I'm a very private, spiritual, strong scorpio and gender fluid person. I expect this is something of an acquired taste and people have never been very nice to me. I've never had any use for love and it was something better explained scientifically, until 12 years ago.
When I met her an immediate understanding of what she was capable of set in. I would hold her thru 2 years of near overdoses and binges, all over another. Walking away was unthinkable because I was so in love with everything about her when she was, what I thought to be, sober. 2 years later I would RUN away.
For the next 10 years I tried to stay as far from her as I could and still be her best friend. After 10 years I figured my ALO's happiness lay elsewhere.
I would marry my best friend of 7 years. It was a marriage proposal promising a future I could "live with".
Four months later I would receive a call and a proposition from my ALO.
What a guttural blow it was to watch my wife as I sat her down and began to share with her my decade plus long secret and plans of walking away from our entire empirve to find out what this was. I moved back to the states and eventually to my ALO's side.
I'm no idiot. I am aware of what my ALO's capable of even while practicing what she calls a "clean lifestyle" for the better part of 5 years now. I believe when she professes her undying love for me and with me. Trust comes so much harder on any other front.
Why?
Not even a single promise has been honored that has ever crossed her lips to me.
While she is not actively abusing her drug(s) of choice this interesting switcharoo occurs, abusing other things in its stead.
For example, obsessively checking her devices and disappearing into the TV whenever she's not at work or on holiday. No time with friends, hobbies and no intimacy between us has become the everyday for us.
Drinking large amounts of caffeine all day only to overuse stress and/or sleeping pills to "stop my racing mind" enough to sleep. Complaints of knowing she doesn't "need the second pill" but convinces herself that "one isn't enough" plagues our life. Those go on the same shelf as the empty promises to go to NA and wrecking counseling sessions with lies or passive aggressive slide of hand.
What's worse is that we have stopped having anything in common. Not because we don't know one another but because without the drugs there is this intense struggle to identify with reality. Zero communication or listening skills are left when she's something like sober. All the years of abuse have left her emotionally unavailable, unable to live a life that is not her job or in front of some electronic babysitter without pain pills.
The outside world sees this really sweet girl, deserving of their favor since she would never be capable of questionable things. I like that only I know the edges she rides in secret but I resent that they don't see what I'm going thru. They don't know what to do with someone like me and any questionable things that happen around her are pinned on me. They never suspect the black circles under her eyes, bruises or lack of quality of life are resulting from binges and other bad choices having nothing to do with and unbeknownst to me.
Wanna' know what breaks my heart the most?
My career path takes me away for 3 days/3 nights a week and for three more days she works while I work at home alone, in a town new to me and no friends. I see her one day a week and 15 minutes while we pass one another headed to work or bed, opposite one another. I work alone and sleep 80% of my life.
Watching her go to work and be fully functional and available to whatever comes her way, know what people need and deliver above board in a beautifully poetic way. Seeing all of that checked at the door and watching my beautiful girl become vacant while at home with me is absolutely crushing.
Is it completely sick to think that I liked her person better when she was abusing, just not the abuse? It's not fair. It's like trading one abuse for another in so many ways.
All of my eggs are in this basket with hers. I'm lost, broken, scared, lonely and so exhausted that I feel utterly spiritually and emotionally bankrupt.
As a partner I am supportive and break myself open to do right by my small family. The reality is that I have needs, too. Needs that are marginally and intermittently met. Yet, she calls me "an unquenchable black hole of neediness".
I'll admit, the bar is held high in my life and failure is unacceptable for me. To be with me is an invitation to greatness not just survival. Still, I've gotten up to some pretty questionable acts since this began. I don't even recognize myself. Things that I can never undo or forget, maybe never forgive myself for, have started to take their place at our table.
It's difficult to look at this situation and know that, even high functioning and not abusing her drug(s) of choice, we are still in the middle of the unaddressed addiction.
Looking around a bit here I see people in difficult situations that look like where we have already been. I don't even know how to get a toe hold here because we appear to be in a very odd limbo, suspended in amber.
I guess I'm reaching out because this has reached critical stages. There is never any certainty with which I can say I understand what's is real anymore, if I AM too needy, if this is reactions the the addiction or if there is even any hope.
1 Guest(s)