I'm not actually this emo, really.

Haven’t been in here in a while.

I should probably write more on this blog, it’s kind of cathartic.

Things have improved in my relationship with my husband. It’s still not a normal marriage, but we found out I have cancer last Summer, and suddenly he realized that I really could die, and his main concern became about saving my life.

The cancer thing also made me shift my mindset. I don’t want to waste my energy on regret and resentment, so I have done my best to drop the secret internal angst as much as possible.

Still, I will have the need to rant and complain now and then, I’m sure, so this blog will stay open.

On being afraid of… what, exactly?

Me, the coward.

I know when the final, pivotal decision was that led me to be the trapped, dependent person I am now. It was on my second run through college. My first two years I attended a small local community college, I started when I was 27. I am a GED bearing high school dropout, so doing well was very important to me. I maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA. I worked my ass off. I had big plans of going on to the local university.

But I was afraid. I took a “break”

It was four years later, when I again took notice that my life was going nowhere, that I went back to school.

But I was still afraid. So instead of going on to the university, I returned to what was familiar and went back to the community college for an AS in graphic design.

I kept my grades up, I did my best, but I discovered that the talent and technical knowledge that came so naturally to so many of my schoolmates just wasn’t in me.

It may be that I wasn’t in the right mindset. I haven’t been in the right mindset for too many years to count. And the problems in my personal life were always, always looming.

For much of that time period I was on a combination of depression and anxiety pills that made it easier for me to function. Towards the end of my second-to-last semester, we could no longer afford these or my diabetes meds.

My last semester I was supposed to apply for an internship.

I was in terror.

I couldn’t sleep. I got sick. I developed a severe infection in my jaw that made several of my teeth start breaking, for which I had to go through several expensive procedures. We were running out of money, and my financial aid had run out the semester before.

Even with all this, though, I knew I could find a way to continue if I really tried.

I went to the first meeting at school about potential internships, smiling and nodding and listening attentively. I took all the brochures and even dared to fantasize about really doing it. About how if I could just get over this one hurdle, if I could just see that there is nothing to be scared of, if I could just fucking do it that a new, brighter chapter would finally open in my life.

And I couldn’t do it. I cried (alone), I mourned (alone), I could almost hear it- the sound of the big giant door of self-respect and worth slamming in my face. By my own hand.

I let everyone believe it was the obvious financial/physical issues that were keeping me down… but really, it was because I was afraid.

Because I am a coward.

Again and again, it’s a slap in the face. Everything I do seems to be the wrong thing. And I’m trying to stay soft, stay open, stay kind, stay warm, but everything keeps telling me to lock the doors, close the windows, draw the blinds, and let no one in ever again.

(Source: darling-waitforme)

On the person you love not being who they claim to be.

Am I a real person? 

I don’t know how to be human any more.

Everyone who knows me thinks I’m just this happy, goofy, odd person. And I am, I do have that side. They see me- a fat, disabled, not conventionally attractive person in my late 30s, married to a fat, mid-thirties professional man- and they KNOW there is something off about us and our life, but they don’t quite know the real story.

I haven’t had a job in over 5 years. 

So everyone feels bad for my husband, who has this lazy good-for-nothing wife, and they think he is just this nice but kind of weird guy, and I’m sure they wonder why we are even married.

I wonder that myself. We are both miserable.

What very few people understand, however, is what brought us to this point.

Most of our friends are relatively recent additions to our life, and are much younger than us. They weren’t here for the decade and a half (give or take) progression of our relationship.

They didn’t see me in the beginning, how completely and totally head-over-heels infatuated I was with him. They didn’t see the devastation I felt when I found out (purely by accident) that he was a closet bisexual who spent a decade lying to me about it, to my face, despite the fact that I even called him on signs of it.

They didn’t see how I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my husband is actually almost exclusively attracted to (and constantly crushing on/falling in love with) our cute male friends. How he would treat me like crap while giving all the best parts of himself to random young men who drifted in and out of our lives.

They do NOT see how emotionally manipulative, selfish, self-centered, and irrational my husband can be. They do not see how I have had to try to deal with him on my own for so long, and how I had to keep silent and talk to no one about what was really going on in our lives. I do still love this man, although it is safe to say I managed to extricate my feelings enough that I am no longer in love with him, and haven’t been for years. 

At least before we had our friendship to fall back on, but even that has become strained due to recent events (more on this later). We’ve been in a sex-free relationship for years. It took me a while to realize that our sexual relationship was basically me attacking him and stroking his ever-wounded ego, while getting nothing from him in return. When I decided to stop initiating, the sex stopped (it wasn’t even really sex any more, it was me struggling to make him finish in spite of the fact that he couldn’t maintain an erection- gay man, remember?). He still tells the story that I ‘cut him off’. 

I fear for him, because he is irrational. He cannot handle being seen as less-than-perfect, or a bad person. He has kept me around for so long, I think, as his ‘beard’. He is too terrified to be open about who he is, and if I leave he will have to explain why. 

I am completely lost. I know that I should just get out, but I’ve been isolated and stewing in this misery for so long that I have no idea where to go or how to be a real, functioning, independent human being any more.

I have no money, I have to access to income (I am not on my husband’s bank account), and I have health issues that keep me even more isolated. In spite of the schooling I went through, I don’t really have any marketable skills, and combine that with my severe anxiety issues and general social ineptitude- who would want me as an employee? 

And I am destroyed. I spent so many years of my life devoted to and fawning over this man, I wasted my entire youth. All my dreams have died, one by one. My last dream, of being a mother? It’s getting too late for that now, and besides I don’t think I will ever be able to trust someone enough to be in a relationship again. 

This is a lot for a first post, I know. And it is just kind of skimming over my life.

I need an outlet, however, so I decided to create this public but anonymous blog to put my story out there. I would really love to find that I am not alone, that there are other people out there like me.