It's been a while since I lost it like that. I felt so numb again. I still cannot completely come around. I don't think I can take many more of these. They cost me so much... as if all hope, joy, life was being drained away from me. I feel so empty and vulnerable. I cannot get my brain to think because there is nothing left to think. Nothing left to say, to do. My mind shuts down as if to save me from too much trauma. It's my low pain threshold kicking in. I guess.
The thing I wrote about (kind of) above happened a week or two ago. I felt so helpless again. I think this is what makes it the hardest. This feeling that I cannot do anything to help, to stop the destruction. A bystander? How can you be a bystander if your whole life's at stake? It's not going to be better. It's not going to be ok. I'm holding on to some pitiful little remains of a hope I once had but even with my eyes shut tight I cannot help but see that it's not going to last. We are two broken people, carrying more and more burden, and the load is becoming too heavy. I don't want to face it all. I want a solution, help. But somewhere deep inside I don't believe there exists one. No solution. Too late, too many things have happened. Or maybe I'm just tired. I feel so tired. I cannot let go of my little hope that we will manage to find a way, a way to make it all work somehow. A way to be ourselves with each other. A way to make our marriage real.
I hate this look in your face when you're pretending everything is normal. I hate it even more when you call our life a farce. Fear and anxiety have become my daily companions. I don't cry so often anymore because it only makes me go deeper into despair, it makes me give in to dark thoughts, it takes me to a place where there is no hope. So I hold the tears back with all my strength because I feel I wouldn't be able to come back from where it would take me. I've spent too much energy already on lifting myself up and making myself go on with my life. And I have to go on for my boys, I have to smile for them. I want to smile for them. They make me happy, they bring me joy, and they add sense to my life when everything else seems devoid of it completely.
But the sadness and heaviness is getting more and more difficult to ignore, to silence. It's harder and harder to concentrate on my school, find any motivation to go there or interest in studying. It seems harder and harder to do what I'm supposed to do. It seems pointless to make an effort. I feel anxious and sad. I get busy to make it go away. I don't allow it to take over. How much longer will I be able to go on like this? How much longer will you be able to continue pretending you're coping? You are not coping, you are avoiding. Trying to block things out, drown, stop the obsessive thoughts from invading your mind. You are suffering but will not do anything to try to improve our life. Nothing constructive. Because you feel as helpless as I do... Because you don't know if you can take it to invest in our relationship again, to let yourself have hope again... You will just keep yourself numb by working too hard, drinking too much, smoking, staying away... Because once you lost trust and hope, nothing remained. Should I let you go? If I make you so miserable that you need to practically destroy yourself in order to stand being in my proximity, should I make you stay? What life would we have if we went apart? What life would our boys have? Nothing seems important, nothing else that I have in my life, when I ask these questions.
What is wrong with me that I cannot be a normal wife, a normal partner? What if it is too late to save our life together, even if we managed to solve the biggest problem we have been experiencing throughout our entire relationship? What if the baggage we have accumulated proves to much to get rid of, even if my search for answers and help is eventually successful? Do I even believe that I will ever be successful?I don't know what makes me be the way I am, How can anybody help me figure it out and make it work?
What made me decide to go look for some help now, the doctor asked me today. What was it? The feeling that we are dangerously close to an edge, some turning point that, when taken, offers no return. We are destroying each other so we keep growing apart to save ourselves from more hurt, more pain, more despair. But as much as we would like to pretend this could still work, it won't. If we don't start some serious repair work, it's all going to be ruined. And I know how you don't like repairs, I know how much you'd like to just demolish the whole thing and build a new structure. You know it doesn't work like that, it's not one of your construction projects. We need help. We have needed it for a long time now. I fear that we are running out of power, out of hope, out of everything that has somehow kept us together for so long. 15 years.
Happy Anniversary, my husband. Happy Anniversary. I can't live with or without you...
