured peace the two of us had been living was shattered by that. The comfort of living in that home, of which there was little, was completely gone by that point. The ex-husband had all but admitted that he had lied to me to get me to move up north. The ex-husband had been behaving like a foolish child. His mother had been having literal temper tantrums (the kind that would make a five-year-old blush) about us living there. And everything else was looking like I would not only be able to go to school, but have to pay for part of it as well as have to get a job because the ex-husband was big on breaking his promises: I wasn’t allowed to just go to school, I had to help out financially if I “wanted to move out of his parents’ house.”

Even though the situation there had become incredibly uncomfortable for me because of his family members.

Even though the situation there had become horrifically awful because I had been brought there on false pretenses.

It didn’t matter.

Just gonna stand there and watch me burn
But that’s alright because I like the way it hurts
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry
But that’s alright because I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie

Since the Sister was being thrown out of her house with VB because, as I had predicted he got tired of her, the ex-husband and I decided to have her live with us. The ex-husband and I wanted to move back to Easthampton because it was a nice, quiet, and friendly place. He had friends in that area and the job he really wanted was in that city. He felt it would reflect positively on his ability to get the job with the fire station if he was already established in the city. The job I had acquired – because of my ex-husband’s friends, actually – was nearby. So, the Sister and I began looking for apartments there. We found a townhouse within our price range in the very building the ex-husband and I had lived in before. And we could bring the dogs with us.

It was supposed to be perfect.

To be continued…

Related Entries

1. Shadow Work with the Ex-Husband (TW).
2. “High Off of Love; Drunk From My Hate.”
3. “I Love You; I Hate You; I Can’t Live Without You.”
4. “I Am Just as Fucked As You.”
5. The Empasse Would Have Been Religion.

But I Want To Go, Too!

I’m taking a break from Tumblr for reasons, but so much of my pagan/polytheist community is over there with me that I hear all the stuff going on anyway.  Apparently, there’s a sudden flourish of interest in traveling to the astral realms. I will admit that I saw some of this shit before I flipped my shit and deleted my Tumblr app from my tablet. A sudden profusion of queries regarding what it’s like, how to get there, etc. In the time I’ve been away (barely 24 hours as I write this), there are some people getting angry/upset/bitchy with the people who do go over there for not “sharing the secrets to get to the astral.”

You know what I have to say?

Are you fucking insane?

I have been friends with Dusken and L for nearly a year. In that time, I have watched them get beaten the fuck up by all the shit they do and see on the astral. I have heard stories of some really awesome moments either together or singularly, but these have all been tempered by all of the fucked up shit, which I won’t mention specifically as it is not my place to do so, that these two have gone through. When my friend, Devo began entering the astral, I started reading her experiences there. And again, some awesome stuff has gone on amid some serious fuckery. Again, I won’t be specific because it’s not my place, but suffice it to say that dead children are the icing on the fuckery cake.

Who the fuck wants dead children as icing on the astral cake? No one. However, shit like that is rife over there. As all three have been saying for months now, the astral gives no fucks. And it doesn’t. There are no fucking rules, which is why you can be wherever the fuck you want and everything looks however the fuck it wants. That, also, means that if it feels like fucking your day up, then it will fuck your day up. And it really doesn’t matter how you feel about the astral fucking up your day. You’ll have to swallow that pain and keep motherfucking going because, excuse me while I repeat myself again, it gives no fucks.

Nope. Not a one.

I go to the astral, nearly every night. I’ll tell you something. I really don’t want to be there. The place scares me out of my fucking gourd. But, dutifully, I put on my coat, my gloves, and my hiking boots. I strap on a knife and make sure my Protective Ride is ready to go. I hold Hekate’s hand and we get going so that the past life thing can hurry up and get finished. I do not cross the street without holding her hand and looking both ways. I do not take sweets from strangers nor do I talk to strangers. I do not look left nor right as we go wherever we are going; I look straight ahead and keep careful pace with Hekate. I am there for a very specific purpose and I am intent on that very specific purpose. We go, we see, we come back. End of story.

(TW)
And I can tell you this: once this whole past life shenans are over, I do not plan on going back. I do not want to find a guide. I do not want to have to use my Protective Ride anymore (except as a sentry for wherever I am in the physical plane). I do not want to go soul journeying. I do not want to pick flowers and see unicorns or dragons. I do not want to do a damn thing over there besides get my working finished and move the fuck on with my life. Why? ‘Cause I know the reality, folks. It’s all fun and games until someone rapes you; it’s all fun and games until someone tries to kill you; it’s all fun and games until a god won’t take no for an answer; it’s all fun and games until you’re stuck in the middle of a war you have no idea about; it’s all fun and games until you meet up with someone who bound your soul to them, without your permission, and they want you back.
(/TW)

Does all that sound exciting to you? If it does, then I have to say, you really need to have your head examined.

It isn’t a sense of wanting to be part of the Special Snowflake Club that stops these people from giving you specific instructions on how to get there. It isn’t that simple, anyway. There are any number of a hundred thousand different ways to get to the astral, for one thing. And on the other, people like the Khal, Dusken, and Devo, are trying to protect you from your own stupidity. And going to the astral is opening up a whole can of stupid worms. Lots and lots and lots of stupid motherfucking worms and you guys just need to stop thinking, “Oh, well I want to go too because it’s so shiny and everyone who goes is part of a club and I want to be in the Cool Kids Club.” Nope. No. Sorry, motherfuckers; it doesn’t work that way.

Everyone I know, on a personal level, who has been to the astral has gone over there kicking and screaming after it fucking said, “Yo, sup, bitches? It’s time to fuck up your day.”

And fuckery was had by all.

Relevant Entries

1. Prepping For the Astral by The Rose Bell.
2. Why Spirit-Walking Is Inherently Dangerous by Duskenpath.
3. Astral Don’t Care by Devo.
4. A Is For Astral by Goat-Willow.

“I Am Just as Fucked as You.”

Last night, I was looking for the right song to work to when I wrote about my next batch of shadow work. Nothing seemed to be working. Earlier in the evening, I had thought that I needed a more melancholy and morose song set to work to. It seemed to get me going when I would listen to songs that were intrinsically linked to my relationship with my ex-husband or that, after the fact, upon hearing them, described so much of what we had gone through or what I had gone through. It was only after the sixth depressing song came on – funny how we can get what we ask for when it’s something inconsequential like a sad batch of songs – that I realized that the depressing mood set wasn’t going to work. I wanted something angry because, for fuck’s sake, I was fucking angry.

And that’s when I realized that this particular shadow work wasn’t going to follow the same feel as the others I’ve done so far. This isn’t about trying to see him as a multifaceted human being. This particular batch isn’t about trying to explain how we were both wrong. In this portion, I’m not looking to sit down and say, “Here is where we fucked up, here is the reason why I screwed up and this is why I think he did.” Oh, no. This particular little section is about how motherfucking pissed off I am at the whole fucking situation. And that even years later, I can still feel my blood boil when I start to think about some of the really fucked up shit he both said and did to me.

You see, the two of us were just not good together, but some of the shit he did is completely inexcusable. These are the instances that I can clearly recall that just make me want to… punch something.

I know your life is empty
And you hate to face this world alone
So you’re searching for an angel
Someone who can make you whole
I can not save you
I can’t even save myself
So just save yourself

TRIGGER WARNING.

So, once upon a time, he dated a rape victim. Apparently, her experience was “more harrowing” than mine. He never really came right out and said that, but I felt like I wasn’t a “real” rape victim whenever he talked about this ex-girlfriend. I also felt that it was a rousing commentary on the state of society when you can go through your life and date two girls, in rapid succession, who have been the victims of sexual assaults. I didn’t think too much of the whole thing because, you know, why did I care about ex-girlfriends? Of course, he was probably using this to incite a riot of jealousy in me or merely because he’s a tactless douche a lot of time.

I’m going with B.

So, apparently, his one crowning achievement with this girl was that he evidently had given her the very first orgasm she had ever experienced. Now, I can’t say if it was her first one in her entire life or if it was her first one since her sexual assault. In either case, I have to wonder why I’m being told about this. I already felt like I wasn’t a “real” sexual assault victim when he first (A) mentioned her to me and then (B) explained in rapid-fire detail about how much “worse” her situation was to mine. Of course, I have to admit that he never came right out and said that my experiences were lesser than hers. It was just a generalized feeling in regards to the story. So, anyway, not only does he tell me about how he was so awesome with the orgasm, but I can’t help but wonder why the fuck he was telling me this.

Is that some big huge crowning achievement?

It’s not like I hadn’t had one of my own before. In fact, I can clearly recall multiples all over the fucking place with previous boyfriends as well as the one who had to tell me this pointless tale.
But, that was something that he mentioned to me repeatedly, so I’m assuming, he thought that by telling me this, it meant that he could make my body respond in ways that it should instead of my body shutting down because of some random trigger that could or could not happen. This happened early enough in our relationship (and then had repeated moments later whenever he wanted me to “try something new”) that I should have realized that he was a selfish dick bag right there.

TRIGGER WARNING OVER.

I know that you’ve been damaged
Your soul has suffered such abuse
But I am not your savior
I am just as fucked as you
I am just as fucked as you
I can not save you
I can’t even save myself
So just save yourself

The cheating thing really pisses me off for a number of reasons. I rather feel like I’m being two-faced about this, though. I did, after all, give him permission to do so. I think the reason I get so pissed off about it is because I told him, implicitly, that I did not wish to know about his sexual conquests. But we lived on a small island and while no one flat-out said, “You know he’s fucking around behind your back,” you can just tell. I think it was the snotty, haughty looks his sexual conquests would give me if they saw the two of us together. You know how it is. You’re out with a group and then, a girl the guy slept with comes up and checks you from head to foot, making sure you’re all made up and dolled up nice so that they can see why it is he’s with you instead of them? Yeah. I got that look from two or three girls when we were living down south, so it was fairly obvious.

And then he always made sure to tell me how much he didn’t cheat on me when he would be away for fire school. I’m not an idiot. I talked with all the guys on the fire department and there was, maybe, one guy on the whole department who didn’t cheat on their significant other. It’s almost like you have to be a card-carrying cheater to get on the fire department or something. They would all go to the bar and then things would happen and then, they’d go home to their arm candy or their wife (because the two were not mutually exclusive) and that would be that. It was like, “Why are you telling me this? I already know you have sex with other vaginas. So, why do you have to pretty much lie to my face about it?”

But, the real big issue I have here is two-fold. One, he would buy me shit all the time to replace him in my affections. I got so much jewelry after he ended a torrid affair with someone. That’s how I got my dog, Jasmine. That’s why I was able to buy the camera that I wanted instead of settling for something less than what I wanted. I mean, there are other little instances where it’s just like, “Wow. Gee. Buying me off, are you?” And yet again, I often wonder if I have the right to be angry about it. I mean, I did tell him it was okay. Yeah, I said it in a fit of rage and whatnot, but the invitation was set out beneath his nose, so…

And yet again, another thing that really gets to me about this is that without fail, if you’re cheating on someone, then you tend to assume that the other person is cheating on you. And I’m one of those idiots that can be faithful until I figure it’s over and done with (whether I mention it to the other person in the relationship or not is an entirely different kettle of fish). So, I got accused, a lot, of sleeping around behind his back when I wasn’t. And how do you prove that you aren’t doing that? I honestly don’t know if he thought that I kept a love slave at work or something, but there were quite a few arguments that started because he insinuated I was sleeping with someone else.

And then there was the time when he told me that the fire chief told everyone that while I was claiming I had a boyfriend up north (you see, the ex-husband and I didn’t move together down to Texas; I went first and then he came down a month or two later), but I was obviously easy and looking for dick. And apparently, the fire chief felt the need to share this little tidbit with him over a couple of beers at one of the bars and then, man. Did I hear about that when he got home? It was fucking ridiculous. He was so stuck on his own cheating ass that he just assumed that not only I would do it, too, but that rumors that had no bearing on fact were true about me. And seriously? What the fuck would I get out of cheating on a fire fighter on a tiny fucking island where everyone would know within seconds?

For fucking serious, douche bag; how dumb do I look?

My life has been a nightmare
My soul is fractured to the bone
And if I must be lonely, I think I’d rather be alone
I think I’d rather be alone

Yet another issue that always pisses me off whenever I think about it is his ex-girlfriend. This is “the one that got away.” And he would always refer to her that way to the point where I ended up using that as her name instead of her real name because I couldn’t stand the bitch. And it wasn’t even that I couldn’t stand her because she was a complete whore to him and used him all over the place (pawned the platinum and diamond engagement ring to get to online boyfriend she was fucking behind his back; demanded that he take her to get an abortion after she had unprotected sex with him and her at-the-time boyfriend within the same day; called him up for booty calls while we were together; would make him jealous by talking about all the guys she fucked; and I’m pretty sure she got money out of him when she went into stripping to pay the bills and I think that money was given on a private donation basis, if you catch my drift). I honestly didn’t like her for the one year I knew of her in high school. Everyone thought she was just the cat’s meow and really, she was just a selfish whore.

He always threw her in my face whenever shit got bad or just because he was hoping I would get jealous and fuck him silly.

Like, seriously, what the hell does she have anything to do with what we’re doing? He told me when she would inform him that I was “using” him to get things. And I’m like, “Really? He gives them to me because he fucks dirty bitches behind my back. So, really, if anyone is being ‘used’ here, I think I have the right to that word and not him.” For example, the night that we broke up and decided to get divorced..? He went over to see her and didn’t come back until, like, four in the morning. And then, upon coming home, he immediately jumped into the shower before going up to bed. And it’s like, “Really, like I don’t know you just fucked your ex skank? How often were you doing that since we’ve up here and she has too?”

But, you know, I think what really pisses me off the most is the fact that I supported his every decision when it came to “what” he wanted to be. He decided to go back to school fairly early on when we were living down south, and I supported that. I helped him pay off the money he owed WNEC so that he could get his student loans reinstated. I helped him to pay off other bills that he accrued with his friends over band-related materials (like the sound system that he put on a credit card and never paid off). While he was in school to be a mathematician, and then a computer sciences major, I was there to hold down the fort. I made sure he had quiet time for homework and urged him to do something he absolutely loved as opposed to something that he only kind of liked (math versus computers). He ended up going with the one he could make more money on (computers).

And then, I supported him through every variation of fire school. That included all of the class time for becoming an EMT-basic. That included all the times he got to spend a week or two at College Station with hundreds of other fire fighters (who were “not” cheating on their wives back home) across the state. And that included when he decided to go for paramedic and had to drive to classes forty-five minutes away with his new side twat. And that included picking up shifts at the EMS base and making sure he made every fire call. That included when he failed to make all of his clinicals for paramedic and then moved us up north, lied about all of that, and had to shell out half of what was left in savings to get his national registry done for paramedic in MA even though he never actually made paramedic in Texas. And. And. And.

I never got a thank you. It was my job, I guess. But, I told him as a kind of way to get me back up north that he had to support me through my next foray into college. That meant that I would not work. That meant that I would focus entirely on school. And immediately, I had to get a job. And immediately, he wouldn’t help me with the homework he promised he would help me with. And that meant that I had to suck dick to get my car to take to school. And that meant a lot of things that pretty much account to the fact that what he had promised in return for all the hard work and support I gave him never came back to me because I shouldn’t have been in school again but relying solely on him for support.

Yeah…

I’m not sure when his 1950s version of what our marriage should be came around, but I can tell you, it didn’t go over well.

You can not save me
You can’t even save yourself
I can not save you
I can’t even save myself
Save yourself
So just save yourself

So, those are just some of the things that I’m still pissed off about. Never mind his crazy, scary stalker vibe. Never mind the fact that he would blow up my phone if he didn’t get a hold of me right away (even if I was in class). Never mind the fact that I was cheating on him throughout the entirety of our relationship, which is a falsehood. Never mind the time that I had to lock myself in my room to hide from him while he tried prying the door off its hinges to get at me and the Sister had to stop him from doing something crazy-stupid. Never mind the time he threatened both me and the Sister with a knife. Never mind the time that he turned over, sobbing, from a nightmare where he killed me – the same nightmare I had just woken up from, myself. Never mind the fact that I had to ask him to use the money in our account, even though it was our money. Never mind the fact that he wanted to turn me into some house bound motherfucking slave.

I guess you could say that I’m still pretty pissed off about all of that.

That Scar? Oh, Let’s Talk About It A Little.

Note: A slight trigger warning since, while I do not discuss the actuality of the event, I do mention a sexual situation.

On Saturday, I had a bit of a moment. I went out all on my own with the intention of enjoying myself. I don’t get a lot of private time, being a mom of an active four-year-old and with TH being gone all week. So, I took time for myself with the intention of just going out and being. While waltzing through the mall, I realized that I don’t know how to do that much anymore, but that’s not what this is about.

You see, as I was leaving, I called TH to tell him about someone I had seen in passing that we both used to know. And as I was cavalierly regaling him with the gossipy details, none other but the man who molested me when I was eighteen years old and he was twenty stepped into my field of vision. I didn’t miss a step. I didn’t stop. I didn’t freak out. I didn’t say a word, but as I continued toward my car, I made sure to peer around me. Could he be following me? Was he following me? Would he try to come after me and finish all of that?

Thing is that there was a moment there when I wanted to get off the phone with TH – who I didn’t bother mentioning this to until later – and go back inside. I wanted to make a scene. I wanted to start a riot. It wasn’t anger that was pushing me, but it was the need to say my piece. We all have moments like that where we have to say the things that are inscribed upon our hearts, the parts and pieces that may help us retrieve the soul pieces that others have taken from us. My molester took a large part of my soul for a lot of reasons and when I start down that shadow work, I’ll tell you about it. The thing is that I just wanted to tell him that he ruined me in ways that I cannot fathom. Well. He had a part of my ruination, at least, and I’ve never been able to bounce back from that. I ignore it. I pretend it didn’t happen. I go about my day, but there is a time and a place where I want to say, “You did this to me and this is what it did to me after. Then, you compounded the situation later and here is what it did to me further.”

I felt fear. I will admit that. I felt real and true, primal fear in that moment of seeing him again.

And then, I analyzed him. I saw what he presented to the world – a nothing, a nobody, a ho-hum dog that has been kicked just enough times to where it’s up in the air if the dog in question is feral or not. The one thing that I noticed was that he was smaller, leaner. In a sick and twisted way, I kind of hope that smaller physique has more to do with the horrors he caused me and compounded later were eating him away from the very center of his heart. But, I doubt this. He had a hard life before I knew him and it didn’t get any easier later, or so I’ve heard. So, I doubt that the thinness and gauntness had much to do with me. The other thing is that while I didn’t see his eyes because I didn’t have to. But those eyes were always a little crazy, a little insane. And as I knew he watched me surreptitiously as I walked right on by, I felt that insanity watching me leave.

Then, I analyzed myself a little bit.

I felt fear, but I did not panic.

I felt worry, but I did not cry.

I felt pain, but I did not have an attack of nerves.

Hm.

As I got off the phone with TH, I drove blindly. I wanted to talk to the Sister, but she didn’t pick up, so I ended up just randomly driving. I thought about calling someone to just say, “Hey, I saw this person who ripped a part of my soul out of my body and never gave it back. So, how are you?” I thought about it but decided that there was no point in doing this. I didn’t feel like I needed to have a panic attack. I had the shakes. I had the start of a headache. I had the wild, crazy stomach flip-flops that can happen when situations like this come up. But, I didn’t feel the gut-wrenching need to leave or run or hide or cry or any of that.

Hm.

I’m rapidly beginning to assess this moment in my life as a stepping stone or a turning point. I’m not sure which – the path ahead is still in darkness. But, whatever it is that this moment was… it’s important. And as a sort of recompense or maybe a just because, I’ve been dreaming about that part of my life again. All of this with my molester relates to other aspects of my life that I have to work through. I keep dreaming about that boy, the one who was my everything and I was his nothing, because of all of this. They’re related, you see. And I know I’m being cryptic, but right now, I don’t have the stomach to go through it all. It doesn’t matter for what I’m writing right this second, either. What does matter is that in analyzing myself and that moment, I’ve come to realize that in just doing a little bit with my ex-husband, I’m able to hold my head up high, even when I just want to hiss and bitch and snarl.

Either I’m growing up, or things are just getting easier.

“High Off of Love; Drunk From My Hate.”

There comes a point in your life when you can stand back, slightly removed from the past, and see all of the things that you’ve been ignoring. You can see the subtle maneuvers of fate and decisions come together to make things into what they ended up. It’s in those moments, which can be either few or often, that you begin to wonder what it is that made you do the things you did. This isn’t always the case, of course. Some moments you’re just so busy wondering what was going through their heads and the desire to see what their fate and their decisions were that causes you to muck up the progress. I’ve been wading through the mud and the shit-slinging. It’s time to open up this particular wound and let it bleed out.

I first met my ex-husband through a guy I was seeing at the time. They were best friends. I’ve talked about in him various outlets before. Most people who have been following this blog know him as Demon Boy or Void Boy. Yes, before he fucked over the Sister in ways unimaginable, I was with him. This was actually before he went completely insane. (He was kind of nuts, but not fully down that road yet.) I liked hanging out with Void Boy. It was freeing and exhilarating for reasons I won’t get into. I liked the man who I would one day marry from the get-go. He had [legit] fangs. He wore a leather jacket. He was fixing his big ass Chevy Blazer when I first met him. His hair was buzzed short and his eyes were a green-blue. He was sexy as hell. I wanted him almost immediately, but I was trying to be serious with VB. What I didn’t seem to realize at that point was that VB was not serious about me. So, maybe, I got him back a little…

…by spending time with his best friend and the one guy who could always incite his jealousy to riot.

In a way, I was doing it because I was hoping to get a reaction out of VB. I was also doing to fly in the face of convention. Some days, I sit around and just think that I was experimenting with a whore phase. In other moments, I tend to think that I was just hoping someone would step forward and say that I mattered in some way. What it really comes down to, in all honesty, is a complete lack of self-esteem. I was so low at that point that I would have done a lot to get attention, in any way, even if it meant that I had to use my body to do it. Not as a kind of excuse or anything, but when I met VB and my future ex-husband, I had been raped only two years prior to that and it hadn’t even been a year since I had been molested in my sleep by someone I considered a close friend. (One day, we’ll discuss those things, but today isn’t it.) So, I had very little to no self-esteem after going through a trial and after being asked to go through a second one and being unable to. I was suffering in other ways due to low self-esteem, which all actually had everything to do with both of those sexual assaults. I’ve always had low self-esteem (for whatever reason) but the lowest of the low points for me are intrinsically tied to the sexual assaults and the aftermath after both.

But, those few months where the man I would marry and I would sneak around behind his best friend’s back were some of the best months of my life. I know that sounds seriously fucked up. I wasn’t technically serious with VB or anything, but I was seeing his best friend without telling him? There’s more to that story, but it’s neither here nor there. The rest has no bearing unless I get into other things later. What matters now is that I felt very much at peace and myself when I was with MEH. After a split-second decision, I ended up with VB on a semi-permanent basis for a while. That didn’t last very long and neither did the next guy. I ended up going back to MEH on a spur of a moment thing. He used to call me when I was with the guy after VB for a booty call at like two in the morning, on his way back from the bar or something. I always turned him down. When I finally was free to do whomever or whatever I wanted, I went right back to the guy who made me feel like I could be anyone when I was around him.

The actual decision I made to head back in the direction of my future ex-husband actually had little to do with him or the freedom I felt when I was with him. I wasn’t quite so intent on my own happiness. I was feeling low (sound familiar) and I wanted some comfort. At this point, I was beginning to associate sex with comfort. I was also bored and tired and sad. I wanted to get back at VB for something (I honestly don’t remember what) and I knew that hanging out with his best friend would set him in a rile. Either I was trying to get a reaction out of VB because I was hoping he would get serious, for once, or I was just missing out on high school drama. I honestly don’t know what the real reason behind all that was. The point is that I ended up going to hang out with my future ex-husband at a party… and just didn’t leave.

It wasn’t supposed to be serious or anything, but you know, I opened up. I told him how I felt about it all. I told him about the situation with VB. I told him about how I was feeling old and prickly. I told him about how I felt washed up, used up, and that I was probably going to die from alcohol poisoning one day. (I was an active alcoholic in high school and continued, with brief spurts of being sober, into my first forays at college.) And he was just there to help me pick up the pieces. A sort of way station of sorts, but the thing is that fate and past lives have more sway than I’m willing to admit. And, too, I had a possible relationship starting with someone who I knew I was sexually compatible with. And you know, the past life thing.

I can’t tell you what it really is
I can only tell you what it feels like
And right now it’s a steel knife in my windpipe
I can’t breathe but I still fight while I can fight
As long as the wrong feels right it’s like I’m in flight

When we lived together in Easthampton, we didn’t really fight. Oh, we had them. It wasn’t… big. They were minor. They were most caused because of lack of sleep or my being bitchy for whatever reason. Sometimes, our fights were based off some of the most inane moments I can clearly recall. I don’t think he ever understood that I was just entirely insecure. I still am, but I was very, very insecure because of the sexual assaults and because of the fact that I had managed to choose really bad guys for me before. Not to say anything negative about my mom here, but she told me that this one wouldn’t work out any better than any of the rest. I mention this because it has resounding effects later and because it was part of my own insecurity – my mother was just voicing it aloud.

The thing is that I wanted him to bundle me up and hold me and tell me that he would always take care of me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a cohesive bond, but I was beginning to associate relationships – like real, adult relationships – with a 1950s mindset. I honestly don’t know why or how got me started in that. I still have issues with this, to this day, but I don’t know where it stems from. It’s possible, armchair psychology moment here, that it stems from watching my mother struggle after the death of my father and never wanting to end up like that. But, for whatever reason, I was beginning to see this relationship as going further than the others and that he would just… take care of me.

The thing is that while I was still very young and immature, so was he. He put on a very good act about being “a grown up.” I’m not denying that he wasn’t more mature than I am in quite a few arenas. He had been living on his own since he was seventeen and had been able to keep his head [nominally] straight while his family fell apart. But he didn’t understand what I needed anymore than I understood what I needed at the time. I needed a strong, sexy Prince Charming to bundle me up tight as though I were a piece of fragile glass and protect me. If that meant that he needed to protect me from myself, then we would have issues, but he needed to protect me from the evils and hurts that had placed bags beneath my eyes and had given me a prickly exterior and had put wisdom in the depths of my eyes that shouldn’t have been there at eighteen.

I started off well in our relationship. By well, I mean that I started off with things working almost as clearly and easily as I thought they should be. As I said, we fought about stupid things but it was all right. He asked me to marry him fairly early on. I was given a beautiful sapphire engagement ring. I loved that ring. But it didn’t take long before I began to near the precipice of my own insecurities and failures. If you ask my ex-husband, he will tell you that this push towards disaster was because of the people I associated with. They were inferior and wrong. They were not people he would have chosen for me. If you ask me, I would say that it was just me finally letting my insecurities, my fears, and my pain catching up with me after pretending that everything was going smoothly. It really doesn’t matter what the reason – I ended up drinking heavily to the point where, one night, I had to go to the hospital.

We ended up moving to Texas shortly thereafter.

High off of love, drunk from my hate,
It’s like I’m huffing paint and I love it the more I suffer, I suffocate
And right before I’m about to drown, she resuscitate me
She fucking hates me and I love it.

Things started off at the same even keel that they had been when the ex-husband and I first moved in together. It was like we were using this as a fresh start together. We didn’t have his family squabbles to contend with. We were starting over. I really tried to think of my moving to Texas as a fresh start, but the thing is that the same old things started to crop up. It wasn’t so much that I still needed or desired him to take care of me. I think the basis for most of the shit that ended up going on in Texas was that I did a complete 180 on things. I went from the needing to be cherished and protected and cared for that I had initially decided I needed to somehow magically fix the pain I was still feeling to thinking that I needed a full on, one hundred percent fresh start and having my ex-husband around was a glaring indicator that I had past actions that I was not proud of – namely, how we initially started seeing one another and the stuff I did when I was with VB – and I couldn’t let them go with him around. It’s not like I could verbalize any of this anyway.

I ended up having my first and only blackout while we lived down in Texas. This is what started me on my 180. With this complete change, I went from not caring to caring too much. My emotions were at a higher surface than they had been in years past. I had suppressed them so that I could have sex and have fun and move on without feeling like a dirty, used up whore. The drinking, I think, suppressed all of this in a way that I hadn’t ever realized. So, along with my no longer drinking, we no longer had sex. At one point, when he tried, I freaked out so badly that I told him I didn’t care that we weren’t ever having sex again and he could fuck whoever he wanted with my full consent as long as I didn’t know about it. Our relationship had gone from a tumble off the cliff to a plummeting to its death. We just hadn’t realized that and wouldn’t for some time yet.

Wait! Where you going?
“I’m leaving you”
No you ain’t. Come back we’re running right back.
Here we go again

He took my suggestion to heart. I don’t know when the cheating started. I’ve often felt conflicted about this in a way that I can’t quite understand. How is it cheating if I technically gave him permission to do so? It’s not that my ex-husband took what I said to heart or at face value. The thing is that I had told him time and time again that I could not and would not have sex. I was frozen in this asexual hell hole I’m actually currently in. And no matter what I said or did or thought or dreamed, I could not break out of it. As anyone who knows anything about men, when they’re in they are in their 20s, they are highly sexual creatures. I was effectively asking him to be celibate with me. And I think he wanted it in the same way that I wanted it. We were so tied to one another by this point and not just because of life experiences that we had gone to together. I think this is when it becomes more and more prominent just how completely tied together we were via our past lives together. He disgusted me. I probably disgusted him. It doesn’t matter.

Our fights had gotten fairly bad. I was trying very hard to keep them quiet, but I’m not fooling myself when I say that we managed to keep them under wraps. They would get so bad that we would both go around and destroy one another’s things. I had broken CDS and DVDs and books of his; he followed with like courtesy. There were a lot of times when I said that I wanted it to be over and I’ve talked about that time when he was visiting his parents and I had tried to end it then. I think what it really came down to, on both of our parts, was a multifold thing. We didn’t want to fail at yet another relationship. We wanted to be able to say that we weathered the storm. We wanted to be able to laugh uproariously in our old age about all the shit we did “in our youth.” But what it really comes down to is that we were both scared of what it would be like to have to start all over again. I’ve dreamed, a time or six, about what it would be like to live on my own without any help from anyone. I’ve never actually had this and neither had he. We weren’t read to separate.

Our souls were entwined, too, by this point. It wasn’t just the fights and the things he tried to help me with or the things that I tried to help him with. There was an all-pervasive need and desire to be together. It wasn’t just the people who told us that we wouldn’t succeed or anything, but we just felt that being apart… we were less than we were together. And in a manner of speaking that is the truth. Two is greater than one. But our souls had entwined by this point to where there were moments where the thought of leaving, on either our parts, would make it hurt so badly that we would literally be curled into balls with the pain. I watched him go through that. I felt it myself. As much as we both wanted to stop all of the insanity we were incurring in our lives, we physically couldn’t do it. It was impossible.

To be continued…

“I Love You; I Hate You; I Can’t Live Without You…”

Note: All lyrics are taken from here.

I’ve read from others about how the gods or spirits or whomever can play around with the shuffle features on various iPods and radio lists. I’ve never had this happen to me before. That isn’t because I didn’t want it to happen in so much as I didn’t have a place to go and listen to music. (I am really not that technologically advanced. My laptop is from 2008.) If I wanted to listen to music, I tended to just YouTube it and watch the videos or have songs that I selected playing in the background. Today, though, I finally downloaded the Pandora app for my new tablet and let it go to town. I ended up choosing a Shinedown station to listen to and went about my business. Now, really, if you know Shinedown then the song that I’m getting ready to discuss isn’t going to be so shocking in the fact that it came up. The happenstance here is the fact that prior and after this particular song, numerous songs reminding me of my ex-husband in some capacity or another – their having come out when we first got together or having been ballads to discuss our relationship in some form or another – kept coming on. The one that threw me for a loop was Always by Saliva.

I remember when this song came out. I believe I had just moved into the ex-husband’s apartment. I was jobless. I was trying to find something that I could do, but I wasn’t actually trying. I would sit at home and stew while he and his best friend went off to work all day. I believe it was the height of fall when the song came out, or at least it was when I liked it best. I can remember having the song stuck in my head on a fairly regular basis, or just letting it blast from the speakers with the windows wide open while I let in the beautiful fresh breath of chill breezes in the middle of autumn. I can remember the smell of the leaves as they frolicked across the sidewalk and I can remember the intense feelings this song arose in me. And what makes it all the more bittersweet is that if I had been paying attention to my instincts, which I never did a single lick of while we were together anyway, I could have possibly stopped the horrible horror of our relationship.

Unfortunately, when you end up in a relationship where shit is fated and tends to repeat over and over again in various lives, you may not really have much of a choice about how shit plays out. Maybe if I had just been more aware… but while I’m sitting here and writing this whole, “maybe if,” I can’t help but remind myself that just because people can see the future doesn’t mean that they can change it. In some cases, it can be truly and willfully fated – there is no way to change the events. There are ways to influence and connive and blunt the sharpness of it all, but you have to be really gifted, me thinks, to get that going. And back then, I was little more than a child. I had all the gifts of a baby realizing that those things that flail around in front of me are actually body parts attached to me. (If you’ve never had children or been around children who discover their hands or feet for the first time, you are missing out on a truly magical and amusing time.) There was no way I could actually achieve the goal of blunting anything, much less escaping from the havoc of replaying the same old shit in a different life.

I hear a voice say, “don’t be so blind.”
It’s telling me all these things
That you would probably hide
Am I your one and only desire?
Am I the reason you breathe?
Or am I the reason you cry?

Often, you will hear me discuss our relationship as “bad in general.” This isn’t actually the case. Most of the time, I say this to explain that things were just never very good between the two of us. There were a lot of fights and a lot of anger. I can remember some of our fights getting so explosive that we would destroy one another’s things since neither one of us would attack the other. Yes, it was that bad. But when I think about the relationship and I go on about how horrible things are, I tend to give other things the injustice. It wasn’t all bad.

Recently, I was talking with the Sister about her past relationship with a certain someone. She told me that she’s begun shadow work to remove that kind of shit from her. She was approaching her primary goddess, Aphrodite, and asked to help heal all the hate from that relationship. Whatever ended up happening, the moral of the story is that a goddess told her that everything wasn’t all bad. Everything wasn’t all tears and pain. She had to mourn the one to mourn the other, I believe is what she was told precisely. The second she said that to me, I started having my version of a panic attack. (And if she reads this, she’ll claim I was not having a panic attack, but I was. I was.)

I talk about my relationship with my ex-husband in the form of absolutes. It was absolutely this and it was absolutely that. Unfortunately, when we talk about things in absolutes, we forget that reality is actually shades of gray. My relationship with my ex-husband was gray scale like everything else. Perhaps it had more darker shading than some other relationships I have been in and have ended in the past, but it was still done in shades of gray.

I just can’t live without you
I love you, I hate you
I can’t get around you
I breathe you, I taste you
I can’t live without you

He took me horse back riding on the beach. He took me to a really expensive inn to “get away” for the weekend. We were only in the next town over, but it was still really romantic (in principle). He had no problem explaining things like the Golden Ratio to me over and over again, knowing that I never fully understood what it was he was talking to me about but trying nonetheless. (If he hadn’t succumbed to financial and outside pressures, he would have been a math major. He wrote a mathematical theory in high school.) He came and “rescued” BFTX and I when two males followed us from bar to bar to bar on our girl’s night out. He never commented on the relationship I had with my mother, whether it was negative or otherwise. He pushed me to write all the time. He let me watch television and never complained when I was watching my City Confidential marathons. He didn’t make fun of me when I told him I kind of liked to watch InuYasha on Adult Swim late at night. He bought me my Jasmine.

I just can’t take anymore
This life of solitude
I guess that I’m out the door
And now I’m done with you

One of the things that we, as humans, do is make everything in terms of black-and-white sketches. We look to our past with a single, narrowed viewpoint. I think we do this to save ourselves the humiliation of choices gone wrong. I think we also do this because we want to absolve ourselves of any guilt in any negative situations. I’d like to say that I was guilt-free when it came to what happened in my marriage. This isn’t the case. I haven’t quite reconciled myself as the person my ex-husband probably views me as and comments on now. (If he comments at all.)

I tend to still remark that I was “quite young” at the time. This is an able excuse – we hear it all the time when eighteen-year-olds get married and then end up divorcing a short time later. It’s not just that. We forget that these people, and myself included here, had raging emotions at the time. They were a confused muddle. I remember what it was like just shotgunning my wedding in less than a day. (We actually had to get a special dispensation to get married because, standard, you’re supposed to wait three days from the second you sign up for the license to the day you get marred in case there are any “regrets.” Unless the SO is in the military.) I was confused and excited and nervous and scared and worried and sad and angry and happy and thrilled. How do you pick apart those threads at any age? Even today, I have a hard time separating out what emotions are raging inside of me at any given moment. And while I wasn’t exactly eighteen when we got married, I was still young and new and childlike in my naïveté. I was pretty aware that I was probably making a mistake, but it was mine to make.

A lesson learned, I suppose, and a little too learned. I see myself as keeping quite the distance from marriage for a good deal longer than I tend to realize. In fact, I don’t really see myself as getting remarried again, even though technically, TH and I are engaged and have been for years.

I feel like you don’t want me around
I guess I’ll pack all my things
I guess I’ll see you around
It’s all been bottled up until now
As I walk out your door
All I can hear is the sound

On so many different occasions, I told him it was over. I can clearly remember saying this to him half a dozen times during the nearly six years we were together. In the grand scheme of things, six years isn’t too long. But at least once a year, I talked about ending it and he always talked me out of it. I often wonder if it was like that in the other lives that we were living together. I often wonder if I tried to leave but it just never ended up working out the way it was supposed to. I’m not saying that my ex-husband is conniving, in so much as he knew how to push the right buttons to get what he wanted. While I do admit that I had as much failing in all of this as he did, I can say that while I’m manipulative, I paled in comparison to my ex. He just always knew the right thing to say. I can clearly remember the one time when I thought I would get away just about scot-free. He was up north, visiting his family and I was down in Texas. And I could feel the relief at the thought of being able to end it and just mail him back his things, piece meal.

Obviously, that didn’t happen. (We got married not long after this episode, so…)

I left my head around your heart
Why would you tear my world apart?
Always, always, always, always

Sometimes, I sit up and I look around, trying to figure out what it was that kept me with him. In those moments, I look around for a clear indicator at what it was that was keeping me holed up in the tiny box I wanted to place myself in. Let’s be completely clear here: I was in a box. It was a bit of his design and a bit of mine, but I was in there. I often wonder if it was just a comfort zone thing. I was terrified of being on my own and I still am. I am serial monogamous in my relationships. I jump from relationship to relationship, but they are always long term. So, I occasionally decide that it was just fear of the unknown that inhibiting me. In other cases, I just decide that I was being young and silly. And in other moments, I decide he was a master manipulator. I probably won’t ever be able to clearly figure out what it was that kept us together…

…except that I tend to get stopped up when I remember we’ve danced this dance in so many different lives together.

And how many of those lives ended with me running for my life?

When I remember how many lives we’ve played this game, I tend to think that it’s all just the lessons I harp on about. I know people are probably tired of hearing all that drivel, but it feels like the gods’ honest truth. I feel like I had no choice. I had to keep repeating it over and over again until I figured out where it was going wrong. It’s not so much the why here that is the most important aspect. While I would love to know what it was that kept attracting us to one another in various lives, it’s really just background noise. It’s not worth the time and energy to put into the why. We, humans, spend all of our time trying to figure out the why about things that we tend not to realize how much energy we put into the question. It’s not worth all those spoons, as evidenced by how draining the experience of pondering why can be.

The only thing I want to know is when I’ll realize the ultimate lesson: that it’s officially over. In the mean time, shadow work… here I come.

I just can’t take anymore
This life of solitude
I pick myself off the floor
And now I’m done with you

Shadow Work With the Ex-Husband (TW).

You know how you set down some guidelines or plans to get shit down and then more shit comes in and blows all that shit out the window? Yeah, that just happened. You see, today, I was supposed to post my “offerings 301″ post that I’ve been slowly working on all week. I was supposed to sit down and hold some hands (metaphorically speaking) and tell it to you straight. And I’m still going to tell you straight but I think the hand-holding will be more like you trying to comfort me instead of vice versa. The reason being because last night, some seriously fucked up shit happened in my head… all while I was trying to compose a comment to someone else’s blog post. It’s funny how random things like that can cause you to have MIND BLOWING REVELATIONS but it’s the little things, I think, that can bring on the biggest changes. To start this post off, let’s talk a little about my ex-husband.

TRIGGER WARNING AHEAD.

My ex-husband came from a really troubled family. There were four children and two parents trying to make it through. The entire family went shitting down in flames when he was in high school. I’m not quite sure how old he was when his family fractured unbelievably the second time, but I know that the first mind-fuck was when he was a teenager. It came out that his step-father was molesting his sister, who wasn’t really his little sister but due to physiological issues and mental issues she was pretty much his little sister. The step-father preyed on the quietest and most unlearned person in the house to fix his control issues (he found psychological help in jail and figured out what his issues were). The family was completely devastated. The step-father went to jail. The mother went into a deeper bout of depression than she was prior to the molestation starting (which is partly why the step-father preyed on the girl in the first place or so the theory goes). The ex-husband went out to fend for his family. He did the “man thing.”

One Christmas, he came home to find his step-father in his house. There he was, just hanging out like nothing bad had happened at all. He had been the man of the family and then, in one move by his mother’s decree, he was being pushed back into the realm of a child. As if the whole previous situation wasn’t enough to fuck up a young man’s psyche, we can pretty much imagine that not only being pushed back into the realm of “child” after being “a man” can do. And then add to that the fact that his mother was willingly bring the man who had molested her daughter back into their house to become a happy family again and you’ve got some serious fucked up. This is when the family fractured.

The molested daughter was, in effect, kidnapped by the ex-husband’s grandparents to move her out of the situation with the step-father (and on that, I can never truly say if that was a good thing for her or a bad thing for her but I can tell you that they sure filled that girl’s head up with some fucked up LIES about her mother after the fact). The ex-husband wandered back and forth between which side of the family he wanted to be on. He lived with his mom and step-dad, he moved in with his grandparents. When he lived with his grandparents, he had his name legally changed from his step-father’s name to a familial last name (which is my current last name) from two or three generations back. And then moved back in with his mom before moving in with his best friend’s family. His eldest sister was on the fence and came down heavy on the side of her mom and step-dad because they helped her out, cared for her, and didn’t treat her like a “fat slob” as her grandparents did. And his younger brother had no choice, but stayed in the care of his mother and father.

END TRIGGER WARNING.

So, the family is all fucked up and the ex-husband has “the one who got away.” This happened in conjunction with the entire family’s fracturing. She and he had been together since they were freshman or sophomores in high school. They were “meant to be together” or whatever. Their senior year of high school, she started talking to some guy from an online forum the whole group of friends frequented (let’s also keep in mind that I am using the term “forum” but this is before forums, as we know them, happened… so like ’97 or ’98). She started Internet cheating with some random guy before it was cool to do so. She had a really shitty family life – I don’t know or care why personally – and she decided to run away. So, the father files a police report about her running away since she was only 17 and the ex-husband is called in to unlock her computer for the cops. So, not only does he find out she was cheating on him after he bought her a platinum diamond ring but he also has to print out the conversations, line by line, for the police officers. Talk about some serious mind-fucking, right? Right.

Why am I telling you all this? Why am I unleashing a man’s personal secrets in this blog? What did this have to do with anything? I’m saying all of this because I want to paint the picture of the man who I met when I was eighteen and he was twenty-one. I want you to see that what I say about the shadow work that happened isn’t a happy-slappy band-aid to what happened between us. I want you to know that he had issues before everything that went down between us happened. I just want you to know that he was as fucked in the head as the rest of us are and what I’m about to say isn’t because I want to fix it or that I want to be able to look at things differently. I, also, don’t want to paint myself [entirely] in a negative light here, so let’s not think this is all altruistic drivel or any of that bullshit. I just want you guys to know that I got with a man who had some serious demons.

And we were working on them. When we first got together, there was a night that we spent at his parents’ house. He wasn’t all that recovered from what had happened in his family. I remember him being awake and kneeling above me, a butcher’s knife in his hand. “What are you doing?” I remember asking him.

He looked at my funny, like I had said the most retarded gibberish ever. “I’m protecting you from him,” he said to me.

So, no. He was not healed. He was not fixed from his previous ordeals. I did start him down that route. I started to talk to him about this stuff and he was open with me about it. We had good conversations, working through his stuff. Yes, he had issues. And yes, he really sucked at handling women who had been sexually abused. And yes, he probably still has issues. But the thing is, he can speak civilly to his step-father to this day because of me. I think, too, the living in Texas thing helped tremendously. He wasn’t always reminded that shit was so bad or that shit had happened. He could speak to his step-father, or not, on the phone. And there was always the fact that his parents did a lot to help us out. They let us live in their house until we found our own place when we moved back up to MA. They gave us not one, but two cars. They gave us money. So, the distance helped, but I think I had a pretty big hand in it, too. And you know what? The only reason I didn’t want the fracture to deepen wasn’t because I wanted to help him but because I honestly feel like, if you have a dad and the dad is trying to make amends, shouldn’t we at least try? I don’t have a dad so I don’t get that chance. Selfish bitch – that’s me.

(Yes. I know that not everyone’s daddy situation is fixable or amends can be made and all of that. I’m just saying that if the chance is there, maybe it’s not so insurmountable. And no, I won’t comment back to anyone who has anything to say about it because I respect that everyone has different views, different opinions, and different situations. I’m just laying out what happened with me and the ex-husband.)

So, let’s stop getting morose and talk a little about the ex-husband and me. (Okay, so maybe getting away from morose isn’t going to happen here…)

We weren’t good together, at all. If you just look at our astrological signs, it’s pretty fucking obvious. In the western zodiac, he was an Ares and I am a Leo. Those two are both head-strong fuckholes who aren’t interested in listening to what anyone has to say if isn’t telling us that we’re right. (And I should have known this because my mom? Ares.) So, you can imagine the explosive fights over stupid shit and over big huge shit that happened since neither one of us was wrong because our astrological charts say so. In the eastern zodiac, he was a metal monkey and I am a water pig. (Ew. I hate that shit.) So, while I can’t possibly comment on how the eastern zodiac formulated who we are – and I will steadfastly avow that I am not a fucking water pig – I bet that says something to other people out there. But, really, without bringing that stuff into it, we were not good together. We had good times and we probably helped each other out a lot in various ways, but you know, we just butt heads more often than not. I can remember thinking on numerous occasions before we were married that things were over between us. Yeah, if you can think that, then maybe, they are.

And I just didn’t quite get the memo.

Or, he was really good at talking me out of major life decisions.

You know, either one is possible and probable.

So, anyway. Let’s move on to today before we head back in time again.

Today, Lady Imbrium wrote a blog entry that really knocked me for a loop. I was all like, “RIGHT ON, MUTHAFUCKA,” and reblogged that shit like I was a two-bit blog whore. And then I started formulating a response besides the “excellent” I had put up there. I started writing this out in my head and of course, I mentioned my ex-husband because he was a firefighter and paramedic before we got divorced. (I PUT HIM THROUGH THOSE SCHOOLS DAMNIT. I DID IT EVERY FUCKING YEAR AND I WAS GOOD ABOUT IT. I DESERVE A COOKIE.) And that’s about the moment that I had a really fucked up epiphany. That moment is when I felt like my world was swirling all around me as a thought expanded past any comments I may have been making. That thought that expanded and filled my field-of-view for a good fifteen to twenty seconds was, Maybe that’s why shit went down the way it did.

Okay, so here’s this man and I’m with him. And he decides to go be a firefighter with the volunteer department on the island we lived on in Texas. (Yeah, there are islands in Texas and no, not just Galveston.) This meant that he had to get his EMT-basic to continue with the fire department down there. After that, he decided to go into paramedic because, why not? The money was better and he wanted to use what he was getting from the fire department to buy me a house where he could shut me off from my friends and family keep me happy while making me his pretty little arm candy. So, we did the schooling and we moved up north and he got a job at AMR. (If you don’t know what that means, Google fu, bay-bee.) After that, he began looking for paramedic positions and whatnot. But the thing is that even at AMR, he began to change.

The job sucked.

He was just hired as an EMT because he was mid-process with his national certification for his paramedic. In AMR lingo, that pretty much meant that he was driving sick people to their appointments. One day, he came home from work and smoked my entire pack of cigarettes. This was because he got to travel the distance of the entire state with a vegetable boy who had been put in that state because his mom won custody of him and then took a baseball bat to him when she had a psychotic break, after the dad proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would have one. Yeah, it was a shitty day. Another day, he came home and jumped in the shower with all of his work uniform on (this was at a different city’s company and when he was a paramedic) because he had to work a suicide that was not just messy but fairly ripe, if you catch my drift.

I’m sure there are lots more days like that, but I wouldn’t know about them. Those were the only two instances he ever told me about his day. Otherwise, he buttoned up like “the man” he was. That’s the thing that gets taught to these guys in this line of work that shouldn’t be: you don’t discuss it. To them, you joined the men’s club, so you go to a bar and get fucked to shit and then call your wife to pick you up. Or, if you’re in a small town, maybe a police officer on duty will take you home in his squad car. Whatever. That’s what these people are taught and that’s just wrong and stupid. The ex should have been open about the shit he was seeing and the shit that was eating up his head. But, he was “a man.” And, so he didn’t.

And while I know he had issues. And I know that they were probably around and were causing him to do his fucked up shit (being a control freak, for one) before the job. But maybe he changed so dramatically and drastically in the less-than-a-year we were together and in Massachusetts because of the job. I’m not denying that he wasn’t already fucked up in the head and that, probably, I couldn’t have fixed it. But I think shit went so sour so quickly because he couldn’t handle what his job was and what he was seeing. And in all honesty, I wasn’t the person to help him with that. I wasn’t the person then that I am today. I couldn’t or wouldn’t have seen it as anything more than him being a selfish prick. And while I could help him with his daddy issues and his mommy issues, I don’t think I could have done much more than, “Hey, that sucks. Let’s go out to eat tonight,” to help him out. And it would have eaten him up anyway. And probably me, too.

The thing that this shadow work shit is beginning to teach me is that things aren’t black-and-white. Before today, I would have said that he was an asshole control freak who wanted me under his thumb because then I couldn’t do to him what his ex-girlfriend did to him. And yeah, maybe that is part of it.

But it’s not the whole enchilada.

And that’s something I’m rapidly realizing.