Yet Another LBS w/ WAW

[Davide]

The good thing is that the job search at least gives you a very straightforward and time-consuming project to work on. I get the frustration of it, but it is a great opportunity to GAL and focus on yourself rather than the R.

What are the 4Cs?

Hang in there. It sounds like you are doing the right things. Just trust the process.

[hongaku]

What are the 4Cs?

4Cs - Cool, Calm, Collected and Confident

[hongaku]

So, worst Fathers Day ever. It was not even that anything particularly bad happened, just the pain of being with my boys for the first Fathers Day since the BD. I kept a brave face and made sure we had some fun together, but inside I am a wreck today.

Some days I just cannot keep the positivity going and today was one of them. The boys spent last night w/me since my cousin and his W were out of town and I had the place to myself. Prior to this, I have only seen them for a few hours on weekends since I have been out of the family home. I talked to my W on the phone this morning and she was being unpleasant, which did not set the tone for the rest of today nicely - I did not let things become an argument, the opposite rather as I effectively used validation to smooth the conversation. I am still trying to put it out of my mind and detach, but I definitely was a mess after I dropped the boys back w/my W and made it back to my cousins place; broke down and was inconsolable for a good bit. Those moments when you feel the full weight of the sadness and realize how unhappy you are. The moments when you wish you were dead.

My up days are good, but when the pain hits, man, it really hits. I feel like I am not ever going to make progress and that no matter what I do, it means nothing. And I may be right. That is the hard reality so many of us here have to contend with. I fully acknowledge that I am NOT detached enough to cope with the thought of D actually happening right now. I have NOT let go enough to actually believe that I am going to be alright if that were to happen. I am still in a place where I doubt my ability to find a meaningful existence with a broken family and the woman I love no longer being with me. I worry that I could become suicidal at some point.

I know it is supposed to get better, but I just need something to go right in my life and I need it to happen soon because so far, this year has left me with no solid wins and trying to remain optimistic is harder every day.

[hongaku]

I am off to England tonight to spend a few days with my parents and younger sister who are currently on holiday there. Going to the Isle of Wight festival and I am hoping to actually allow myself to have some fun on this trip. I have been going from being totally excited about it to being completely shrugs about it.

I keep hoping that my W will call or text to wish me a safe trip, but that is not exactly conducive to detaching now is it? Letting go seems impossible, but I know I have to do it in order to truly be DBing and focusing on myself.

I am taking No More Mr. Nice Guy with me to read it again. Other than that, I really want to try and just be present for this trip and have at least a few days of serenity.

[Davide]

Sounds like plan! Enjoy England!

[hongaku]

Sounds like plan! Enjoy England!

Thanks, man!

[hongaku]

Well, missed my flight and WOW Air is an awful airline - do not use them if you have another choice. Not going to be able to make the trip. Not getting a refund. Disappointed my family.

I feel like I must have somehow wronged the universe or something. 2018 has been nothing but bad luck for me. I think I am going to lose my mind if this keeps up. I seriously do not know how much more cr@p I can take at this point.

[40free]

Since you've been on my thread, I thought I'd come over and check yours out. So sorry to read all of what you've been going through. And I'm really sorry you missed your trip over to England. I know it's been a week since then, and I hope you have managed to get your head together and find some positives to work on. My view is that when bad sh*t happens, there must always be some good around the corner at some point to balance it out. You just have to make that good happen.

I think somehow you have to fight of that feeling of the 'world is against you' and focus on small wins. You know that I'm also going through a very up and down period, but I try to set myself goals for the day - detachment, or GAL, or things with the kids, something that will keep me positive and that I can use at the end of the day so say 'good job' to myself. And on to the next one. Eventually those small wins will add up, and you start to feel you can do this (like you said to me..!). Even when you have a bad day, as I can see you do (as do I), hopefully it's still 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

Anyway, let us know how you're getting on. I hope things are improving with your W and that you are managing to stay positive. We are with you. Keep it going.

[hongaku]

Thank you, 40free, and my apologies on the late reply. I have been paying so much attention to other threads that I ignored my own!

Going back through my own personal journal entries, it seems I was in a better and more positive place emotionally about 3 weeks ago, in spite of nothing good really happening, I still had a spark of optimism. I started nosediving when the most promising job prospect I have had since I started looking fell through. I had put too much positive expectation into it and the let down was bad. Followed by continued failure to keep things positive with my W, the battery on my van dying unexpectedly, missing the holiday to England, my knee blowing out just after taking up running and starting to enjoy it, W getting a new lease from landlord with only her name on it, her not keeping me informed about important issues with S9, and my cousin and his W starting to become a little uneasy about my continued presence in their home (leaving me nowhere to go, literally, if they ask me to move out). I feel like everything is spiraling out of control from the mundane to the big stuff - I am losing at every turn. I am trying to find those small wins, but they are being reduced to things like got out of bed before noon today (instead of laying there for hours too depressed to move), had something to eat, applied for more jobs today, etc.

I have not felt suicidal, but I have repeatedly felt the wish to be dead.

I saw a movie with my S13 and S9 today (little one was sick and had to stay home w/W this weekend), and there was a line of dialogue that struck me and I am trying to internalize the wisdom of it - if you want to get out of the hole, drop the shovel. This seemed very profound to me and applicable to so many of our sitches here on this forum.

So, I am going to try very hard to drop the shovel. I hope that the good comes round that corner soon, because I sure need some balance for the bad!

[hongaku]

I tell myself: Surrender your intellect. Stop wondering and planning and just let it be. Sit in your sorrow and marinate. It softens your heart. Do not judge. It is simple, it is. What is, just is!

Many times, like now, I sit in the hole, my hole with my shovel, wondering how I got here. Dirt sliding all around me, as I claw at the sides of the hole trying to get out. Terrified by thoughts that this is forever. That I will be gasping for breath forever and one day it will kill me! Chest high in dirt. Shovel in hand, but I act like I do not know who wields the shovel.

I will let it be. I will cry when I need to and try to not panic when I cannot. I will let it be what it is, in a hole, that only I will turn into my grave, by the way I think about being in it. I go outside and I see all around me, people living freely, who can bike and run and walk in the sun, people who are young and have their whole lives ahead of them. Doing things I used to do, that they think are new. I cannot change this. I have to play the hand I am dealt from the hole. I am getting fairly good at cards. Sitting in the dirt. The funny thing is few people know I am in a hole, only I know that, me and my shovel, the one I dug the hole with. The hole is the bad things that have happened to me in my life that I cling to, that I let shape my view of my life because I won t let them go.

So I sit in the hole a while, curl up and sleep however long I can, wake up and see if I can stand a while and peek over the top of the hole. I may not be able to, I may have in my despair dug too deeply to see, I may need to crawl up the sides on my hands and knees. On my knees, the way I learned to walk in the first place, feeling much like that infant, as he ventured out into the world on his knees, searching, in a would he did not understand. That I still do not understand because the play has shifted to another script. I am on the stage and they have changed the play, I have the wrong lines, I have no idea who I am, or what I am to do. I am lost. The light is on me, everyone around me plays their part and I stand mute. Life is that, ever changing scripts in which we play many characters, re-written over and over because we are in each others play. You only think you are in the same play when the scenes are compatible and it is a shock to learn that you have been in a romance that then in the next scene becomes a tragedy. What is hard for me to understand is that my W and me never did share an identical dream of the future. Very similar in some parts but because it is a play being written while we go along, an improv, there is often no way of knowing what the other is creating.

It is our thinking we know that is the shovel. Our ego, our sense of ourselves in the world according to us. Because the world is different to each and every one of us, it is our own creation. If we don t know that, if we do not know how to collaborate with the other authors and actors, we end up standing stranded on an empty stage or, like in a nightmare dropped into a hole that we have dug without knowing. Sometimes there is no wrong, there is only difference. Different because of changing, through time. Even the self alone is dong that, changing, in ways you do not know. Growing up is all about that, character development in our scripts. We evolve, we change from the effects of the circumstances in our lives, our scripts, our play.

I am yelling out into an empty house, this is my play! I am demanding that everyone play the roles I have written for them. Like they have been doing, or seeming to have been doing, I was able to get them to adjust their scripts to fit mine for many years. But that has changed. My role has changed in the script of my Ws play, which has been being re-written for many of those years, bit by bit. I had a part in that. But being unaware that my Leading Lady had her own play that was not the same as mine, I have become shocked. We share our lives with one another, but they never really become one. That only happens in pregnancy, the only time when two lives are really one. And that is only for a very brief and beautiful time. Most of us long for the safety and comfort of the womb many times, after being pushed out into this glaringly bright and loud strange place. Frightened to be thrust out into the world from the womb. And you carry that fear with you. You write it into your script. And after every script change, every last act, every ending, that fear rushes into the heart and mind and you find yourself again in a strange and frightening, lonely place. It happens over and over, from brief moments to ones that feel like an eternity. They happen and we fight to keep them at bay, to no avail. We need not think it strange, people change

I am alone, on stage, still holding on to the old script. My masterpiece, now in need of a rewrite. It is awful. Painful. No one else can feel what I am feeling and no one else has the ability to set me free from this scene in the hole with the shovel. I may not let go of the shovel because it is all I feel I have left. All I think I have left. My thoughts are creating my feelings.

I am sitting here, curled in a ball, writing to you from my hole, shovel on one side, my script, laying on the other. I cannot see what to do because I dug the hole so deep, and I only have my shovel, and my script. But somewhere in the dark and the dirt is my pen. When I am ready, when I am done with the pain, I will know what to do. But it will be hard if I do not know that the shovel is my own, as is the pen and the script.

As long as I fight change, I will suffer the pain I am creating by fighting to control it.