Am I torturing my husband?

I have to find a way up and out of this emotional pit I seem to be struggling with. I look up and see daylight and blue sky and promise. I just can’t seem to reach it. Yet. All I need is a foothold. And once I get out, I have to defend myself so as not to get kicked back in. I need to be strong on the inside and outside.

If I could do it for him, that would be so great. My secret fear is that I have traumatized him. He’s had the sinking realization that he married an insane person and he is losing hope that I will ever be well. At least the sex is good. And I don’t nag. And we have great conversations. And I believe in him. And we’ve been together for 27 years.

Wait, maybe he’s not so bad off, after all. Maybe he’s really fortunate to have me. Maybe we are truly made for each other. There are some areas where I am crazy and maybe I won’t ever be magically healed from that. But there are other marriages and relationships that we know are horrible, flat out scary. Our relationship is not that.

We are best friends, best imperfect friends limping along together on this hard road of life. I hurt him sometimes and that is up at the top of my regrets in life. He could be more tactful with me but the intent is good. Neither one of us is very disciplined in setting and achieving goals or good with money. We get by pretty well though in spite of that.

Still, he is so much better than I am. And I feel I have put him in a bad position with the slow death of my business and nothing else coming up after it so far. He has to work so hard and his body might start to have trouble keeping up. I know he is stressed. I want him to be relaxed. I want him to change what he is doing but he doesn’t feel like he has time for that yet.

Real estate would be a good option for him. If only he could just take the time to do the training.

I am going through paroxysms of stress because I feel like a lump sitting here every day not making money, when it used to be pouring into the coffers with my Etsy business. Not any more. And it puts a lot of pressure on him. And I can’t seem to find a way to replace the lost income. I have gone back into panic and anxiety mode.

I think my best option right now would be to focus on trying to rebuild the traffic to the Etsy store. It still brings in some money and maybe if I could tweak things just right it would turn the spigot back on. I have been praying that I could find the faucet and get under it.

Avoidant.

After I went almost all the way through design school and then quit the last quarter, I was increasingly unhappy in my marriage. Not that I had ever been blissful. I’d married him because I was pregnant. That’s what you did back then. It still wasn’t socially acceptable to just live with your baby daddy. I suppose that was a good thing in some ways for the girls, even though it ended anyway when they were six and eight years old.

But hell, I don’t want to sit here and write out a line by line account of my past. That shit hurts. I don’t like to spend too much time thinking about it. The truth is, I go back and forth on whether or not I like the person I was in the 80s. Usually I land on the side of not liking her. Which begs the question: how do I feel about myself now?

You know, there are some things I just can’t seem to get it together on. I’m not much of a people person and I guard my heart. I keep people at arms length. I am putting a long term friendship on hold because she wouldn’t take my counsel under advisement. She wouldn’t even consider it. Case closed. So I have no desire to be with her anymore. Is that wrong of me?

Here’s the thing: I have a faith. I believe in God. I even claim to follow Jesus. I don’t call myself a Christian because I think that term raises a lot of negative feelings and I don’t want to associate myself with it. I’m not like other people. Yeah, fuck, I’m special and all that, remember? Anyway, I have a faith. So shouldn’t I be willing to be a martyr and sit and listen to my friend’s problems and try to figure out a way to be able to help her even when she has rebuffed my advice?

Or should I decide what my own boundaries are and live by that without shame? Which choice is going to make me a better person?

I just don’t know.

When my adult daughter wants to come over and talk to me I cringe. It’s not that I don’t want to help her, I do. It’s not that I don’t love her. I do. It’s just that the potential emotional fallout of such encounters makes me feel vulnerable. Of course, I have a history with this particular daughter that makes me feel like a painful episode could happen again. And I try to avoid that kind of shit.

I find that as I get older I am more and more hesitant to extend myself. I am hurt and hiding in my hidey hole. I am disconnecting from more and more outside things and content to be at home, alone, no longer in the world making a difference. Realizing this disturbs me. It’s like everything I touch eventually falls to shit and I withdraw further.

It wasn’t that long ago that I decided to become part of Toastmasters. I’m a good speaker. I’m a good writer. So how much fun would that be? It would be great fun. And it was great fun. I got to write speeches and give them and critique others’ speeches. I was even elected president. And then it all fell apart one day when I was too harsh in my critique of someone’s speech and another member publicly rebuked me. I left and never went back. I will never go back. There is now shame attached to that event and that place and those people and I will never go back.

So now I am making myself cry. That’s not a good way to start the day.