seesaw

Before I started dating my ex I had this idea that if I moved fast enough I would be able to quiet the anxiety about life that always ran rampant in my mind. I would refuse to sit alone with my thoughts until it was the dead of the night, everyone asleep, and seeking refuge in the silence of the night. when I was alone and didn't want to face my thoughts I would create elaborate daydreams, just to keep from thinking too hard about anything. I didn't mind being alone, I just didn't want to sit with my thoughts all alone, I wanted to be as far away from reality, I was determined to play my part to perfection. I was successful at everything I wanted to accomplish, I was spoiled, pampered, and dumb, I played the long game, fighting between procrastination and perfectionism. my life started crumbling the first night we met.

If you took a good, long look at how we interacted as a couple, and then dissected our own personalities you would be able to find a multitude of similarities and differences, it was looking into a carnival mirror. This person in front of me was me, but throughout our lives, our different decisions, our environment, and the people we looked up to, created just slight differences in our almost identical contradictory personalities. While we were able to agree on some things, we usually came to our decisions on completely different thought processes, or our opinions would be on the opposite viewpoint of the other. Whatever it was, there was always something to talk about. trying to understand his reasoning was annoying especially since trying to get him to understand my reasoning was impossible.

Being in that relationship allowed me to flourish in ways I never knew I could. I had become a different person almost overnight. He gave me the courage to stick up for myself, he forced me to be able to talk about my feelings even if it would upset another person, and he always tried to get me to understand why being alone was important. One of our biggest disagreements I remember, if not the biggest, was that I wanted to be near my family. I grew up knowing my family would always support me, that all I needed to do was ask and I knew I would get help. In his family, they didn't share the same values my family did, he couldn't understand why I was so attached to my family, why I was sad when I hadn't seen them, why I would text my mom everyday. I couldn't explain to him why, and he took this as an answer that it was because I was forced to, or because I was still not mature enough, still a child, because I knew I could count on my family. he spent years trying to convince me that the behaviors my family had taught me were wrong, that what they did to me was abuse because they didn't allow me to grow up. but was met with empty arguments whenever I argued that he can't expect me to just go along with ignoring our families just because he felt like no one loved us.

I eventually began to realize that while he was forcing me to grow up, he was regressing back into the immature, and very unstable teenager he had once been. This became especially evident when we moved into our first house, and while I do understand the fact that it is generally expected for a stay at home mother to typically take care of all of the cooking, cleaning, and general household activities, you also have to understand that I was not alone at home. We both were unemployed, living on passive streams of income, so it's a bit upsetting to be accused of being a shitty wife. a typical day in my life consisted of a 7-9 am wakeup, breakfast for the kid, trying to wake up my ex every hour since I've been awake, and eventually trying to fill my time while not being allowed to leave without his approval and more often his presence, eventually around 4-6 pm, and pretty often much later, my ex would wake up, expect a usually different dinner than I had cooked for me and my son because he would usually wake up after we had eaten, then I would start the bed time routine, usually having the kid asleep before or by nine and then also expected to spend at least 2-3 hours with my ex since he slept the whole day, and god forbid we had an argument (which was eventually almost daily) I wouldn't get to bed until 3-5 am most mornings. throughout all of this, I was also making sure all of our bills were paid, I was doing random research for my ex whenever he wanted to buy something he didn't need or start a hobby he wouldn't finish, and then expected to let him waste upwards of 1k of our savings every few months because he could never finish anything he started. I was pretending our life was normal, trying to plan regular family outings that were always shut down, usually having to beg to get out of the house. forced to keep the peace between all of our parents, while also maintaining his relationship with his parents because he refused to. whatever he didn't want to do he delegated to me to do for him. when people couldn't reach him, when they couldn't get him to do what they asked him, they called me. All while fighting my ex, trying to convince him that his insecurities of me cheating and running around with guys he hated was because he was delusional and projecting his guilt of cheating on me back onto me. I begged him at the very least to keep his attitude pointed away from me, to be told I'm abusive for wanting him to change. and any time I mentioned wanting to do something just for me, wanting to buy something just for me, my answer was always no, unless I got someone else to convince him he was being rude, and while I don't want to be especially materialistic, those hobbies and activities he always gave up on, plus his video games, clothes, and jewelry purchases added up since he would throw his money without care if he would enjoy it, but my requests of materials for my own hobbies, for things to make my life just a bit easier were almost always paid out of pocket on my own very small income, and when my hobbies were able to return profit back into our house, and massively cheaper than his bimonthly hobbies, it made him think I was only out for his money.

Eventually he had poked and prodded at me so hard and too many times, that the break he had been waiting out for, finally happened. I know now looking back, that this dude was incredibly unstable, a lot more unstable than I had ever thought when we were together, I just was unable to see how genuinely sick he was, and I do mean actually sick, not twisted, although a bit of that as well. It was hard to communicate with each other because I knew that both of us were in an incredibly frail emotional state, it was hard to notice that the other was suffering because you were suffering just as much.

the hardest part about leaving was knowing that the person I left was sick. knowing that if I leave, he will hate me, especially when I admit that I know he's sick, because he always expected me to be accepting of his treatment of me no matter what. I never know how I'm meant to feel about it all if I'm being completely honest. I never really expected that the entire relationship would be full of conditional agreements and acceptances. There are still events that I'm not even sure who was wrong because it's all messy. It's hard to blame someone for being mentally unwell when you yourself were also mentally unwell, it's even more difficult when you factor in the love that you have or have had for that person. I ask people to not pity me, or even expect me to share everyone of my experiences because it would feel like tainting my own opinion of what has happened, especially in when im still uncertain on how I am supposed to feel about those experiences.

While I'm still not entirely sure on what to feel, I also don't regret everything that has happened. It's hard to stay angry when you already examined, dissected, and analyzed each scenario for hours whenever I could remember a new one. I also don't really want to be angry anymore, I know now that what happened between us was because of how young we were, it was still that age where you can feel so close to someone and then eventually grow out of each other. while our marriage had already been steadily declining for months, around may of what would have been our college graduation, if either of us had chosen to continue, it took a nose dive to rock bottom. I think that the combined sense of doom that we weren't accomplished enough compared to others our age, and not necessarily in the sense that we weren't accomplished, we had a very comfortable life, it was just horribly unfulfilling. while I wanted to appeal to our future, trying to make new friends, trying to do new things, still trying to fuel that once shared passion of adventure and new beginnings, he wanted to attract the attention of our past, he wanted to prove he wasn't the shitty kid he was before, a brand new man. and while I could understand this desire, I couldn't understand why he was so determined to prove he could be a god, I didn't get the desire to be followed by those he had once seen as equals, and I didn't want to be seen as less than anymore. a lot of the time I think about how he was so worried that I would want to leave him because he wasn't similar enough to me, that I wasn't similar enough to him. he talked about how I would leave him for someone with more money, someone who could play the violin, someone who likes musicals and weird indie movies, someone who wouldn't ask to read every single thing I wrote. I think about how I was always worried that nothing I do would be enough to make him happy, how I felt like I had to be uglier than him to make him feel like I wouldn't cheat, and I remember sixteen year old, me knowing she would call me a fucking dumbass for putting up with all of the bullshit that had been going on for years. I thought about how thirteen year old me would be scared and sad for me, wondering how we let this happen, how we let someone we loved hurt us so much. I looked in the mirror and all I could see was eight year old me looking right back at me, knowing I fucking hated who I was now. I fought eighteen year old me, telling her that just because he's sick, it isn't my responsibility to help him get better, especially when he was a fuck head who didn't act like he cared about my feelings. I told the twenty year old that she had to stop feeling sorry for him when I had said all I needed to say way more than was necessary, and anything from now on wasn't because of me. eventually after I had looked at each version of myself it was easier to be selfish, it was hard to drown out the voices of all of myself whenever the singular voice of his that still lingers around spoke up. I think about how eventually, like with most of his predictions, he was right. I think one of the things people notice the most about me is my ability to act like everything in my life is perfect, I've had multiple people surprised at how my life actually is, compared to how I portray it as, the next thing they would notice is the fact that I will cut anyone out of my life if I feel I need to, it doesn't matter how long I've known them, how much I love them, it wouldn't matter if they even offered to change, most people know when I'm done with something it is 100% done with. so while I know his prediction was right, I also have to wonder if maybe he didn't know me as well as I had thought, but I also think that's the last time I'll ever wonder about that question again, because I've gotten the same answer too many times to count by now.