Friday, December 23, 2011

Understanding.....



With time comes understanding, and with understanding comes healing, and with healing comes the ability to close the doors and move on.

I think I'm nearing the understanding phase of my divorce.

Let's explain.

Sarah and I were together from July 4th, 1999 to Christmas Day 2010. (Wow, one holiday to another, weird coincidence). That's a long time. So on one hand, it's understandable that our split would cause some inner turmoil and emotional issues that I would have to deal with. But I feel that what I've gone through is above and beyond that, and if the split had happened in a better way things would have likely been better for me emotionally this year.

There was no easy way to do what Sarah felt she needed to do, I get that. I do feel that the split itself could've gone better, but it is how it is. Eventually she did what she needed to do and just got out of the house, but that was 6 weeks after she dropped the bombshell on me, and 4 months after she implied that she was losing interest and started avoiding me at all costs, while trying to distance herself from me and making me sleep in the lazy boy in the living room.

I realize that she didn't know what she wanted to do and hadn't made up her mind, but I feel that on her end it could've been handled with more grace to spare me some psychological damage. If she hadn't avoided me at all costs, ignored my phone calls, tried to pretend to her friends that I wasn't living there anymore when in fact I was, and made me feel like I was something to be ashamed of, it might not have hurt (as bad anyway) on February 5th when I came home to an empty house.

I'm not blameless in how my year went after that. I hate many of the things I've done this year to Laura in my emotional aftermath of hurricane Sarah, and she didn't deserve any of it, yet she put up with it and tries to offer as much understanding as she's capable of offering. Still, I'll always hate that Laura came back into my life at that exact time, because I fear the damage I've done to her as a result of the hell I was going through. That said, I'm so thrilled to have her in my life, and I don't ever want that to change.

But I'm starting to realize and understand that my year has been hell because of the damage done to me by this messy split. I mean, when you drop the bomb "accidentally" on Christmas Day that we're no longer together, how can you expect me to look at Christmas the same the following year? It's not a fun holiday, for the first time in 12 years. When you leave me feeling like I'm second class and not worth your time, it's natural to expect me to have some identity issues and confusion about what I wanted in the aftermath. When you leave in general, it's natural to expect me to be angry about it, and when it's been 12 years, it's natural for me to be angry and feel abandoned for a while after that.

Long story short, i've been damaged by the way it went down. I've gone through hell to come out on this end, nearly a year later, and now I'm starting to see why I was so damaged. It was the shitty way this breakup was handled.

So now that I get it, my hope is that I can just move beyond the anger and move on with my life. I've moved on in many ways, I'm in a new relationship after all. My life with Laura is awesome, even though I feel terrible crippling guilt a lot of the time for how I treated her when I was going through all of this and sorting myself out.

So now that I understand it all more clearly, one hopes I can just get past it and focus on moving on. I think maybe it's time for that to happen, cause quite frankly, I'm growing weary of bitching about this all the time on this blog. I feel like anyone who reads it will think that all I do is sit around and mope about this hell of a year I've been through. I feel like I'm hesitant to even post these whiny blogs to facebook anymore because of that. Whining isn't all I do, but it's naturally going to happen. So when you yourself are getting sick and tired of your own bitching, you know it's likely time to get over it and move on. That's the beginning of the healing phase, and I think that I'm getting there at long last.

Image lifted from aroundtheworldineightyyears.com

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