Acceptance

I lead a meeting last night and it finally dawned on me that the reason I've been struggling so much for the past two weeks all comes down to acceptance. In fact a lot of my problems in life have also come down to acceptance.

Accepting a situation for what it is and then deciding what to do about it. It is no more or no less it just is. For a long time I have struggled with food. I have a love/hate relationship with food. For awhile I didn't eat. Now I do but I eat certain things, sometimes LOTS of certain things.

A friend and I tried to do a healthy living challenge and as part of what I was supposed to do she tried to modify my meals. I shut down. I couldn't do it. I simply refused to participate because what I found happening was instead of letting someone control what I was eating I simply didn't eat at all. Which is not going to help me do anything but get more ill.

Yet, if I accept my body for the way it is, the way it will be, just as it is then I can start making some changes to my life without worrying if my body ever changes at all. If it does, great, if it doesn't, fine... I've accepted what it is.

For me, coming here and admitting to you that I may, or may not have had or still do have a mental health issue was the first step. Truly accepting it myself is an entirely different battle. Finally, last night I came to a conclusion.

It changes nothing.

I am no different than I was yesterday because I admit this. My life doesn't change unless I want it to and will never change unless I accept it just as it is first.

Then I found this video and I think more than anything it sums up what I was feeling and helps me to know that once I accept that I'm alright the way I am, I will find happiness whether anything changes or not.

Are you there Internet? It's Me

Hey, anyone out there? So, two weeks ago I put up part two of my story and then I got a comment, something that shut me down and made me take a step back and do some more evaluating of my life.

About two or three months ago on a blog I read a woman posted about having a disorder. A post that hit all to close to home with me. I read it, re-read it and then tried to force it from my mind. Two weeks ago I invited her here. I'm not sure if she was the one who put up the comment I got (maybe others think I'm crazy too) but it was the reminder I needed that I needed to evaluate my life a little more. (As if all of this hasn't been enough.) So I took a break.

What she posted was Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.
4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., ....eating disorders.. )
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats or self-injuring behavior such as cutting, interfering with the healing of scars (excoriation) or picking at oneself.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days).
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness, worthlessness.
8. Inappropriate anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights).
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation, delusions or severe dissociative symptoms

Even now reading that list makes my breath catch in my chest. I am, for those of you who have ever met me in real life, a very large realist. I do not like labels and I do not, EVER want to be sick or be labeled as having ANYTHING. But this thing, I can't run from it.

Those numbers up there, those were me. Up until about two months ago every one of them fit me to a tee. In the reading I have been doing it seems to indicate that people can outgrow these things or learn to manage them. I think that's what Al-anon and this place have done for me. I don't feel empty any more. I don't feel worthless. Last night I climbed out onto my roof and cleaned out my own gutters. I am woman... hear me roar. :-)

But I do have to tell you that almost every day, I self talk. There are days that I barely make it and days that I do much better. I have HORRIBLE... HORRIBLE impulsivity. If I think of something I want or think I need I will just run out and get it or do it. That one I still battle, some days successfully, some days not.

I won't even touch on number 8 because it is a side of me that I loathe. I'm a horrible, horrible angry person. DH may have been the violent one but if he wouldn't have been bigger than me it would have been me. For a LONG time there was such a rage in me that after the Munchkin was born it scared me terribly. That is when I knew I had to get a handle on it. And that is when it changed. Now, he can scream and scream and act horribly in public and it hardly even phases me.

Abandonment is my other crutch. I have more pages to write and more stories to tell but you are going to understand here very shortly that a lot of the reason I stayed in the relationship I did was because it was better than being alone. Because the thought of being alone terrified me more than anything I can ever imagine.

Just recently I started dating again. We are taking things VERY slowly, especially since the divorce is not even final yet, but there are days that I step back and have to give myself a reality check. I NEVER, EVER want to be with someone again simply because I don't want to be alone. I think for me that's why it's so important that we don't see each other every day, or every other day. So that I know that I'm dating him because I like him and not just because I think I need him.

This post has been two weeks in the making. Two weeks worth of wondering if I am strong enough to admit that for awhile I was very ill. For a long while I was just as ill as DH and now, ever so slowly I'm coming out on the other side. I'm taking back my life and I guess for me, admitting that here is kind of freeing.

Hey world... I was crazy... but I'm getting better and if I can do it... ANYONE can do it.!!

The story of M

On the 18th of April I came home from a friends house late on Saturday night. Tax season was over, DH had moved out a month and a half earlier and been in jail for a month at this point having just been released a few days earlier.

I was bored and wide awake and decided to e-mail a friend of her husband's that she had told me about and also to join an Internet dating site. It was just for fun I told myself. Even though I was still in the process of the divorce I figured it would take awhile to meet anyone and as far as I was concerned I had technically been divorced for MUCH longer anyway. DH and I had never recovered from the incident on March 20, 2007 and I had basically been alone since then.

Every night that week I would come home from work and jump on-line to see if anyone had messaged me or to message "eye contacts" to people. On the 22nd, only 4 days after I had started looking I saw M's profile and sent him a note.

He sent me one back and we started sending messages through the site. However, D, my friend's friend, had also begun talking to me. I'm not so great with more than one guy at a time and since D was someone I knew in real life and M was just in the computer I sort of stopped messaging M. On the 25th, I know only 3 days later... what can I say... I have that affect on people..... he sent me a follow up asking if I wanted to keep chatting or not.

Thinking I needed to perhaps not put all my eggs in one basket I gave him my personal e-mail and we e-mailed back and forth for the next couple of days. On the 27th I sent him my last message and he just disappeared.

D was coming to visit me on the 30th so I figured just as well and never really followed up to see where he went. D came and visited me, we chatted one more time on the phone a few days later and then things sort of went South from there. I think the general gyst of it was that my past was a bit too much for him to handle. So on the 5th I sent him one last farewell e-mail.

And because I am a firm believer in fate, on the 6th I went to my personal e-mail and there was a message from M. He had apparently had a problem with his e-mail and was not able to access any messages for a week and a half. So... he didn't know that I hadn't tried to locate him, just that he hadn't been able to e-mail me back.

And the rest, shall we say is history. Shortly after that we exchanged phone numbers but have never once talked on the phone. We text. EVERY day. Never missed a day and never less than 5 - 6 times a day. There was one Saturday we started at 1:00 in the afternoon and I had to stop at 9:00 PM when my phone battery went dead.

We had our first date on May 20th and it lasted until 3:00 AM. It was amazing. I have seen him several times since then and I truly believe he has helped me to realize that I can have and definitely deserve better than what I was putting up with.

I struggle with him whether I'm going too quickly. I'm not divorced yet but at the same time don't feel like DH and I ever really recovered from his infidelity before he left for treatment. I guess for me it comes down to the fact that when I told him I was done I was just DONE. I had done all of my grieving before that point and at that point I was just done, moving on. So for me I feel like all of the time I needed to devote to getting over DH was done before he ever really left and now... now I'm just ready to be happy again.

So, who knows where M and I will go. I'm not in love with him but I could see myself getting there. He has not met the Munchkin and will not meet him until the divorce is final and until he decides that he wants to be in our lives for a lot longer than just awhile. Munchkin already has an absentee father figure. He does not need another one.

For now, I'm just enjoying being with someone who truly lets me be me. He knows everything that has happened and has never shied away from any of it. He treats me like a queen and I gotta tell you after 12 years of being treated like the servant girl it's pretty nice to be brought up out of the dungeon.

Meeting DH

I'm linking to a series of posts I wrote about this a few months ago. At the time I posted them back in 1996 so I'll link to them here so I don't have to write them all out again.

Could it be?

First Impression

First "Date"

09/08/96

Bonfire

Homecoming

Going Out

09/17/96

My Story (Pt. 2)

After school started in the fall of 1996 I met the boy who would become my husband and also the alcoholic that brought me to Al-anon. (Yet not for 11 more years) Of course with in a month and a half I was madly in love with him so when I found out that he had been lying to me, using drugs and drinking, I was already so stuck in the things can be changed pattern that I just fell right into trying to help him. I was the 4.0 student who had never been in trouble and he became my “project” although if you would have asked me at the time I would have told you that I stayed with him because I loved him and we were going to make it work. (Coincidentally that is the same answer that I would continue to give for the next 12 1/2 years)

In December he was sent to his first treatment facility and this was the first time in our relationship that I started focusing on sobriety days. My alcoholic was not working a program at the time so I was trying to work one for him. After a couple of months, I realized that his sobriety wasn't really sobriety and our relationship started falling apart. He would do something and I would swear this was the last chance. Next time I would leave. And then the next thing would happen and I would stay. Making some excuse, some reason I couldn't leave.

I even gave up the one thing I had been holding onto all this time just to try to keep him with me but it didn't work. We fought, we broke up, we got back together again, we fought some more, rinse and repeat.

By, my senior year it was time to pick a college. I had always wanted to be a lawyer and had every intention of going to law school but the colleges that I was looking at for my undergrad seemed so far away. I began making choices that would keep me closer to home so that I could hold onto my relationship instead of the choices that were necessarily best for my future.

It was also during my senior year that I started trying to “buy” his love. For some reason I thought if the gift was bigger and better he would love me more. I continued this trend throughout all of our dating years and even into our marriage. Almost nothing was out of reach and the gifts just kept getting more and more expensive and we kept getting more and more into debt.

Meanwhile, through all of this, my diary is filled with thoughts of I can't loose him. I have to do this so he doesn't leave, I need to focus on that. All the while, writing on the next page I can't do this any more. I want to leave but I can't, when is enough enough, etc.

My trying to control him started that first year of our relationship. By some time in college I remember that my controlling went horribly wrong. He moved into an apartment with me and a friend of mine and I was trying to keep him from going out with friends. We got into an argument, I tried to take his keys and it got physical. No punches were thrown but there was plenty of pushing and the police were called. It was a this point that he was charged with his first domestic and he moved out.

Eventually, through some lying on my part, the charges were dropped and within a couple of months we were back together again however we continued to argue and fight and things continued to be somewhat physical. I was willing to let a man do just about anything to me as long as he didn't leave me.

A year or so later we were still together but no longer living together when when I found out I had gotten an STD from him. We broke up again but we never really severed ties. I still spoke to him on the phone once a week and we even tried to rectify our relationship a couple of times. It didn't work and we ended up broken up for the longest stretch in our relationship, about four or five months. During that time, I tried to date other people but inevitably ended up still talking about my alcoholic. Since I was still “in love” with him, sometime in March of the following year we got back together.

At the time I thought he was using but I didn't have anything to prove it so I decided that if I couldn't prove it he must be straight. Instead of trusting my gut instinct I stuffed it down and tried to justify what was in front of me. Until, of course, justification was no longer possible.

I was working as an intern when I got a call from his Grandma. She was very distraught as she told me he had been arrested the previous night. The arrest was a big one and we were pretty convinced that he might have to serve some jail time, especially when there was one more arrest over the summer. Finally, towards the fall it seemed like things started moving in a positive direction. He started working steadily and we decided after I graduated we would move in together. My theory on this was that it was his home life that was making him act the way he was. If I moved in with him then he would be with me and we would be happy and then he would want to stay home instead of going out all the time.