Live With Yourself
Today was a rough day. Nothing about it was particularly bad, just a day I struggled with all along the way. I had a fairly restless night followed by having to go into work earlier than I had planned. I managed to grab myself a sinfully greasy burger and fries on my way to work and that did make me feel a little bit better. I ran out of tea, gummy worms, and chocolate today while I was at work. That really put a damper on my energy level. I am rather thankful for the people in my life right now that were there for me today though. Thank you for trying to keep me up when I really wasn’t feeling like it. Things have changed so much over time and the last few years specifically have shown me a lot of cold hard truths about who I am and who other people are.
Someone made the comment to me today that they weren’t a confrontational person. I found it to be an interesting statement actually. Not the reflection on them in anyway, but more so how I personally have come to view confrontation over the years. I have found that I am more of a pick your battles type of person. If it is something that doesn’t have too much meaning to me, why bother with it. Just let it go and continue on. If it is something that matters deeply to me, I will fight for it. That being said, there are some battles that just aren’t made to be won. I have come across several times where while I cared deeply about the subject I knew there was no way to win. Fighting would only make matters worse. There are times in life where the more you fight, the more you are actually pushing things away.
Most of us grew up being told there was a right and a wrong, good and bad. As we have gotten older we come to a point where we see that life is never that easy. There is all this grey area in the middle that is affected by every choice and path we take. Sometimes you just have to make a choice and sometimes people are going to get hurt. You can’t please everyone and trying will only exhaust you. Sometimes you just have to do what is right for you and the ones you love.
Make the choices you can live with. Don’t let anyone push you down a road that you don’t want to be on. That doesn’t mean to turn everything into a fight or argument though. Many situations have a point where you can simply walk away. If not try to work things out. If you truly give things a fair chance you will often find that things are a lot easier than what they may have seemed at first. Miscommunication is the downfall in so many situations. It is crippling.
At the same time there is no reason to air out other people’s dirty laundry either. Just because you feel it is something that makes your position stronger doesn’t mean that it needs to be brought out for the world to see. We all have our own dirty little secrets. They are our own to air to the people we wish to share our short comings with. There is no reason to go about throwing other peoples problems into the mix.
Stop trying to sell yourself to everyone based on how you handled a situation. If they cared, they would acknowledge it. If they don’t you sound in genuine. Instead handle life in a way that you can fall asleep knowing you have done the best with what you were given and you can wake up knowing you have a chance to do better. Be the person you want to be and don’t let anyone hold you back from who you can be.
Sometimes there are no choices you can live with, you make a choice because it’s the only thing left to do and no one is going to be satisfied until you do. You make a choice knowing that it doesn’t matter because the ending is probably going to look the same either way, it just depends on whose hands you want the blood on when it all comes down to the wire.
It doesn’t matter what I wanted, it doesn’t matter why I made the choice I made but it does matter that my name is totally muddy by the end of it all. I don’t plan on hanging around much longer but I’ll be god damned if my story isn’t heard somewhere.
Aside from the fact that I got several pieces of information from our discussion that had been previously unkown to me, it’s why I do what I do. Because now I know just a little more and it does matter, you’ll never know how much it matters until you live in a world that is built only on lies and fabricated fantasies. You’ll never know what hell it is to wake up every day and wonder if your name really is what you read on an id because nothing seems that far fetched anymore.
Don’t try to pretend like you could ever understand what it was like being married to that man. Though I thought woman to woman you would have appreciated knowing he was screwing with your head that whole time and every other time before that. I actually remember coming to him with an email between the two of you that was a few years old, I was disturbed by it’s contents because they were something unknown to me. He said, and I quote, “mal and I lie to each other, it’s just what we do.”
I suppose I should be thankful I wasn’t special.
This may come as a surprise to you, but this post wasn’t meant to be about you in anyway shape or form. I don’t claim to know what it was like for you to go through what you have been through. I have only heard stories from many different people about what happened. I am not judging you on what happened or the choices you made. It’s not my place to do that. As far as your ex goes, I have known him for over 26 years now. I have shared many good times with him and bad. We have become very close over the years. We talk to each other about some things we don’t talk to anyone else about. He has lied to me recently yes, and I am very upset about it. I truly hope that we will move past that. As far as lying to each other being what we do, I would have to say that is pretty far fetched. I don’t know what it was exactly we were even talking about that long ago.
My apologies then, I can be a little overly sensitive lately and apparently egotistical as well. I honestly didn’t mean to let my emotions take over like I did and say such snarky things. Of course you’ll always want to remain friends with him, even after all that we’ve been through I find myself missing the friendship be it real or imagined.
I think what angered me the most (or whatever emotion it was that I was feeling) was the fact that so many people are so willing to just let it all be and not hold him accountable. I mean up until you made mention of the fact that you were talking about moving in together a few weeks before he and I got married I had no clue of such a thing. He ran your name into the ground on a daily basis, though looking back that should have been my first tip off but I wasn’t nearly the lie detector then that I am now. It came as a bit of a shock to me and caught me off guard, to say the least. It might be the past now but it still hurts when I look back on it.
Neither here nor there though, I suppose.
As far as what you were talking about when I made reference to the statement he made about you two lying to each other, it was an email that was fairly old and the two of you were discussing relationships and marriage. He had sent you a link to a ring and was talking about this girl he wanted to spend forever with. His fabrications had become a sore spot and I was being the typical woman and over reacting about him having bought a ring for someone else in the past when he had said that he never did. That’s when he said that you two lie to each other and that’s just what you guys do, or something very close to that effect. I myself find it slightly hard to believe and do realize that he was probably trying to back peddle his way out of something he didn’t want to talk about openly. I’m sure you’ve both not based your entire friendship on lies, at least not on your end of it anyway.
So, at least you know and that’s pretty much that. I just wanted to apologize for being out of line in some of my words. I’d also like to take this opportunity to say that I am sorry for the stuff that happened in the fall, it was really nothing personal. If he had just been up front with me about it from the beginning none of that would have happened. I was furious when I realized that you weren’t Holden’s girlfriend, then he started telling me that Renegade was his dog and I asssumed that there was a great deal more going on. The story also has more to it than that but I’m sure it’s not anything you really care to know about. Like I said though, it was nothing against you personally and I am sorry for whatever troubles it all ended up causing you.
I do vaguely remember that conversation. He had been dating her for sometime. It may or may not have been a girl he had dated in the past and then gotten back together with. For some reason I want to say that was the situation, but it was a long time ago and I don’t fully remember. He really seemed to be happy when he was with her though and had asked me to help him narrow down some ring choices. He did break up with her before too much longer though and I don’t believe he ever bought a ring for her. I don’t even think she ever knew how serious he was about her.
As far as me moving in, he had asked me several times and I told him i didn’t think it was a good idea. I didn’t want to be anywhere that my ex knew easily how to get to. He told me to think about it and when he picked me up to help me move I could decide then. I only told one other person, but I was pretty convinced I was going to move in with him instead I just didn’t want anyone to know. I wasn’t planing to tell him until he was there in person though. As time got closer he suddenly stopped returning my phone calls and I had someone else drive me to where I ended up. He later told me it was a work thing that had come up and shortly after that you two were married. So while he had asked me, he didn’t know until this fall that I had intended to take him up on his offer. He didn’t lie to you about it.
As for this fall, he didn’t want you to freak out about me being there. He knew you would take things the wrong way about it. I was a complete mess and he was trying to protect me like he always has. I was completely torn to pieces over my break up. He was there for me and that was it. With the way you had seen things between him and I how was he supposed to tell you what was going on. What would he have said that you would have ever believed. You of course did exactly what we expected you would do when you knew for sure I was there. I can see what you must have been thinking. I’m sorry that things went the way they did. I spent most of my time there in tears over what I had just gone through though. He was just helping me work through it and pull myself together.
Not telling is the same as lying, I didn’t ask if it was you directly that he was involved with this time last year or get specific enough with the questioning because he seemed to be so vocal about running you into the ground. I have yet to actually even say a word about the fact that I now know all of this, it doesn’t change the present situation but it actually alleviates a great deal of guilt and self-hatred. I come to accept a little more each day that he never loved me, not when it mattered and not when I needed it most anyway. He married me for money and to kill the time with someone other than himself for company, he wanted another mom to take care of him.
I’m getting off the subject again, it’s hard to hold so much in all of the time.
Here’s the thing about August ’10, I didn’t seek out the knowledge until he worked a good number on my head for a week and a half before I came down. By the time I drove home sunday night I was suicidal and would have checked in to a hospital had my health insurance been accepted when I went in in MI.
It wasn’t the fact that he had another girl living in the only place that I’d loved and called home in more years than I can count, using my kitchen and sleeping in my bed, it was the fact that for a week and a half he messed with my head and my heart and had me convinced he had loved me all along. He had been telling me that he was having surgery in KC that weekend and had to find someone to drive him there. I felt aweful about it, I loved him and I didn’t want him to suffer alone and be in so much pain in that house by himself. I told him that I would gladly drive down to bring him to his surgery and help him around the house and take care of things for him. He had been begging for me to come down that weekend for a week before hand!
Then he did a complete 180 and told me that he never wanted to see me again and that I was as good as dead to him, not allowed on base or in the house or near him. He told me some other girl was comming down, I can’t remember which girl he used as a diversion that time but she lived in muskegon and he’d been pining over her for ages. So, I was lit. I was angrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life, I can’t even describe the rage that I felt driving down there. It was a painful rage and I’m not saying I didn’t deserve to hurt, it takes a lot to get to my real emotions though. I’m volatile when I’m hurt and when I’m angry because they are the same thing to me, ever since I found my step dad after he committed suicide.
I was just trying to figure out how to be a good mom, how to survive after losing everything in my life not just once that year but twice. When I was driving down, I had no idea it was you who I would be seeing, I actually didn’t even connect the dots until late that night after he made a wonderful scene in front of the neighbors. Until I found that out, I didn’t think the pain could get worse but it did. I did something I have done since my step dad killed himself, I got in my car and I started drinking and I just drove. I drove by the court house we were married at, I drove by our first apartment. I drove through the park where I think we actually the most fun and discovered the most about one another. Then I prayed that God would send my car into something fast and hard so that I didn’t have to.
Still, he kept denying and lying about what was going on and who you were and what you two were or what feelings there were or what the purpose of you being there was. If he’d not done what he did the week before and then continued to blatantly lie about everything there after, I would not have called base housing and I would not have been the witch that I tried so hard to be.
He had no right to do what he did to me at that point, it was almost as if it was a game to him and if I didn’t have a daughter I would have been happy to play right back. The story, as always, doesn’t end there and is still only partially told. I feel the need to be heard though, I need someone in this world to at least hear me out and that I never did the things I did to cause pain or to hurt anyone.
wonderful post.Never knew this, thankyou for letting me know.
Would love to always get updated outstanding blog ! .