mr-chainsaw's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - We worked together and were good friends for about 2 years before our hooking up. I’ll just start at the beginning as best I can. When I first met BF I was in an extremely difficult relationship and he had just moved back to our city after recouping from a nasty break-up. He made no secrets about the details of this said break-up or any of his “fucked up shit”. In the industry we work, drunken commiserating is the norm and boy did we. The year after my relationship ended, I became one of the guys and got shit-hammered damn near every night with this group. During this time my BF was seeing “the Dr.” and I was hooking up with whoever I wanted. I am a serial monogamist, most of my relationships had been long-term and I was never an ONS kind of girl. Fast forward another 6 months, his roommate and he moved into the apartment I am renting with my roommate at the time. This was a blast at first, but things went downhill by the second year of living there. I was miserable, and I know now that it was mostly my fault. During that time his best friend started dating my roommate. I was glad for them but was unhappy that he was crashing at our apartment for long periods. Looking back, I think I was extremely jealous of them. To be fair, from my perspective everyone else seemed to have such ease in their relating and I was perplexed as to why it was so hard for me. I was not adult enough to address this and let it drive me crazy. I took this out on my BF, a lot. Knockdown screaming fights, drunken bullshit, I was out of control. I tried to crawl out my second-floor window, just so I wouldn’t have to leave our room. I’m sure by the time we all moved out, it was as big of relief for my roommate as it was for me. My roommate relocated to the town of my BF’s best friend, and I moved with my BF and his roommate to a new neighborhood. My BF and his roommate sat so long on the decision about staying or moving that it was made for us. I loved that apartment, and I was not quiet about it. The rent was great for the space, the hood was fine enough, and I had lived there for 5 years already. We end up having to move but don’t find a new place until about 2 weeks before our lease is up. I was extremely upset because they dragged their feet to the point where I was starting to get worried. I greatly prefer to not be a last-minute planner IF it can be prevented. Anyway, we find a place and its about $400 more/month and smaller than our current place. I don’t let this go for months, despite there being nothing I could do about it now. I know I am wrong, but I dig my hole. Things level out after a while and we all get nice and settled. BF and his roommate started working together in this time at a place they can walk to from home, and I work about a 20-minute drive from home. We all are still on that ‘work hard, play hard” life, and things seem good for about a year or so. To be honest though, from about 2015 until 2017 I don’t remember a whole lot of details about how BF and I were relating as we were almost always drunk or hungover. I think it was quite a bit of maintaining the status quo, but I cannot say for sure. We fight several times during this period, always extremely drunk, always end of the world, always embarrassing. Our neighbors hate us, our roommate is hardly ever home, and it is just a hot mess. One drunken night we fight, I punch him in the face and attempt to sleep in the car, but BF will not let me. I do not remember what this fight was even about. I cool it on the drinking after this. I am mortified, I feel like shit for weeks. I apologize, make my mends, but I still hate myself for doing that to this day. I will say that I truly believe that was one of the moments that was the catalyst for changing my ways. The more on the outside I get, the more I can see how bad things are. During the time I am getting my shit together, I think he starts lying about drinking despite saying he is sober. I believe him until he is coming home from a sports game. He is adamant that he tripped getting off the bus, busting open his head and giving himself a black eye. At this time, I am unaware of how much our roommate is covering for him as well. It turns out he had been getting drunk at work and continuing to drink at home. They find him asleep in the liquor closet several times before I find out. We fight a lot around this time, and I start feeling real animosity towards him. A lot of that animosity for me stemmed from him almost always saying one thing and doing the opposite. Saying he wants to get sober, but not doing anything about it. Saying he doesn’t want to lie, but not trying to figure out why. Around this time my old roommate and his best friend getting married and this amplified my feeling that BF was dragging his feet in our relationship. Honestly, it hurt me to see this couple moving forward in their life when they had started their journey after us. I realize that my thoughts on this a wrong, but it is how I feel. I am not keen on marriage, but I had been talking about us buying a house together for a while at this point. Looking back, I am glad we did not. I see him drink at the wedding and I lose it. I’m crying in the closet and break down for a few minutes with the bride. I’m an asshole, I know; I can feel it too. I tell her things are bad and she listened, let me change out of my bridesmaid dress, and we get back to the party. I love her to bits. I need to apologize to her. I am glad I am typing all this out. I end up drinking while out to dinner with a friend the following week breaking my several month sobriety. I realize in this “one beer won’t hurt” moment that I cannot have just one beer, I do not drink again after this day. BF starts going to meetings because he’s about to lose his job. I make him get a breathalyzer (wrong thing for me to do, I know), he again says he is sober. I believe him until I get an email from our downstairs neighbor while I am at work saying, “If we could quiet down.” As someone had been “moving furniture around all day.” I text BF and roommate to let them know. I come home to piles of things all over the bedroom, dining room, and BF looks crazy, going around with a garbage bag. I think he panics because I can tell something is wrong, he’s tossing beer cans that were hidden under the bed frantically. I lose my mind. He has blue boogers coming out of his nose and swears to god he is stone sober. He cries, begs, says he needs help. I start staying in the cat room and eating peanut butter compulsively. I also start going to therapy around this time. While trying to have a discussion with BF I find myself so utterly frustrated that I am bashing my head against the table and wall. I frighten the fuck out of myself, quickly give myself bangs as I have to go to work. I call to set up an appointment the next day. I find therapy helpful and it allows me to find other ways to communicate with BF that seem to work for a while. I don’t think I ever used therapy properly. In retrospect, it has always been about the things that are happening to me and never about how I react to these things. When I can get back into therapy, I am going to do my best to focus on ME. I have the clarity now to see that I perpetuate my victim role, but still lack the skills to begin to change this. Over the next 6 months, BF starts to improve in small ways, but we still are far from good. The KM position at my place of employment opened, and they always knew BF was in the kitchen elsewhere. They end up reaching out to BF to see if he was willing to come in and discuss the opportunity and I am squirming. I explain all the bad things about the job, why I think it is not a good idea. I let him know that I thought that if he took this job it would be the downfall of our already shitty relationship. He gets drunk on his first day. Yeah, he took the job. I leave and stay at an ESA for about 2 weeks. I find out he cheated on me about two months or so after he started. It was 5 years prior and he never told me. I move back into the cat room; he is diagnosed with bipolar. He finally sets up couples counseling in the meantime. I am freaking out. It was almost like I walked around the corner and someone smacked me in the face with a shovel. At this point I start feeling like my whole life with him has been a giant lie and everything that he has done has been a way to make sure I cannot leave him without upending my entire existence. I am not supportive, and he shares very little. I questioned the shit out of his BP diagnosis because it came out of nowhere, and I’m at the point I just see it as one more excuse for his shitty behavior. I deeply regret this. I sometimes think that if I had been supportive, things might have gotten better a lot faster than they have. I felt unable to support him though because I felt like all I had done was drag this relationship around for the last 6 years. I leave and stay at an ESA again a few months later when I can no longer take the med changes, the lies, and living/working together. I only share with my therapist, my old roommate, and my friend the details of my life. Even then I pick and choose the things I tell. I go from the bedroom to the cat room a few more times. I start eating my feelings, isolating, and I feel like I am on autopilot. Here I am 1.5 years later, still on autopilot with major systems failing. At this time BF and I can hardly do anything but eat or watch TV without fighting. We try to do things, but I am usually left disappointed. I explain through screaming, crying, and counseling sessions the things that I am not okay with. He says the lying is because he’s afraid I will leave. The lack of motivation, he says he doesn’t know. I try calendars, suggesting videos, try to talk about the hard things, I read, I watch videos, I drive myself crazy, but we are left in an endless stalemate. I feel like I have been beaten down and incredibly stupid. I’ve isolated myself into this little shit hole of a world. It’s eaten away at who I am. I don’t know how many more of BF’s words I can just accept when I know that things are the way they are. I suppose I have stayed because I believe that people can change. I always just leave out the part “if they want to.” in my mind. That and I have no respect for myself, and I don’t know that I ever have. He has changed and it’s been for the better, but I’m left feeling like its too little too late. It makes me cry to even type that because I do love him. I just feel like he never worked to rebuild the trust that was broken, and instead continued to lie. He’s stopped drinking, but I don’t know for how long. He still doesn’t share any of this information with me. He cannot just do things for me or the relationship without being told what it is to do. I don’t ask a lot, but I am frustrated by the things I do have to ask for, like honesty and openness. I am on high alert for each little fuck up, and at this point they only make me see red. I am extremely stubborn and full of rage. In all of this, I have learned some things about myself that I really do not like and have yet to address on my own. (people-pleasing, co-dependency, addiction, anger, poor self-image, I could go on) My first therapist left the practice and I have been in insurer limbo as far as seeing my new counselor since December. I feel so depleted by the last two years of my life and I’m depressed. At least I think I might be. I do nothing now. Most days I sit in my apartment, in my pajamas, until I have to go to work. My house is a mess, my life is a mess, and I am stressed to the max. I refused to do anything because I feel like he won’t do anything. I keep going though because of autopilot. I hate myself. I do it with a smile because I have no choice. He always apologizes and appears sincere, but I don’t feel like he is choosing me. I feel betrayed because it feels like it has never mattered to him how many times I CHOSE HIM. It was never enough to illicit change. Now that he says he wants to do the work; I am ready to move out. I feel like an asshole, and I have been acting like an asshole, but I need space. As I type this, I am staying in the cat room, again. How do I get to a place where I can respect us both if I don’t respect myself anymore? Thank you, whoever you are for reading this far. I felt the need to get that out. 3:52 p.m. - 2020-02-21 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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