Broken

I think I’m broken.

For real- I think there’s a part of me that just doesn’t work right anymore (assuming it ever worked correctly to begin with).

Most people have the ability to moderate emotion- I don’t. When I love, I love too hard. When I hate, it’s with the burning passion of a thousand suns. And when I hurt, it’s a deep and rending pain that takes forever to subside.

Right now, I hurt.

I can’t figure out what to do about my marriage and this confusion is driving me insane. When I think about a future alone, I feel scared. When I think of a future full of loneliness, I feel sad. When I think about hurting HUBBY, I feel devastated.

People like to remind me that my life is pretty fucking sweet on paper and that compared to most, I have things pretty good. I have a husband who loves me and provides very well for us. He’s a great father and we have two amazing, healthy kids. We have more assets than most people out there and we have financial security to top it all off. So with all that, I sound pretty fucking ungrateful when I say that I’m unhappy with my life, don’t I?

But I am.

And I’m kind of tired of people telling me that I shouldn’t be. Because the old adage is true: money doesn’t buy happiness.

“Most people would give their left arm to trade lives with you in a heartbeat”.

That may be. But what they see on the surface isn’t always reflective of reality.

“But is it really THAT bad? So your sex life sucks and he’s gained weight and doesn’t take care of himself. Is that really so terrible? He’s not an alcoholic. He doesn’t beat you or the kids. He loves you and supports your business in every way possible. He lets you find sex elsewhere- isn’t that enough”?

Well, when you put it that way…it doesn’t sound so bad.

But what if I said that I’m lonely. I miss being intimate with a man. That physical intimacy that comes when you LOVE someone. The physical expression of love that you want to give someone you care about. Laying next to someone and feeling their heartbeat. The smell of their skin.

I miss falling asleep with someone. Waking up with them. The prospect of traveling the world together when the kids are off on their own- that dream is gone because of his health. My retirement years…I don’t know what they’ll be now. Traveling alone? Staring at a man sitting in his chair unshaven, unclean and depressed who refuses to do anything about it?

Should I give up on my life because he’s given up on his?

“You said ‘Till death do you part’”

Yeah. I guess I did. And there’s a part of me that has died, that’s for sure. And there’s no certainty that divorce will make it come back to life, so maybe there’s no point in trying to move on.

The only thing I’m sure of right now is that I don’t have any prospects on the horizon. THAT GUY and I are tentative friends, which is nice. I say ‘tentative’ because I have to hold him at arms length for a while. He hurt me pretty badly and I can’t let that happen again so I need to make sure I don’t let him get too close. It hasn’t been hard to do. I don’t get upset if I don’t hear from him for a few days- I actually don’t even notice. I think I got used to not speaking to him so when I DO hear from him, it’s a nice surprise. He actually called me on the phone out of the blue and I thought it was great- it meant that he finally thought of me as a friend and was willing to take the initiative to reach out first. Of course once he realized he had called me while I was sitting with HUBBY and THE BOY, he freaked out.

What a weirdo.

Regardless, the point is that I’m staring down the barrel of a pretty bleak future and the more I think about it, the more despondent I get. What I need to do is to make a decision once and for all: Do I stay or do I go? And once the decision is made, just stick to it and see it through.

It’s okay to be broken. It’s okay to fall to pieces every now and then. But I’m kind of sick of being all over the place and waiting for someone else put me back together.

I need to be whole again and the only person who can fix me is ME.

Sigh. Here goes nothing…