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Dating After Divorce – Rebounds and Supernovas

Date: October 13, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Dating, Dating - NYC, Dating After 35, Dating After Divorce, Divorce, Gay Husband, Relationships, Straight Spouse, Uncategorized
Comments: 9 Replies
English: Pleiades Star Cluster

Image via Wikipedia

I don’t know why they call them rebound relationships.  When I think of a rebound I think of a ball bouncing off of a wall, which is a fairly tame thing.  I now call the first major relationship after leaving my husband the supernova – a collection of stars exploding all at once vaporizing everything in their path, burning bright, hot and fast.  It was a force of nature – so much bigger than a rebound.

I left my husband when I discovered he was a closeted homosexual.  He had been lying to me and to himself for our entire nine-year relationship.   When I left him I was devastated, although the relationship had grown dysfunctional, I was still deeply in love and a dedicated wife.

My marriage had been celibate for a prolonged period of time, and I desperately longed for a relationship with a straight man.  I found it almost too easily and only four months after leaving my husband.  He was a man who I had known casually in my social group of friends.  He was handsome, charming, and we had a lot of the same interests.  We sort of discovered through mutual friends that we both had a crush on each other, so it seemed inevitable that we would end up together. He even remembered the moment we first met years earlier, which was fuzzy to me, but he could recall it in startling detail.  And he resembled a taller, younger version of my husband.  It was as if I had found the straight version of the man I had just left.

I knew it was a dangerous situation and I avoided getting involved at first.  I had so many fears–Was it too soon? Would this end up making my depression worse? Was it because he reminded me of my ex?

But it happened, the universe finally put us together, and for a brief period in my life it was pure magic.  I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world to have fallen from that complete and utter disaster that was my divorce into something that felt so perfect.  And he seemed just as excited as I was; it felt like the ideal love affair.  But the cracks started to form almost immediately.  I was deeply depressed, a depression that is almost too difficult to describe now.  I couldn’t sleep through the night, had difficulty eating, cried constantly, suffered panic attacks, general anxiety, overwhelming fears dominated my thoughts, and my moods would turn on a dime.  I lost 20 pounds and dropped two dress sizes in a few months, had frequent asthma attacks, and was constantly sick; physically, and emotionally I was falling apart.

I also wasn’t used to dating, I was used to being married.  Dating is not anywhere near being married.  I didn’t know how to make the transition; I was suffocating, smothering and desperate for his affection.  I will never know his motivations but I can’t blame him for walking away from an obvious train wreck.  He had his own problems as everyone does, and I was just a disaster of a human being. When it ended it felt like being dropped off an emotional cliff.  I was already so damaged from my divorce and now my first attempt at love was an implosion of epic proportions.

For months I tormented myself over the whole affair beating myself up for all of the mistakes I had made.  I tried to start another relationship only to have that blow up in my face almost the exact same way.  I kept blaming myself, what if I had waited?  What if I had been healthier?  Would either relationship have worked out differently?  Eventually I convinced myself that it didn’t matter.  I would never know that alternate reality and life doesn’t work with a reset button.  The damage was done; the trust was shattered on both sides and couldn’t be repaired.  Feelings were hurt, egos bruised, expectations destroyed and there was no way I could repair any of it.  And I needed to move forward anyway as the whole affair was just collateral damage of my state of mind at the time.  Being clinically depressed is not the best time to start a relationship.

The real source of my anguish was my divorce, so either it would have been this one painful affair or a series of short meaningless flings, but the outcome would have been the same.  I was eventually going to hit rock-bottom.   After an agonizing eight-hour long anxiety attack and three days of very little sleep, I finally bottomed out, and then I got into therapy, briefly went on antidepressants and little by little, month by month, the horrible twisted vice of depression released its grip and I began to have my mind back.  It took nearly two years from the day I left my marriage to finally feel like myself again.   Friendships tarnished and other aspects of my personal and professional life have been negatively affected, but I try to live with a positive outlook and not look back.  Cognitive behavioral therapy is one tool that worked for me and I try to use its tips and tricks every day.

I say it all the time now to anyone newly divorced and I say it even if they are not listening.  Don’t do it.   Give yourself time to heal before you suck someone else into the personal torment that you are inevitably going to experience.  Of course not every divorced person goes through this, as some are happy to leave their spouse, and for them divorce is a new beginning.  But if a person is emotionally crushed, they should avoid getting involved in a serious intimate relationship for a while.

The most important thing that I learned from my supernova experience is that no one else could save me.  No one person has enough love or strength to pull another out of a free fall, especially in a brand new relationship.  I had to do it on my own.  I couldn’t really be available emotionally to another partner when I couldn’t even take care of myself.

Sometimes a person gets lucky and has a perfect love affair immediately after a divorce, but from my own, and most of my friend’s experiences this hasn’t been the case.  So fight the force of nature, hang out with your friends and work on yourself.  Things will get better, but the main thing that you need is time, not another lover.

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High School Bullies – It Gets Better

Date: September 18, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression
Comments: 3 Replies
English: Looking northwest across Nostrand Ave...

English: Looking northwest across Nostrand Avenue at Hudde Junior High School on a mostly sunny midday. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m shutting down another blog of mine and I am moving some of my favorite articles over to this one.  The original date for this post is Oct. 15, 2010  And in honor of my 20th high school reunion which was last night, and I did not attend, I thought it was perfect timing for this one.

I’m not gay. I have no idea what being gay in a world that is so damn homophobic would be like. I can’t imagine having to deal with that on top of other trials and obstacles of adolescence.

I was different from most kids  And I was bullied.  So if there is anyone out there that might read this in the same circumstance then I hope it helps.

Since college I have suffered a bit of an identity crisis.  People tend to assume that I am from a solid preppy middle class background.  Or that I was at least a popular girl.  Some have even asked if I was a cheerleader.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

My father had a blue-collar job, my family life was chaotic and full of screaming fights, money was_always_ an issue as we never had enough of it.   There are also some issues with my family that I don’t feel comfortable printing on a public forum like this, so I won’t, let’s just say there was a tremendous amount of pain in my childhood.   I was an awkward, insecure, beaten down mess, a flat chested girl with wide hips, round thighs and baby fine hair that refused to take a perm or curl.  And this was in the days of_huge_hair!  I was also a little too smart for my own good and the world’s worst athlete.  Gym teachers would make fun of how uncoordinated I was at pretty much_every_ sport.  I also developed chronic and impossible to treat acne.  None of this was helping my poor social skills.  In social interactions I was blunt and too the point, I had no subtly.  I didn’t posses any of the tools of to make or keep a lot of friends.  I was basically a disaster.

The worst of it was in Junior high.  Who doesn’t hate Junior high right?  I really didn’t have any close friends.  I actually had a birthday party when I was 13, and no one showed up.  NO ONE. Even though I had invited about a dozen or so girls who supposedly were my “friends”.  They chose to go to another party on the same day for a popular boy who happened to share my birthday.  Yet none of them had the courage to tell me they weren’t going to come to mine.  So it was all a shock to me when 8 o’clock hit, then 8:30 then 9:00 and still_no one_showed up. I knew I had stiff competition with the other party but I never thought I would be alone on my birthday.

I had decorated my room with balloons and streamers,  bought a cake (in my best friend’s favorite color) and my family had helped get everything together.  It was beyond heartbreaking.  Humiliated in front of my parents and siblings and utterly devastated, I never spoke to any of the girls again.  I cut them out of my life completely and then I was socially entirely alone.  I couldn’t understand why no one wanted to hang out with me or seemed to like me.  I got along better with adults than with kids my age, or with children.  I developed a social numbness that I still deal with a bit today.  My depression was so bad that even my grades fell and I had been in advanced courses before that.  My parents way of dealing with it was to try to shame me into getting my grades up, which only made it worse.

There were multiple other humiliating and degrading incidents that I won’t catalog here.  My senior year being the most absurd.  The first gulf war broke out and my little band of friends and myself were quite vocally anti-war.  We were harassed in the hall ways and my friend had her car vandalized once after school.  A group of people had written anti-peace signs all over her car and “Hippie go Home” and things of that nature.  Then at the end of the year and the war over, when after I had won a competition to speak the benediction at my graduation, I found out that there was an emergency meeting by the student council and they voted me out.  Apparently my anti-war and left-wing politics seemed too risky to allow me access to a mic.  It sounds like an after school special but it actually happened to me!  HA!!!!

My speech in the senior speaker competition didn’t contain anything political.  The speech that I was to read at graduation was written by someone else.   I had no editorial control over its content whatsoever and I had not been planning on using my graduation as any sort of soap box.  I had gone to speech tournaments for years, had won multiple awards and I took public speaking very seriously.  When I found out what had happened and I almost didn’t attend my own graduation because I was so upset. Maybe they had banned me because I tended to hang with the “art fags” or foreign exchange students, gay boys and girls and other artistic types.  We were a tiny band of freaks and we really didn’t make any apologizes for it.

But all of this did do something to me.  I knew I had to get out of Missouri and get out of that community and eventually I did just that.

I have suffered some recent heartache with the collapse of my marriage, but overall I never imagined that I would be living and performing in New York City at any age.  The prospect of coming from a home where I was always told that “We can’t afford it” and “We don’t have any money” to living in the most amazing and expensive city in the country?  The whole prospect seemed insurmountable.

This city is magical to me, and has been since I moved here in 2001.  I am surrounded by friends, really amazing friends who have listened to me cry about my divorce, go on and one about my situation and seen me meltdown multiple times and they were always there to pick me back up.  They didn’t desert me, they stood by me and in doing so they have really blown my mind.  And this is the greatest part, they are all creative people some are film makers, artists, writers, dancers, singers, musicians, actors, directors, sword swallowers, fire eaters, trapeze artists, trick rope artists, burlesque performers, clowns etc. etc. etc.  Nearly all of my friends share the same values, roughly the same politics, similar belief systems.  Instead of being in a tiny little band of freaks who might call themselves LIBERAL or DEMOCRAT, I know have an ARMY of folks that are like me!!!!!!

I don’t even remember the names of people I went to high school anymore.  I only really remember fellow girl scouts, my friends and the other kids in my Advanced Placement classes.  If the bullies and the jerks look me up on facebook, I might friend them.  I don’t really care at this point.   I have toured the country twice, performed on cruise ships, in the Soviet Union, in an Off-Broadway theater in an award nominated show.  I been an “extra” on a whole list of films and Television shows.  Not that being an extra is that exciting, but still shows like Boardwalk Empire, 30 Rock?  How is that not fun?   I never would have thought any of this would happen.  I am not a bitter actor/performer wondering when my big break will come.  I feel like I have already kinda made it, even though I don’t make a lot of money and I own basically nothing except my furniture and my clothing.  🙂

To go from that 13-year-old birthday party where I thought my life had ended to my life today, I never would have thought it would happen.  Or to the bullies that decided to silence my voice my senior year, when I get to go on multiple stages all over this city and speak my mind.  It really does get better.  Those punks have no bearing on my life whatsoever and they never will again!  🙂

So if anyone out there thinks that the cult of mediocrity will always keep you down, know that it is the weirdos and freaks that eventually take over the world.  At least the kind of world that I love living in.

Oh and I just realized that part of my motivation for writing this was a recent incident at a comedy show where another comedian basically said words to the effect of

“Your so gorgeous you don’t have any problems”.

And well I nearly killed her verbally which I regretted, because she didn’t mean anything personal by it, it was actually written into her act.  And well, I am not always so proud of my verbal tirades. But it is another lesson of never judge a book by its cover, not every “pretty” girl has had it easy.  Not in the least.

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Why I just can’t get over it and be happy — Depression is an illness

Date: September 16, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Gay Husband, Relationships, Straight Spouse
Comments: 9 Replies
Rethink Mental Illness

Rethink Mental Illness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This post is originally from July 2010.  I am moving this from my other blog.  It got tremendous feedback and I am sad that I can’t move the comments over as well, but I am very proud of this post.  Depression is a mental illness and should be treated as a serious medical problem, not something that can be easily brushed off as the blues.

My last blog post was so positive!  Well here comes the ANGRY part of my little Miss Angry Girl blog.  The other day had such a beautiful interaction with another human being and then last night……..ARRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH (pirate growl)

Someone gave me yet more unsolicited advice tonight.  Boy, do I hate unsolicited advice!!!

“Why don’t you try looking on the positive side of things for a change?”

Really, I hadn’t thought of that.   Now I am sure that this person had the best of intentions.  They thought they were helping me out, but let me break it down for why it is not so easy to simply “Think positively”

Would you tell an anorexic to just eat some food?  An alcoholic to simply stop drinking?  A drug addict to simply stop using?  A person with ADHD to simply focus?  A person with schizophrenia to simply stop hearing voices?  Or would you even dream of telling a person who is physically handicapped to simply start moving?  Yes stopping the negative behavior is part of the problem, but there’s a reason telling a person suffering from mental illness to THINK BETTER is absolute nonsense.

Just as a physically handicapped person can not suddenly become fully functional after thinking positively, the same cna be said about a person suffering from depression.  I’m suffering from reactive depression.  To quote Psychology.suite101.com

This form of depression is a direct result or responses to a painful or difficult circumstance or event in a person’s life. In reactive depression there is a specific and recognized reason found to be the source of the condition.  Examples of situations which may result in a person suffering from reactive depression include: redundancy, work stress, marital problems, bereavement, loss, problems with one’s children, retirement, moving house, DIVORCE or changing job.

Sometimes it takes longer than perhaps casual acquaintances think is necessary to work through a major life changing event.  I was clinically depressed just a few months ago, so I’m actually doing better off now.  Clinical depression is depression that gets so bad a person cannot normally function.  That is eat, drink, bathe, sleep, get out of bed…..FUNCTION.

Not to mention that I lost not just the primary relationship that I had for nine years. I had to move.  My income has severely dropped as has my ability to find work.  All thanks to a number of circumstances surrounding my divorce.  Even the loss of a regular source of income could lead to depression never mind, the loss of my husband, sense of betrayal, loss of trust in other human beings, damaged sexuality, and destroyed self esteem.

If you are reading this and don’t know me, I found out my marriage was a complete fraud.  My husband has been living a secret life, and has lied to me from day one of our marriage.  It’s been a rough 13 months.

All of this doesn’t even  take into consideration my childhood, my life history or any trauma’s besides my divorce that might also be contributing to my depression.  Trust me, you could sit down with my therapist and we could go over some things in my past that might make your hair turn white.  I’d rather not rehash them here.  :

Depression is an illness.  Depression is an illness.  DEPRESSION IS AN ILLNESS!

It’s not to say that I won’t overcome it, but my brain is sick right now.  Chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, nor-epinephrine all play a role, and they are real.  It is not simply  a question of “thinking positively”.    I’m not being self-destructive sexually or with drugs and alcohol, and I’m in regular therapy with both a therapist and a psychiatrist.  So I think I’m doing everything that I can to overcome this.

What I am currently dealing with is trying to get off an SSRI (Zolfot) while still trying to figure out how to survive in a ravaged economy with high unemployment.  My life hasn’t exactly stabilized since leaving my husband, especially financially speaking.

Not to say that positive thinking won’t help, of course it will, but I’m dealing with a chemical withdrawal of a drug that altered my natural levels of serotonin.  Just sitting back and trying to think happy thoughts, is not really going to cut it.  What might help is some respect for this MENTAL ILLNESS called depression, and some compassion. for not just me but the millions of other Americans who are currently battling this disease.  Just as a handicapped person cannot simply will themselves to walk, a person suffering from a mental illness needs a little bit more than positive thinking to pull themselves up.    I am not weak because I can’t get over this, I am NOT being self-destructive, I am doing the best I can.

And solidarity to my fellow sufferers of depression, we will get through this and we will be stronger for it.  One day people will understand that we can’t just simply “be happy”.

Read more at Suite101: What is Reactive Depression?: Understanding Common Mental Health Conditions http://psychology.suite101.com/article.cfm/what-is-reactive-depression#ixzz0uCm4pTxr

4/23/11

I wanted to add an an epilogue as it were to this post.  I left my husband nearly two years ago, because he was gay and every aspect of my life much completely collapsed immediately afterward.  Emotionally and financially I was a mess.  If my financial life had been in order, or if I had steady employment that was not tied into what my husband did for a living I would have been much better off.  That being said, I can honestly say that I’m much better off now.  It takes serious time to get over something like a divorce.  I have never gone through anything as torturous in my life, and I really hope I never have to go through it again.   There is hope on the other end of whatever hell is causing your reactive depression.  If you’re suffering from clinical depression due to a recent crisis, please seek help if you feel you need it.  There are so many resources out there, and if you feel like your life isn’t worth living anymore, that’s the biggest warning sign.  Get help.  Depression is not just feeling blue.  I had no idea until I went through it myself, but it’s an actual mental illness that will take over your life.  If you’re experiencing most or a a few of these symptoms seek professional help.

  • Lack of appetite
  • Lack of desire to do anything, get out of bed, shower, eat, drink,
  • Isolation – Refusal to go outside, see friends, etc.
  • Suicidal thoughts – This is not a joke, get help as soon as possible.
  • Waking frequently at night, not able to sleep for more than a couple hours in a stretch
  • Sleeping way too much
  • Poor concentration
  • Overwhelming feelings of guilt and despair
  • Crying ALL the time

Clinical depression is often coupled with anxiety.  And in my case the anxiety was so bad, that is why I knew I had a serious problem I had never had anything like it before in my life.

  • Panic attacks
  • Anxiety attacks – Panic attacks that go on for hours, my worst was 8 hours long and absolutely terrifying.
  • Overwhelming panic and fear
  • Waves of depression followed by waves of anxiety – this is actual textbook depression, and not at all unusual.
  • Inability to sleep that goes on for days.

I’m not here to sell any drug.  Medication doesn’t work for everyone and isn’t always the best option.  I was only on meds for a short period of time, but I believe strongly they saved my life.  Don’t be afraid to ask for help and please get help if you need it.  There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, don’t give up.  🙂  If your first therapist or doctor isn’t working for you, find another one.  Keep looking until you can get the help you need.  Cognitive behavioral therapy is a great resource that I’ve tried and highly recommend.

Also try to find distance from anyone who doesn’t take your illness seriously.  They probably are trying to help, but some well-meaning friends or relatives can actually cause more problems.  As much as the lover or friend will also help you out, there is a limit to what they can do.  Having someone around who is objective and doesn’t know you or want anything from you will really help you in finding the right course to help you with your healing.

Try as much as you can to not self-medicate with alcohol or recreational drugs, they will just make things worse, and could kill you.  Substances are just stretching out the process.  They numb you temporarily, but in the long run they will just make things harder.  The same thing goes for sex, or food, anything that can be used in a self-destructive manner should be avoided.   No one is perfect and you will make mistakes, just try to pick yourself afterward and not beat yourself up too much.

Just my two cents of course, you don’t have to agree with me on any of it.  I just know what helped me.  Good luck to anyone finding this blog, may you get stronger and healthier each day.

I wanted to add this brilliant Lecture by Dr. Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University.  The first time I listened to this it blew my mind, I found out I was suffering from a textbook case of clinical depression.  His explanation of the inability to sleep through the night and weight loss was EXACTLY what I was going through.  It was a PHYSICAL manifestation of my depression, it wasn’t something I could control.

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Life After Divorce: Some Basics I try to remind myself of every day

Date: September 15, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Depression, Divorce, Gay Husband, Relationships, Straight Spouse
Comments: 2 Replies

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This is a blog post from another blog that I used to write, that due to confusion with this blog I am shutting down and moving my better articles over here.  🙂

So I was sort of acting as impromptu counselor for a friend who is facing a separation/divorce.  And I will repeat what I have said numerous times.  Divorce is much different from a regular break up.  You stood before your entire family, you committed your life to another person, you had legal and financial obligations, you had to go to court to actually break up, you have a wedding ring, and on and on and on.   There is just such a perceived permanence to marriage, even with a 50% divorce rate.  If you were betting on a horse, a 50% success rate wouldn’t be so bad, so thinking you might stay together forever isn’t really that far-fetched.

Divorce is hell, I am still over a year from separating from my husband and I still have dark nights of the soul, crying fits for no reason, insomnia, and the occasional panic attack.  I am doing a MILLION TIMES better than I was just a few months ago, but it is still a daily struggle.

But I try to live by these very basic rules every day.  Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I don’t, but I try and, trying is half the battle. This is sort of what I was telling my friend tonight (who shall remain nameless) and I thought it would be good to write it down.   I get a lot of “Think Positive“ and I think that is a lame way of saying “Be Happy“ for me there is a bit more to it, and I am breaking it down.

1. Don’t Dwell on what You cannot control – Like it or not, we cannot control other people.  I can’t control the main factor that lead to my divorce, so I have to let it go.

2. Get Rid of Crazy People in Your Life – Not exactly crazy people, but people that make me crazy or encourage crazy behavior, especially self-destructive behavior.  Sometimes this is impossible if it is a family member or a roommate but if you can avoid people who make you do crazy things, do it!  They might not even know they make you crazy or are actively trying to make you crazy…..but it doesn’t matter.  People that put you into CRAZYTOWN, should be avoided.

3. Do Not Hurt Yourself – Avoid the trappings that seem like an easy fix to a complex problem, drugs, alcohol, sex with people if it is in a self-destructive way, lashing out at loved ones and friends.  I don’t do any substances and for the most part have avoided dating, but I definitely find ways to mess up my life…..trust me.

4. Surround yourself with supportive people – This one is hard with my crazy schedule but I try, I wish I could do this more often.

5. Focus on the Future not the Past – I think it is important to know your past, but not to dwell on it.  This is HARD especially while in therapy, because in therapy a therapist is usually trying to find a cause to the core problem.  I actually saw my future as a black hole when I left my husband.  I am still extremely uncertain what lies before me, but it is a little less black and more gray now.  🙂

6. Forgive yourself and others for past mistakes – This one is also very difficult for me especially.  I won’t get into it, but because of childhood issues, I have difficulty letting go of things and especially with forgiveness.  My biggest problem is forgiving myself.  I tend to beat myself up over things that I cannot go back and fix.

7. Ask for Help when you need it – This one is beyond hard for me.  It always has been, but I tell myself that I am a weaker person when I DON’T ask for help.  No one is perfect, everyone needs help sometimes.

8. Stop Saying “What if?” –  What if I had not dated so soon after leaving my husband?  What if I had left him earlier?  What if I had never married him in the first place?  Do these questions really do me any good?  NO, they just make me crazy.  And they will never stop, so I have to stop them…..I will never know the answer to WHAT IF?  So I have to stop asking!!!

9. Don’t ignore reality – When I start to spiral I say to myself, I have a great apartment, I am working, I am healthy, I have the best friends, supportive family, and the two world’s greatest cats, and compared to how a lot of people live in this world I have it pretty good.

10. It is going to get better – This has become a mantra I say to myself nearly nightly, although it is usually “It is going to be OK, It is going to be OK”  Life has a way of constantly changing, and even though things are bad now, they could very easily get better soon.

11. Find something that makes you really happy and do it – For me that is performing and more specifically singing and music.  One good thing that has happened through this whole mess is that I have re-found my love for singing that studying music had sort of beaten out of me.  🙂

12. Try to throw away the bad advice and take the good – I can’t tell you how much well meaning bad advice I have gotten.  It is extremely difficult at times to just let this stuff roll off of me, especially comments about my Ex-husband and judgments on myself and my marriage when the people giving the advice are uninformed.

13. When in doubt find my cats – They are pure love, they are furry, they purr, and they never let me down.

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Life After Divorced: Being a straight spouse two years later.

Date: September 13, 2011
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Divorce, Gay Husband, Relationships, Same Sex Marriage, Straight Spouse, Uncategorized
Comments: 5 Replies

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I still remember my wedding day, vividly.   Any day planned and fretted about for months is going to stick in your brain for a lifetime.  Any day built up as the beginning of the rest of your life will burn into your psyche, in the same way horrible trauma sears its pain and anguish deep into your bones.   Try as you might, you can’t shake it the pain becomes a part of your very foundation.  Few positive memories have the same effect.  For whatever reason, our bodies, hearts and minds tend to cling to the negative memories such as: being humiliated in front of your class, not being able to get jeans off in time due a broken zipper and wetting myself at girl scout camp, seeing my father lash out at me in a yet another blinding rage, losing a  job or role for reasons unknown, having a voice teacher tell me I would never be a singer, seeing the face of a lover suddenly go cold and distant, having no one show up to my 13th birthday party….and on and on and on.  The traumas and disappointments get inside of you like a bad virus you can’t shake, but the good memories fade quickly.  The memories replaced instead by just vague emotion.  Instead of specific images they blur into shifting colors through a window.  Instead of the detailed sharp piercing prongs of negative memories happy thoughts become reduced to feelings.  I can’t remember holding my cat for the first time, hugging a friend I haven’t seen forever, the first kiss from a person I adore, winning a competition….they drift, they fade only warm pretty shadows remain in their place.

The memory of my wedding day is now traumatic but still beautiful in my mind, so like the crazy nuanced event it has become, it is now a hybrid of negative crystal clear clarity and blurred fuzzy happiness.   The one image that keeps coming back is the walk down the aisle.  I used to have PTSD style flashbacks of the very event.  I would be sitting on the train or reading a book and for no reason it would flash into my brain as clear as it was actually happening.  The cathedral, with his family on one side and mine on the other, the organ music, with all of these faces turned towards me.  It was so overwhelming, all I could do to get through the ritual was to focus on my soon to-be husband and move closer and closer to him and the rest of my life.  I knew that if I turned to look at people on either side I would start crying and I didn’t want to cry on my wedding day so I kept focusing on the task at hand and that was to get down the aisle without shedding a tear.  My husband was now my new family, the scars and damage from my old one were over and I had chosen this new man to start over and help wipe away the darkness and pain of the past.

Since my divorce, I have had recurring nightmares of being outside of my body trying to run up to myself in the moments while screaming

“Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it”

The sound of my screams echoing through the great hall of marble, but no one looks up, no one even flinches and I still just keep moving forward.   Nothing I can do can stop me, it is like looking at ghosts re-enacting the same scene in a play over and over.

I hate it when people say,

“Well at least your husband was just gay, it could have been a lot worse”

Or anything to the effect of that I have somehow had it easier than a typical divorced person.

I guess in some ways I have, in that the end was so absolute.  There was no reason to second guess why I was leaving my husband, no amount of couples counseling, no amount of therapy or listening skills that would have made anything better, no horrible act of betrayal that I would regret for ending everything.  But on the downside I felt cheated.  I got cheated at a chance at a normal marriage, with a man of the same sexual orientation who loved me like a man is meant to love a woman, in mind, heart and body.

I was cheated of the chance of having children and being a mother.  I know I _might_still have time left, but dating at age 38 is difficult as half of the eligible men already have children and don’t want more.   And in my current state I couldn’t afford to raise a child on my own, as I can barely take care of myself.  There are times on the subway or in the park that even the sight of a young mother with her child will send me spiraling.  Suddenly tears come from nowhere and I can’t make them stop.  Why is she so lucky to have the one thing that I will never get to experience?  I am constantly told that I shouldn’t give up hope but I haven’t been able to sustain a relationship for any length of time and every other man who I find compatible is already a father and doesn’t want more children.  I had to end therapy because literally every single session was the same conflict, the same fear, the same resentment over probably losing the chance to be a parent.   When my therapist suggested I go back on medication, and then tried to get me to justify what I consider a fairly innate human desire to procreate I couldn’t take it anymore and ceased the sessions.

I was cheated of the dream that everyone has when they get married, that despite the obstacles in life and arguments, fights, and petty annoyances I no longer have a partner for life.  I was cheated on the intimacy of an adult human sexual relationship.  It seemed normal at first but it quickly became dysfunctional but because I loved my husband I stuck it out, and now I beat myself up for not leaving sooner.

So over two years have passed, but I am still not right.  I am still not healed and I don’t know if I ever will be.  I am suspicious of every man I meet, and I trust no one, it is so debilitating that I actually stick around in relationships that aren’t fully formed, that aren’t as scary, that aren’t as real…I am scared to have a real one.

But my shattered life has in some ways made me stronger, like a piece of metal cracked and then welded back together, or a bone broken and then reset.  I am no longer the same shape, my insides, my skeleton is not the same, and I don’t react to pain the same way.  I am far more empathetic to another person’s pain especially anyone divorced.  I feel deeply for them, and I cut them a lot of slack for self-destructive behavior or lashing out at themselves or others.  I know they are in a ton of pain and that most of their actions are not directed at me or anyone, but instead directed at the emptiness inside of them.  I have also learned that I have to heal myself before allowing anyone else in.  I no longer have my husband to unload my emotional baggage on.  And friends get tired when I repeatedly do it to them, so I am now forced to deal with it on my own, with just my broken heart and damaged soul to mend myself.  These things have definitely made me a better friend and a better person, but the lack of trust and emotional scars have made me more skittish and more apprehensive about letting anyone new in.   I have become damaged goods complete with certain memories playing repeatedly in my mind.  Hopefully I will one day be able to replace the photo sharp negative ones with more blurry happy thoughts.  But until then, I try to ride the nightmare of the memory of walking to my new life of fraud, deception and loss.  Two years ago I was pushed off a cliff and I survived, now I just need to figure out how to pick of the pieces and start climbing again.

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