8:00 p.m. - 2004-11-03
rantings resolved...
well. the psychotic rantings inside have calmed down somewhat. i've been questioning my life, my goals, my marriage, my spirituality, my relationships with friends and family, and the very core of my existence. how's that for fucked up?
really i'm not that fucked up i guess. some of my older, wiser, more experienced friends have said that what i have been going through is both completely normal and has to be processed individually by each person who experiences it. some of the confusion and thoughts were brought on by my massive physical and emotional changes over the past year and a bit, some of the chaos was brought on by some really close married friends of mine splitting up, and some of my angst has been brought on by realizations of what was hoped for in some areas did not turn out exactly as expected. such is the stuff of life. why should i be any better off, any different than the rest of humanity?
don't get me wrong. i have a truly wonderful life. my husband adores me. that, in and of itself, is life-altering, if you allow yourself to dwell on it. someone likes me enough to still want to be with me when they see the ugly stuff, the insecurity, the ups and downs of fighting depression, the chaos i bring to our lives by getting lost inside my head sometimes. he still wants to spend the rest of his life with me. how lucky and blessed am i?
for a while i didn't know how i felt about him. it was a very scary and dark time for me and i truly thought perhaps i was going crazy. i had no hope. i felt like there were things missing from my life and mistakenly thought that it was because i hadn't been able to effectively communicate them to him, and he wasn't providing them. i was so wrong. i put him in a box designed by my knowledge of his rigidity, his resistance to change. i panicked because i thought for sure that once i shared the chaos and angst and emotional numbness with him that i was experiencing, that he would just shut down and freak out. i couldn't bear the thought, so i withheld myself and my feelings from him. i even managed to convince myself that maybe i didn't really love him. what a dark month.
then i decided that if i wanted intimacy to come back, i had to be willing to take risks again. i had to start sharing with him again, the things that were really on my heart and in my mind. i was like a wounded animal in the corner. i already had us divorced in my mind and i was talking with some trusted friends of mine about it... and i wasn't trying to justify leaving. my heart wasn't in it. a couple of my friends advised me to follow my heart, but that they thought that it didn't sound good. however, one friend knew me well enough to know that i wasn't looking for an out. i was looking for an in. i couldn't think of a good reason to leave, so i didn't.
i don't know what exactly started my turnaround. i did start taking antidepressants a couple weeks ago. that was kinda hard for me because i had managed to stay away from them for 5 1/2 years. however, sometimes we get by with a little help. depression runs heavily through all four branches of my family tree, so i guess that is part of my reality now and i need to just accept it and keep watch over it.
one thing we did notice and that we have talked about is that because of work pressures on his side and family pressures on mine, we really hadn't spent much time together over the past year. we are lucky and we don't have problems of jealousy and we have never tried to limit the other's activities and hang out with others time... but at the same time, you have to spend some time together to keep love alive. we never even went on a road trip together once in more than a year. so we are planning on fixing that. we went to a halloween dance together last week and had a blast. i got plastered for the first time in a long time and had a great time, didn't even have to pay for it with a hangover... had a lot of dances with my hub and with my parents... it was fun. we are planning on a road trip soon, and going to see friends and family we haven't seen for a long time. it will be fun.
so i am on my way back. c if you're reading this, sorry i haven't shared all this with you. sometimes it's easier to write it out and i didn't want to hurt you by worrying you about us. i never planned to leave, but i couldn't plan to stay just because he is so good to me - it felt wrong if my heart wasn't in it. we are doing really well and we do love each other more than life, so i have to believe that part of the problem was the depression and part of the problem was small issues becoming big ones due to lack of communication. we're working things out and we love each other.
feels good to type it out. more next time, diary.
