What inspired me to write, The Demise?

Last year I was still in the midst of feeling sorry for myself for my failed marriage of ten years. My newfound love was being patient with me and told me that maybe I should go and talk to someone. I pondered the idea for a moment and decided against it. Talking to someone is not going to help me heal. I continued on with my self-pity instead. I was emotional, I would lash out at the silliest things. He would look at me with sadness in his eyes. He was trying to understand and help me, and I knew deep down inside I was overreacting but I couldn’t find a way to stop it. I was hurt and I was still mourning and felt no one understood. I should be over it by now. But why? Why should I be over it by now? I gave this man eleven years of my life and now I should just get over it?

One evening I was watching Netflix and I noticed an ad for a TV series. It was titled The Affair. It caught my attention and decided to start watching it. Although Alison Lockhart (one of the main characters in the series) was grieving the loss of a child I still felt I could relate to her. She was lost, trapped in her grief and I felt the same way. I too was trying to piece my life back together. Then the 2nd main character appeared in the show, Noah Solloway. He was a struggling author trying to write his second book. The affair between him and Alison began and Solloway started writing about his affair in his book and before long the words were just flowing onto the pages.
A light bulb went off in my head. An urge in my gut started to fester. I don’t need to talk to anyone, I thought to myself, I need to write. I grabbed a pen and paper and started to write my life, my marriage. Anything that came to my mind. There was no order at first. It was total chaos. I didn’t mind though, I knew I needed to purge it all out no matter how hard it was. After everything I needed to write was all out. I created a timeline and decided to make my writing into a book. Yes, my book is written as fiction but there are stories within my book that are my memories and just like The Affair, the memories are bias to my side of the story. Which ones are true and which ones are made up? Well I will leave that up to you to decide.

Why I Still Feel Bitter 

In the beginning you once told me that if I could reach into the stars and give you the moon it would still not be enough to show you how much I love you. You also told me time and time again how I was your rock, and made you a better man. But I don’t want the moon for it only shines in the light of the sun and does not shine on its own. I am my own shining star with a bright future sill ahead me. I do not need your light to guide my way. I don’t want to be a rock for they are dull, cold and crack under the pressure of others. I am not meant to be held down for others to succeed.
But do know this, I have learned many lessons from sacrificing my time, my identity, my dreams, my future, my everything to only have it thrown back at me as not being good enough. I know I can be harsh and limited to who I give my love to, but time and time again I have been shown that I am only worthy of being loved by others when they have something to gain from it. 

I didn’t deserve to be used. I didn’t deserve being talked to the way I was. I didn’t deserve the fights and the screaming and the tears. While I didn’t deserve those things, I tolerated it. I tolerated it because you said I made you a better man and to just give you time and in time it felt like the norm. 

Do you know what it’s like to look at someone you love, with all your heart and believe in them despite everyone’s doubt?

Do you have any clue how hard it is to walk away from the person you loved most in this world?

You don’t, because you never truly loved me.

And I don’t think you saw the full effect of what you did to me.

It broke me to say goodbye to you. In fact, I wanted with every fiber of my being for us to make it. I wanted the words you said not to be lies. I wanted to prove that your reputation wasn’t what everyone said it was. I wanted everyone to be wrong about you.

In the end, you made me feel I was not worthy, that the sacrifices I made meant nothing, that my job and education were worthless. That I was worthless in your eyes and could never live up to the person you were. 

You can call me bitter but I have the right to hurt, I have the right to feel angry, I sacrificed over a decade of my life to you, and bared your child. You walked away from a 10-year marriage saying that you can’t handle the family life that your career and money meant more to you, but then you fall obsessively in love with a woman with 4 children, no job or education. Yet you preach to the world how amazing she is and how she gives and gives and never ask for anything? How is it possible to never ask for anything when she needs to depend on others hard earned money to support herself and children. I’m sorry, I digress.   

I don’t want to speak ill of her, you have the right to move on and love again, it just doesn’t ease the pain or help me heal from the emotional abuse knowing that even though I have accomplished so much in my life that it means nothing to you, not even a small thank you on Mother’s Day. But she can do no harm. That she is perfect in your eyes. 

I am trying to move on and heal. I want to forgive you for your past mistakes. I want to forgive you for the person you were. I know you may not be him anymore or maybe you’re on the road to bettering yourself. But, that same toxic person turned everything black in its path, myself included. 

I might have been damaged by many people before you, but they never broke me the way you did. They never changed me the way you did. I overcame them, but I couldn’t overcome you.

I have become so numb because of you. 

And now I’m lost trying to find myself again, while you are building a home with your new family. You think you’ve hid every skeleton in your closet, but eventually the past will come back to haunt you. It will ruin you the way you have ruined me.

When that day comes, I hope the ghost that will haunt you most, will be regret. Regret that you walked away from the one who truly loved you, who truly gave and gave to you, and only asked to be loved by you. 

My Broken Year

Last year on this date my husband and I celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary. We didn’t do anything big or extravagant just a fancy dinner and a few glasses of wine. A simple dinner enjoying each other’s company. As we sat there enjoying our dinner there did seem to be something missing. I knew we both felt it and had felt it for a few years now but chose to ignore it. The brutal truth is we were both unhappy with our marriage, and yet while I can’t speak for him, I can now say with completely honesty I felt trapped in our marriage.

I was 19 when we married, I was 29 years old on our decade anniversary, and he was the only one I had ever loved.  The man sitting before me had watched me grow and helped mold into the strong amazing woman I am today. How do you just walk away from a love like that?

I find myself stopping and literally marveling at the complexity of the entire situation. Ten years of memories come flooding into my mind at once and it’s overwhelming. Moments of love, excitement, joy. Moments of fear, pain, and loneliness. Moments of anger, betrayal, resentment. I love the man sitting before me but I also hate him. How can I love someone and yet hate them at the same time? How can I invest ten years of marriage and want to simply walk away from it all? I know him and I both feel this way yet we ignore the elephant in the room as they say, both wishing it will just go away on its own, but these unnerving feelings were never going to just up and disappear on their own…

So a month after our anniversary I was tired of this feeling of unhappiness, and every other emotion all coming out at once with no way of knowing how to get it to stop. I looked at him as we were having a small argument and said, “I don’t even know why we are doing this you and I both know we secretly want a divorce.” It was the first time in a while that I’d seen a smile on his face, a weight had been lifted off his shoulders. The next day he asked me if I meant what I had said. I wanted to say, “No I did not mean it. I only want this feeling to go away. I want to be happy and in love with you again. I only want things to change, for us to be better to each other, to move past everything and to forgive”, but he seemed so much happier, and that I   could not move past. So I looked at him and said, “Yes I meant it. I think we will both be happier if we just get a divorce.” I don’t think I could have imagined, predicted or even realized in that moment how powerful those words really were, or how my life was about to change. I went from trying to understand and live with feelings of what to me was an unhappy marriage, to learning how to cope with the feeling of a failed marriage, divorce, letting go, to seeing the man that I once loved fall in love with someone else and learn to love again myself. It is truly amazing to me how so much can changed in just one year. I had always heard of the 5 stages of grief but had never experienced them before but boy did I for this. I’ll break down the five stages and my experiences now… The first stage is denial. We seemed to be doing great with the separation, I no longer had to endure the emotional abuse, we would talk in passing and then would part our separate ways. We would occasionally hang out together. I felt happy, it was like I found my friend again, the one that I had fell in love with. There was no more fighting. I thought to myself this is great! This divorce is going to be a piece of cake. I had this wonderful fantasy in my head that we would be friends and still hang out together do things with our daughter together, go on double dates with our new couples. It would be the easiest divorce in the history of this world. The denial stage was great, and was going perfectly until reality set in. We were still way too close, I see now that it was unhealthy. It was tremendously heart crushing to witness firsthand the moment he started having feelings with a mutual friend. I glanced over as they were on the dance floor and he grabbed her hair and smelled it and embraced her as they danced. This was the moment I was no longer allowed to stay in the denial stage and the exact moment I entered stages two and three, the anger stage and bargaining stage.

I believe that it was in these moments I was so desperate to cling on to the small piece of the relationship I still had. I would place blame on myself, if I hadn’t done this or if I hadn’t said this. There were many what-ifs in this stage. I had already lost my husband, now I had lost my friend and that angered me.

This is the stage where all those feelings that were never addressed while still married came unleashed. I thought to myself, how dare he think he can just walk away from me after I endured 10 years of emotional abuse from him, stood by him in his times of despair, stood by him for his career and made sacrifices in my own personal life and lost touch with friends and family to be by his side. How dare he think he has the right to look at me in disgust? How dare he give her an anchor necklace when she’s only been his girlfriend for a month, when I was never given a gift like that? Does he not realize I was the one that was there for the deployments and not her? How dare he take her to our family vacation spot, and how dare he make plans to meet her family when in the 10 years we were married he only met my family twice? How dare he take her on all the dates I wanted to do but would never take me because he said, “he would be miserable and hated things like that?” Oh boy, the anger stage is the worst of the stages, because it will trap you and bring you down if you do not break yourself free from it. Which brings me to the next stage, the depression stage. While in this place, I wallowed in my self-pity. I questioned myself. Why wasn’t I good enough? What made her so different? However, when I finally accepted that it was no longer my concern to care what he did with his life now, that’s when the healing began. I realize that the relationship he had with me was completely separate from the relationship he has with her was when I was able to enter the final stage. Acceptance.

At the end of the day I’m human, and I have feelings. I care, I hurt, and I make mistakes just like everyone else, but I wake up every day and I try to make the most of it. I try to do the best that I can and set a great example for my daughter. I want to look back at life with no regrets. I am learning to let my guard down, and to let love in my heart again.
I have a new amazing man by my side and he has been so understanding and helpful. He has opened my eyes and my heart. It is refreshing have someone by my side that listens to me, cares for me, respects me, believes in me. I have fallen deeply in love with him. I am curious what another year will bring and how much more my life will change but for now today is just another normal day and sometimes that’s just how life goes.

Hello world!

Mary Lambert, her song secrets should really be my new theme song maybe even my new motto. I used to write all the time, not a care in the world but then people started to use my words against me and one day I just never picked up the pen. There were many times I tried to start again but I just couldn’t get through that initial push for the words to start flowing. I would start writing and then I would start thinking who’s going to read this what are they going to say when they read this? Will they hate it or they like it, will they use it against me while they try to hurt me with my words that I created. And then the pen would fall to the paper, I’d walk away with all the thoughts still trapped inside me. But you know what I’m tired of keeping the thoughts inside of me keeping my secrets inside of me and so now I don’t care if the world knows what my secrets are. Someone recently in my life told me that it’s easy for people to introduce themselves to you and tell you all the great experiences and all the great accomplishments that they’ve done in their life but to really know somebody, to know their character and to really appreciate who they are and where they come from you Gotta know their faults because it’s through those faults and through that strength that built their character. So if you want to follow my blog and step into my world to read my thoughts then enjoy, if not no loss to me.