When I first read Elizabeth Gilberts 'Eat Pray Love' I thought that I understood completely her quest. That I understood so well the need that she had to find herself once more once she got the divorce...I even understood her need to get a divorce...heck I identified with everything she did and wrote. I thought....
When I would come across someone who was divorced or seperated and I was going through so much hardness at home I would feel a tinge of envy just looking at them. Like a child looking at their friend as they held the latest doll which they have been covetting for weeks...asking the question, "why does she get one and I don't?" . I thought that they were the lucky ones. Not having to be in that situation any more. Freedom.
Trust me there is a bloody large part of me that is revelling in the freedom. I cannot speak this too loud for it is thrown back in my face. To say that anything in life feels good is to feed the controller ammunition to throw back my way as a bomb....so I stay silent...I stay still and say nothing and try not to feel guilty for trying to live my life now..free of daily critisicm while still feeling the sting and aftermath of it, while still having to endure it as he just will not let go. He will not accept it is over, he will not stop the cycle.
I try and rebuild....but there is one thing that I never ever realised about this seperation thing, this rebuild and starting again and that is that it has to happen alone. ALONE. I have not been alone since I was 14 years old! 14! Practically a baby.
I have had boyfriends and relationships for the last 20 years. Oh dear that makes me feel bloody old! I have always found myself, through all the different stages of my life with the aide of someone else. When I think of it that way it is so incredibly, fucking scary to think of going it alone. But this is where I feel I am at.
Sure I have my parents and family who care and are concerned and who are worried about me, but they cannot be there for me as they have in the past. As they helped me grow when younger, as they guided me and taught me right from wrong. Held me when I hurt, when I was sick, when I struggled. When my heart was broken they helped to mend me....but they cannot do that this time. I cannot pack up and move back home, into my childhood bed, surrounded by childhood heros and crushes staring down from glossy posters on the wall. I have children of my own, work, life....a house, bills. There is no packing it in and mourning, sobbing, screaming at the injustice! There are dishes to be done, dinners to be cooked and washing to wash and dry and fold and put away. It doesn't stop....the cycle keeps going. So instead my parents and family ring and ask how I am, they bring groceries when I cannot get out and help when they can with the children..a little...as frequently as they can as they go about their everyday life and responsibilities.
My friends are there for me, I am surrounded by little bits of them, figures, photos of flowers long gone but not forgotten, cards and notes and little messages throughout the day. In everyway I can look and see that they care about me. But it is not the same as in days of the past. Days when friends flowed through your veins as frequently as the blood which kept you going. 5 days a week spent together with nights on the phone, weekends by each others side. Travelling in packs, laughing, crying, being stupid together. When break ups happened they held me as I cried, just happened? I'll be right there. Lets bitch about him, lets bag the shit out of him! Here you want vodka? DRINK...you want to put a potato in his exhaust pipe and sand in his petrol tank....perhaps best we do that another day when the vodka's not making your decisions...we will walk home! Shit I know its a long way but so what! Laugh, cry, movies, fun....you had each other because you had no other responsibilities. Oh how quickly we longed to grow up and start that grown up life of mortgages and babies and bills and responsibility and not realising the wonderful freedom we were living while living it.
My friends, beautiful, adorable friends. Some the same as those days of freedom, some new, some long serving..all wonderful. Ringing, messaging, encouraging, listening - sometimes objectively....sometimes not...there. They fill my heart, they make me feel valued and cared for and they have helped in ways I cannot explain but it also hurts to except their help. I didn't really understand the saying that EG said when she turned her back on her friends and ran away to Italy until now. She valued the support they gave her but felt guilt that she could not give anything back. She was of no help to them the way she was. I don't believe that I am of no value to my friends, but I do question to what value I am to them compared to what value they are to me?
I keep apologising to them. Over and over I feel like telling them that I am sorry. I am so sorry that I share my sorrow, that I share my hard times because that just doesn't seem fair. I know that their life is not perfect, not by any means, I may not have lived the same life as them in retrospect but I did have moments in my married life when things were normal and calm. MOments of love and joy, moments of worry over money or housework. Laughter and crying over things. They happened. I cannot deny, 3 children would not have happened without those normal moments. But my world now is so incredibly far removed from that time...it is almost like I have been thrust into a world where people speak a different language of which I do not understand! I don't know how to get along in this new world. I don't understand it fully and I feel like I am trying to work it out and verbalising my confusion and sorrow over this displacement feeling to people who are still living in that world. I feel like I am putting pressure on them to try and understand this world, while still living in the other world. I imagine how insanely hard that must be to comprehend and understand and I don't want to impact on them too much.
I also don't know how much to share, how much of them to take? I worry everyday that I take too much. That I expect too much. I don't know how much to expect of my friends?
I visualise all the time, the people that they have around them. Like a circle, with strings attached from my friend to all the people in their circle. I place their family in the front row of the circle closest to them and then I place extended family in the next row and then friends..etc. Where do I stand in that circle? I must stand in the third or fourth row surely? Then I think of my circle....
There is me and my children, my parents and right now through all of this are my friends...all in the first circle. Then there are people helping me, extended family and friends who are offering incredible support and words when needed but who I don't necessarily disclose all to, as my second circle and on and on. But everyday I question if I have any right at all to have my friends in that first circle? They should be in the second or third circle shouldn't they? They used to be, even through it all and when things were terrible I kept them there, in the second row because i understood then that in that world, family and relationships came first....good or bad they had to be the number one priority.
I have cried myself to sleep, sobbed hysterically so many times over these circles. For the circles no longer make sense to me! They don't make sense. All of a sudden I feel that I have circles which have dotted lines rather than string. For the people connected to mine have strong line connections to others first and foremost....as mine is to my children....but to me?.....
I try and fill the voids, I try to find something, anything to fill the insane gap in my life that this has made..,the loneliness. But they never seem to stick. A new tv show, a friendship (I spend so much time worrying that I am putting so much pressure on my friends that those worries bring a new pain of a different kind :( ), alcohol when the kids leave (not a good solution and stopped quicker than it started! Only a glass or two but the thought that it would fix things, especially considering my extended families experiences with it for the same reason, has scared that thought right out of my head!), reading - works as long as the book lasts and as long as it has no triggers in it...on and on I search and keep coming back to the same conclusion.....there is nothing! I have to face this and deal with this.
I AM ALONE
I have to learn to know myself once more. I need to figure out who I am and I cannot rely on anyone else to heal me. I have to heal myself. And it scares the shit out of me because I have absolutely no fucking idea how to do that at all. No idea.
This is new, unchartered waters of which I need to set a path and hope like hell it works out to be the right one. I need to try and get through this for the most part on my own. With support and people around me but from a distance. None of them can be here for me, in the day to day, holding my hand..encouraging me..seeing me through the hard times and laughing with me in the good in real time. None of them. When I have a funny moment with the kids who do I turn to and tell? Should I message friends? is there a certain number of times I message though, a magic number when I suddenly turn into a needy friend or a pain in the butt? when do I start to impede on a part of their circle I don't fit into? Who do I rage at when everything turns to shit? Who do I turn to when I have had enough and everything seems too bloody hard? I have turned to my parents but lets be practical, they cannot drop everything and come running to my aide all the time. I try and reserve those needs for the incredibly desperate times.
Alone. A completely new concept, new outfit which sure as hell doesn't fit me yet!
It hurts so incredibly deeply it is not even possible to explain or comprehend from the outside. So so much....and I think that the thing which fuels it the most is that it is such a foreign situation, so unfamiliar that there is no way to see what the future will bring. If you cannot work something out then how can you find hope that it will ever be any different? Right now it looks and feels like an infinite forever of the same...barren loneliness stretching on and on and on for all of eternity...on and on and on...
Fck!
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