Grind

9:07

Is writing so often the problem or the solution (yes to both)?  Should I just quit now, 20 seconds in, and find something on Netflix to watch (since no book seems to satisfy me)?  And, the scary question: why, since I found out a week ago that I might actually get a grant that might actually allow me to keep my job, why have I felt worse not better?

I know the answer, and I’ve been writing about nothing else for the week.  The easing of the existential threat opened space for the feelings I’ve held off for three months.  Knowing that doesn’t make it easier.  It scares me more.  What if nothing is enough? What if it will take so very much more to make me feel better, and what if that very much more never ever comes?

Earlier today, I felt an odd sort of congratulations to myself.  I’m in a rough place, but I believed that I was not anxious about being in the rough place.  I thought I was settling in with a lot of wisdom, and not draining even more energy by fighting my feelings.  But it’s hard to maintain that wisdom for long.  Now I want an out, again, and fast, and am worried because the last one vanished like a sugar high.

Is there anything left to say?  How does anyone describe a grind, which is the absence of vividness (vividity?  I wish that were a word) and freshness, in a way that is vivid and fresh?  It’s not bad prose, it’s the emotional equivalent of onomatopoeia. Having nothing to say is a sign of authenticity.

Meh.

9;19

Grand

6:40

That’s less a title than a provocation.  What would be grand right now?  A grant would grand!  A grant of, say several-hundred grand, which would keep my show on the road for a while… until the next grant.

Grandly fraudulent, is how I felt today discussing my tiny seed, not even a seed, more like a cell, of a project with someone who is an expert in the two fields I’ll be grandly traipsing into, trailing clouds of privilege and status, and never mind the grand-canyon sized gap in my mastery of the subject matter.

Grand is… what is grand?  Not this post, which is a mess, reflective of my mess of a mood.  I was in sales mode today, a travelling saleswoman with her tired kit of half-baked ideas.  People seem to think that there is some stronger underpinning — both financial and intellectual– to what I am doing.  Nope.  It’s me and an anxious assistant on a shoestring — both financial and intellectual.  I don’t even aspire to be grand, I aspire to be solid.

Oh, yes, solid.  I was going to write that it will be grand to be on the other side of the current difficulty, but I don’t think that is true.  I think it will be small and sad and quiet, and I’ll build from there to middle-sized and happy and sometimes loud– no delusions of grandeur here!  But it will also be solid.  I would like solidity in work and home.  Solid like a good wooden table at which to eat meals with people I love.  Solid like a lover’s arms around me at night, or his back against mine in the morning before we turn to face each other.  Solid like good shoes for a long climb.  I’m tired of tottering, of wondering where the floor is and if it will hold me.

So my task for now is to be solid in myself, like a tree in a strong wind.  I have to bring the solid to circumstances, rather than wait for circumstances to solidify.  I can do that.  And won’t that be grand?

6:55

Feelings

9:08

Who needs ’em?

Coming here and writing makes me feel better, I suppose. I feel a slight quickening, a little lift, when I sit down to write, even though it’s possible, or likely, that I’ll end up in tears.  There is something good about going into the feelings and wondering about them, even if it means making them into a story.

Feeling things I’ve never felt before… it does seem different to be observing the feelings and living with them, however much I would rather be living with other feelings, instead of trying to explain/manage/conquer/redirect/minimize/under-describe/evade/avoid the feelings — which is what got me here in the first place.  The feelings now, even though they are relentless and disturb my rest and make me so lonely, are so necessary.  Feel them now so I can not feel them again and again and again and again, with Daniel or with every relationship in the future.  The first incarnation of this blog was about feelings management and justification–> is it okay that I’m feeling this?  I still have that tendency.  But there’s something different happening now.  There is more comfort with, more respect for what I’m feeling, and therefore the feelings are both bigger and smaller — they are just their proper size, and I am not mistaking a feeling for a commitment.

This is very muddled, again.   This is very diary-like and I don’t like that.  Too much feeling perhaps?  Not enough thinking, not enough refinement, not enough polish, not enough storytelling around it?  A bit adolescent?  Oh well, no one is forced to come here — not even me.  I have two other notebooks that I bought for private reflection, but I don’t use them any more. I just opened one of them, and saw that everything I am feeling now, and thinking now, and writing now, I wrote back in December (Dec 3: “If I had been stronger, if I had set a boundary or pushed back, I would have been so much more interesting to be married to.”)  That’s too self-involved and meta, quoting my diary in my blog.  I am a little bit stricter in pixels.  A little less droopy, a little more shaped.  (My writing wears a bra?)

That’s all for tonight.  I’m tired and have an early morning and another business trip tomorrow.  I’m weary and need to conserve energy.

9:25

First

3:30

Also, right now, failure.  Failure to rest.  I ironed and cooked instead.  I tried to have lunch with Daniel.  Well, we ate lunch next to each other at the same time, looking at the same newspaper (different sections).

First as in, me first.  As in first things first.  I want to start simple and small: feed myself before doing household chores.  Go to the bathroom or get water when I need to, regardless of where I am in any particular project.  A small thing… but try it.  It will feel like more of a change than you expect, if you are me.

First as in, feelings first.  And feeling them, not outworking them.  Feeling them even as I iron.  Feeling, for example, that I am so tired of only making a difference to Daniel in a negative way, never a positive one.  I can bring him down, but I never seem to be able to lift him up.  I can (always) err, but never excel.  Then questioning that feeling: is that a problem for him or for me?  Is it my fault?  (Oh, a post titled Fault.  That would be something.  It’s either all my fault or not one tiny bit my fault.  Daniel is the same.  And we cause each other untold suffering because of it, although I’m trying to tell my part.  The next post would be Fight.  It might be yet.)

False: what I just wrote sounds false to me, even though all the words are true.  I’m tired of constructing it that way.  That was how I thought of things before our crisis, but now I desperately (Fervently?) need the crisis to mean something and signal a change or release.  So what if I release myself, and say that I am good and bad, and Daniel’s reception of me is not the most relevant metric.  Oh, I so wish it were.  I wish I could measure myself positively in Daniel’s eyes.  I wish I trusted him enough.  I wish I didn’t have to trust myself.

Fallback: That’s what might doom us, is that our perceptions of our own selves vis a vis the other will never line up with the other’s.  He will never see me-to-him as I see me-to-him.  Is that a failing?  Is that even possible for anyone?  Can a person ever overcome subjectivity?  Hypothesis: no couple can ever achieve what I laid out. So the fall back (in a Fallen world) is trust and an effort to see it in the best light.  The fallback is generosity and gentle inquiry.

Failure: And we, Daniel and I, me and the man I love most and want to love more, we fail catastrophically at generosity and gentle inquiry.  My soul is crushed like an aluminum can at that realization, and the tears come.  I want this so much.  I promise I try to give it, except when I don’t.  Is is true that for some happy, blessed people, it’s natural, it’s like breathing, it’s like knowing right and left (which I don’t.  A big cost of divorce will be literally losing my orientation in the world when the rings leave my left hand.).  Or maybe, it’s something no one does beautifully, but people do often enough, and when it fails, there’s no catastrophe.

Daniel and I shrug when we should celebrate, and we explode when we should shrug.  And that is a very sad state of affairs for two people who had what I thought was a great love.  But maybe I was very very wrong about that.  The other couple I knew who I thought had a great love is divorced.  We all had great words, and great energy, but it’s not lasting.  And the couples I thought were settling look gorgeous and strong.

Falling: I am sad because I’ve been sending energy to Daniel and not getting much back.   I am falling back into trying, and being so sad when it doesn’t work and feeling like it’s because of my unworthiness.

When I was at yoga this morning, the burly, bearded substitute instructor adjusted my posture three times.  I’ve been practicing yoga for 20 years, so I don’t usually get hands-on adjustments: instructors tend to think I know what I’m doing, so they help people whose physical postures are less solid.  But he touched me on three occasions, pulling back my shoulders, kneading my sacrum down in child’s pose, adjusting my shoulders (again) and neck in shivasana.  It was a gift.  I thanked him after class, but didn’t ask why he treated me that way.  Was it a gift or a rescue?

3:56

Fragments

8:23

My Headspace app tells me not to do what I am about to do, which is to make a story about how I am feeling.  My Headspace app casts doubt on the category of “I”.  But Headspace is not writing this post.

Small nod, though, to Headspace: the base fact is sadness.  A lot of sadness today.  I wish in some ways that there were more, that I could have the good cry that I have not had these three months and be done with it.  But the tears won’t come in abundance, just a few here and there.

Then the stories start to barnacle themselves to the sadness.  Am I sad because it’s Shabbat, which has always been a magnet for sadness, because it’s when I slow down enough for the sadness to catch me?

Before I sat down to write, and before I did the laundry and cooked dinner, and washed last night’s dishes and walked the dog and all the other small explosions of activity that signal the end of Shabbat, I had a lot of clarity about what I wanted to say.  I was ready, even eager, to explore the knife-edge between ownership and self-blame, to commit to pixels my culpability for the mess of my marriage.  Activity blurs clarity.  Perhaps that’s why Daniel hates activity.  But I’m not sure he loves clarity.

One more delay: this afternoon Daniel wanted to kiss me, so I offered my forehead.  The differences in our heights makes it easy — I dip my chin just a little, and he kisses me right below my hairline. He said no, and kissed me, just fleetingly, almost distractedly, on the mouth.  And that, like the dishwasher (unloaded by him since then), has me rethinking divorce.  Except that the Lauren Hill lyric “I used to/Lo-ove him/But now I don’t” keeps running through my mind.

But I do love him.  I am muddled and sad about what love is and how it feels.

Some truths:

I’ve been unhappy for years.

I have so many regrets, which need to be balanced by the truth that I was doing the best I could.  Sadly, the best I could led me in the wrong direction.  I should have held my ground and stood up for myself and said, “You cannot do this.  You have to restrain your worst impulses.” I think it would have worked.  Since I learned how to do it, it has worked some of the time.  But instead I did things that fed his worst impulses because I wasn’t straightforward.  We needed deep and radical trust and honesty and we both ran from it.  He didn’t trust me.  He didn’t trust me with his deepest self.  Daniel likes to move between being very big and being vulnerable.  I had a hard time intuiting the vulnerable.  I doubled-down on the big and made myself very small so he could stay big.  And that was a toxic cycle for us.  But really, I couldn’t see what he didn’t want to show me.  And he yelled sometimes when I tried to stop it, and I didn’t grow up with yelling, so I had no immunity to it.  It’s like a European disease to an indigenous population: it wiped me out.   After so many years, I’m better defended, but not completely so.  I can’t get close to another fight, or his anger towards me, again.

This afternoon I had a nice script, too, and a plan to tell him this summer, maybe, that things needed to change or end.  (Headspace reminds me, inconveniently, that everything is always changing.)  There was a good formula in there, which I’ve lost.  Something like “I am not happy.  I haven’t been happy for a long time.  We don’t trust each other.  We don’t know how to be fully ourselves with each other.  I can’t live like that.  Can we fix it together?”  And if he turns on me, as he is wont to do, and tells me all my shortcomings and all the ways I’ve hurt him, I’ll know that the answer is “no.”  I cannot work harder.  I cannot take upon myself more rules or restraints or mental checks about what I can say, when, and how, and when I rest and when I move and what I watch and what I wear and how I fuck (or, never do).  I will not do that.

It was extremely convenient to worry about work, and to think of divorce as a series of transactions and logistics (all the cleaning and sorting and shedding of 19 years in this house).  Now that the anxiety about work has abated a little, the sadness is upon me like a long darkness.

It’s a sign of how worn down I am that I don’t want to fix my marriage.  Let Daniel do it for a while.  Or, radically, let it not be done.  Let it go un-fixed.  Let it stay broken. Normally, I love to fix things.  I have embraced fixing, taken it upon myself with vigor and relentlessness.  Now, I don’t really want to do anything for anyone else.  I don’t even want to make Milo lunch (to be fair, Milo is of an age where he can make his lunch, or any other meal).  Everything is an effort, or a drain.  I tried to outrun feeling and I ran right in to burnout.  And sadness.

The cycle of days is against me.  I work so hard during the week that I welcome the weekend, but Shabbat is a day of very difficult feelings, of emptiness and loss.  Then Sunday I dive into domestic work, and run away from feeling.  Nowhere in the week is there true rest.  I don’t know what rest is, what it would be like.  The cessation of motion and worry and sadness — bliss!  But these are like drunkenness to me now: I can’t stop it when I want it to stop.

I’m done but I don’t want to publish this.  I don’t like the turn in my posts. They are too diary-like.  I’m going to publish anyway.  It was easier when I wasn’t looking at myself.  I don’t trust myself.

Oh dear, that’s a whole post.  I don’t trust myself, so I seek external permission for divorce.  I don’t trust myself, so Daniel gets to set all the terms.  I don’t trust myself, and I don’t want to think about all of that right now because it’s not restful, so I’m going to publish now and think about this tomorrow.

Exploration

7:13

Or perhaps, empathy.

What if Daniel is never sorry enough, by my standards?  What if he never repents to the degree I think he should?  Today, that became an interesting question.  Before today, that was a final status determiner: if he wasn’t sorry enough, I wasn’t going to be married to him.  But I’m kind of curious about that now, because there are things that I’m not as sorry about as Daniel wants me to be.  I’m rather defiantly not sorry a lot of the time.  (Okay, like 1% of the time.  Anything other than zero feels radically large.)

I often do a false and corrosive equivalence: I won’t give Daniel what he wants –for lots of good reasons that have to do with my dignity, integrity, and independence — so, I guess it’s reasonable that he won’t give me what I want.  I’m trying not to do that now.  I’m getting curious about what it means not to leave something up to Daniel’s behavior or emotions, which I absolutely can’t control.

This is muddled, because I’m muddled about it.  But what happens if, rather than waiting and hoping and yearning and piling so much anxiety onto Daniel about what he will or won’t do, I detach from it?  This feels like putting myself at the center, and also moving away from the reckoning about the past that I have so deeply wanted, but know won’t really get me anything but yelling.  It felt like a big advance to go from wanting to know what, exactly, Daniel has done to wanting to know why he did it — and it still does because 1) asking “what” will just trigger the same soul-crushing argument it always does and I won’t believe him anyway; and 2) the why — the spirit, the intention, the energy — is what matters.  Caveat: it may be that asking why is as useless and avalanche-inducing as asking what, and we just happen not to have had that corrosive fight yet.

I had thought that Daniel not being sorry enough would give me grounds — solid, authoritative, unquestionable grounds –for leaving him.  But now it feels irrelevant, somehow.  I’m not sure if I’ll stick with this feeling or view.  I’m just curious, just exploring.  I thought our marriage would like this:  If I _________, then Daniel will __________.  But that calculation never worked to my advantage.  I ended up feeling cringing, confused, manipulative, exhausted, sad, misunderstood, misunderstanding, powerless, nothing good.  So I went to, If Daniel __________, then I will ___________, in an effort to get back the power I’d ceded, but that’s still reactive, still too much about him.  My best feeling, my strongest place is “I _______ because I want/need/have to.”  End.

Oh dear.  Empathy is inconvenient.  I bet it wasn’t too nice for Daniel to live on the back end of, “If I ________, then Daniel will _________.”  Indeed.  But it wasn’t nice at all for me to live that way, either.  It looked like the only choice at the time, it really did.  It was my modus operandi, my self-protection, developed over the course of years, despite the fact that IT NEVER WORKED: If I can be nice enough, compliant enough, ______ enough, then the people who hurt me or who I fear will hurt me will not anymore. They might even be nice right back.  It was a good dream, but as a practice it rotted me inside.  And did I mention it absolutely never worked?  Seriously, I tested it over 40 years, maybe more– it was locked in before I met Daniel.  It never worked.   I’m sorry.  I am so sorry to my past self for this.  And to Daniel a little, but mostly to me.  It would have been nice if he had saved me, and us, from this dynamic, but it would have taken a degree of empathy and self-knowledge that he doesn’t have — that very few people have.

The answer is to _________ because I want to for myself.  End. Come along or don’t.  There’s a huge amount of space in that construct for love and sacrifice and generosity, and, happily, no space for martyrdom (side note, there’s a line of political and economic theory that talks about how actions that appear altruistic are in fact self-interested.  I don’t remember the details, but I think it boiled down to, sometimes doing things for others makes a person happier than being selfish. It’s sweet when social scientists come up with a fancy way to tell the truth about people).  It’s glorious to say, “I’m here because I want to be here.”

Hmm. That sounds good.  It also reminds me that Daniel is far from this mindset.  There’s a lot of talk from Daniel about how I “made him” feel or act in a certain way– often a way that involves yelling and anger directed intensely at me.  Not a lot solid self-ownership.  Whatever.  But also, there has to be some interaction with Daniel’s agency.  His actions are relevant to whether I can trust him again.  His actions are relevant to whether I stay — well, that might not be true.  I might be beyond staying.  His actions might be relevant to whether I change my mind.

Maybe it’s deciding which actions of Daniel’s are relevant.  If he’s truly sorry, but continues to treat me poorly in other ways, then the sorry doesn’t matter.  What is essential, and can I stay focused on it? (Turns out, the correct phrase is “home in on” and not “hone in on” Go ahead, google it.  One hones a thing or a skill, but one does not hone in on.  I thought I was a grammar ninja, but there is still so much to learn.)

Excavation

9:15

I almost titled this “excavating” but that’s the ominous, then monotonous, pounding of the gerund, so I resisted.

Oh dear.  Like beloved (yes, I still love him.  I might not stay married to him, but my love for him will endure.  My life would be infinitely easier if I had loved him less and myself more, which is what this post is about.)  Anyway, like beloved Daniel, I would like to skip a difficult, wrenching, terrifying, uncomfortable, brutal process of internal excavation.  Daniel might actually pull it off.  Daniel might avoid it.  He might find the escape route or secret passage and escape his current state with the emotional sediment undisturbed.

That’s what I wanted for myself.  Divorce looked like a really nice way to pole vault (forgive the mixed metaphor.  I always loved the look of pole vaulting.  It looked like flying.  I would love to take wing right now.) … anyway, to pole vault over a whole mess of feelings.  To ice skate into a new life, rather than ice fish in the present one.  Daniel was incorrigible, Daniel was bad to and for me, and, so, boing!  I land in a new life.  Today my therapist took away the pole and handed me a shovel.  Or the keys to a backhoe.  So my task is to move away from what Daniel will or won’t, does or doesn’t, is or isn’t, dodges or dives into, and to focus on what the hell has been going on with me all of these years.

I am in for some excruciating pronoun re-alignment.  He abandoned me and stopped loving me?  Well, I abandoned me.  I stopped loving me (did I start?).  I sold myself down the river for a veneer of comfort and harmony.  How could he do that (fill in the blank) to me?  No — how I could I do that to me?  How could I treat myself with so little care and concern?  He lied to me.  Yes, but I also was complicit.  I bought into a unreality.  I lied to myself.

Daniel would love to know that I am looking at my own role in the wreckage — except he doesn’t want to admit that there is really wreckage.  But he wants me to think about what I’ve done to him.  He — as a doer or being done to — is not the focus of this big dig.  Where was I for myself?  Where was I when I was being abused?  Why did I refuse to call things by their true names?  And how have all those lies colored my understanding of what has been happening around me?  Did lies to myself keep me from seeing true things that were good — not just true things that were bad?  What are the consequences of me-to-me violence?

This isn’t to excuse Daniel, it’s to dethrone him.  I gave him all the power to define the terms and the truth.  I won’t be able to take it back unless I do this work and get right with myself.  I would so like to skip this step.  (More than a step.  An Empire State Building’s worth of steps.)  I need a lover for this — not a sexual one, although that would be a joy.  I need the comfort and care of someone who loves me.  I need arms I can fall into every day.  And I don’t have that now.  This is my third crisis: the crisis of my marriage, which is frozen in place because a thaw becomes a conflagration and I just can’t right now; the crisis of my job, which is letting up a bit and now the crisis of my own culpability.

Weirdly, what’s keeping me going — and I am writing it now because I will want to disown it as soon as I see it in front of me, so I better write it (like disaster) — is thinking that this is the real prep work for divorce, and it’s cheaper and easier to take care of it in our current household configuration.  I don’t see this as work that has to be done to stay married.  I see it as work that has to be done to stop, and to start again by myself, and maybe eventually with someone else.

9:39

Easing

8:19

I’m glad I didn’t do something silly like insist that all my post titles be nouns, or gerunds (gerunds would be really awful, starting out like a metronome and then ending up like the cadence of a pounding headache).

Today at 3:30, I was worn out and feeling every bit of the slog.  By 4:45, after a call I almost didn’t prepare for, that I almost gave up on in the first 10 minutes, my sense of possibility was restored. (I blog so much about being restored.  I start my day with the English version of a Hebrew prayer: Blessed are You oh Lord our God, king of the universe, for You restored my soul to me in mercy.  Great is Your faithfulness.  I would like Daniel to be restored to me in mercy.  And great to be his faithfulness.)  (Also, when I am happy I speak in parentheticals. When unhappy, it’s a straight line.)

I might get the money I need when I need it.  We talked dollar amounts and the need for cash to be on hand in Q2.  I pivoted! I played to my grander strengths rather than my project plans, and maybe it worked.  At the very least, it changed my mood.

And Daniel was nice to me when I came home.  I was happy and uncomplaining.  I was riding the massive emotional sugar high of a great Spotify playlist (Happy, by Kim France): I have not yet gotten so low that Kiss by Prince cannot lift me back up.  Plus Supertramp, and Talking Heads. Yeah, it’s all possible now.   Daniel was happy for me, and impressed that I might pull it off.  No friction, just nice talk like married people, or people who like each other, are supposed to have.

So what will I think about tomorrow when I talk to my therapist about fear?  “Oh, it’s all over now.  It was really just about work and now it’s okay.”  “I was just upset, it’s not so bad.”  Daniel is confounding that way.  It’s all true.  It’s true that I fear how he will hurt me (what was he muttering about in the bathroom, when I couldn’t really hear him? Who was he talking to).  It’s true that when it is good, there is nothing I want more in the world.  It is true that the proportions for years have been draining and debilitating and life denying.  And it’s true that I have no idea how to, and probably no ability to, determine the proportions or feel safe about the proportions for the foreseeable future.  I had hoped that it was depression or a fixable or manageable thing that was throwing the proportions off, that was giving me so much bad Daniel and so little good.  I don’t know if I still believe that, or if Daniel’s volatility or fear-inducing-ness is fixable.  That’s what I will talk about.

But in the meantime, I have to respond to a very ego-enhancing Twitter direct message that makes me feel super important in my field.  I hear the Buddhist admonition: “Praise and blame, success and failure, joy and sadness come and go like the wind. Rest like a giant tree in the midst of them all.”

8:35

Discovery

7:00

Discovery: I am afraid of Daniel.  I wouldn’t have put it this way before today — before my therapist said, “It sounds like you have been living in fear for a long time.”  I would have said I am afraid of what I will overhear Daniel saying to another woman, or what I discover about his relations with other women.  I would have said, I am afraid Daniel will hurt me emotionally (never physically).  I would have said — and have said — I don’t feel safe (emotionally).  I would have said — and have said — I don’t trust him.  I would have said, I never ever want to have another fight like we had two weeks ago because it would devastate me and I don’t know I could recover. (Of course I could! I am made of rubber, apparently.  Always bouncing back.)  Tonight, I changed the blog settings to private.

Devastation: Putting it as, I am afraid of him, makes the marriage seem well beyond repair.  It crushes me to think I have been living in fear.  How could I do that to myself?  I am soaring on privilege — educated, skilled, wealthy, with parents who love and support me, with friends, with degrees, with so much.  How could I do that?  What happened to me?  How damaged am I?

Denial: If I am living in fear, that means our household is full of fear, and Milo absolutely refutes that.  Milo is not fearful.  If I am living in fear, why do I, even now, long for Daniel’s affection and his touch?  (Unwelcome answer: one of the fears has always been acting wrong, and Daniel withdrawing his affection from me.  Which has happened, regardless of my actions, which I have been living through for a very long time.)  If I am living in fear, how can I also feel joy and delight and hope?  Is this really fear about my job, and I am mis-allocating to my marriage?  Aren’t I really just making a big deal over nothing? (Yes, I wrote that on purpose.)

Data: Daniel didn’t unload the dishwasher, nor did Milo and both were home all day.  I mentioned something about to Daniel — admittedly before I said, “Hello, how are you, how was your day.”  And again got the boom lowered: I am lecturing, I have a grievance, I am making speeches, it’s not about me, I am wrong to phrase it as asking for help, because we all have tasks around the house to do.  I love that latter, I love that we all have responsibilities.  But that’s new, and I haven’t had time to build expectations upon it.  And of course I feel like a ruinous presence in my own home.  My therapist — I might have to stop listening to her sometimes — wondered why I didn’t just throw down: “Guys, this is bullshit.  Start doing what you see needs to be done.”  So I did.  And nothing good.

Why did I do that, why do I hurt so much, why couldn’t I be good and say the right, happy, emollient, self-forgetting things when I got home?  Why did I go immediately to the thing that was undone, when I know Daniel has exactly no tolerance for criticism, or for me, or for anything about me at all?  Why do I hurt so much — do you know, that question can be read two ways?  Both, why do I feel so much pain myself, and, less obvious but still grammatical: why do I cause so much hurt, why do I hurt [Daniel] so much, why do I hurt… well, no, I cannot convince myself that I hurt Milo in a meaningful way.

Demand: (implicit): why do I have feelings at all? Why do I have anything ever in my head except Daniel?  Why do I walk into trap after trap after trap?

Why am I here?

7:12

Data

2:11

I am scared of this post.  I have been writing it in my head for many days. I am scared of what writing does, which focuses me in the present and brings me into myself.  I would prefer not. So here I go, D by D.

Data: On Friday night I got exasperated, even pissed, that no one was helping me prepare for Shabbat dinner.  I had been away Thursday and Friday morning on a business trip, and was tired, and yet I was hustling around the kitchen while Daniel did emails and Milo played video games.  I called to Milo to come and help me, and Daniel was ferocious about it, because Milo had to be somewhere else in 15 minutes.  He said I wasn’t asking for help, but rather acting as if I “had a grievance.”  I might have been pissy, I might have been more energetic in my frustration than on a typical day.  But Daniel’s reaction — which is quite common for him — struck me as ridiculous and outsized.  How dare I have a grievance?  (Oh, I have many, and many are related to household labor).  How dare I challenge his monopoly on anger in the house?  Even typing this now drains me, drags me down.  This incident, but more this pattern of treatment, of a severe reaction that tries to overtop my anger or frustration or impatience or exasperation at Daniel and Milo, is data.  Data about going or staying, and what will have to change for the latter to happen.  I’m not writing this correctly,  it’s not matching the emotion and exhaustion that comes up when I think about it.  Year after year after year of having my emotions cut down to size and problematized, rather than, say, responded to: “Oh Dorothea’s pissed, I should get up and help her!” rather than “Dorothea you are wrong, outsized, out of control, bad, and anger at me or our perfect child is not a legitimate emotion for you.”

Depression: I feel it especially during synagogue, when I don’t have household labor or work or computers or reading or anything else to distract me.  It’s a weight on my chest as I wonder how I got into this situation, and how I will get out of it, and will God listen to my prayers and offer a way out, or at least comfort, this time?   I am scared that I can’t slow down for depression — velocity is my salvation, at least at work.  But depression and a feeling of powerlessness are very real and present right now.

Dream: My Headspace app asks me to consider, “could it be a dream”?  Especially about thoughts about the future or past.  This is very useful to me right now, as I am spending a lot of time in the future, thinking about my solo apartment and the material mechanics of separating our household into two.  This is, I believe, a way of being active when my circumstances are forcing me to wait on the actions of others — again, both at home with Daniel and at work with respect to raising money.  I can’t move Daniel — story of our marriage.  The present is so very hard to bear.  So, I spend a lot of time in the future, in my apartment with decor inspired by Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Latin American Modernism (in the future, I am not economically hobbled by divorce.  Hah).  I also imagine Daniel and I being beautiful friends, and deciding that divorce greatly improved our relationship. I would so love his friendship again.  (In the future, I am not realistic.)  I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to distribute my energy this way.  I need to say “Oh, dreaming again,” and wake up to the present, the unpleasant, immovable, sad, uncertain, difficult present, and feel all of this.

Done:  The uncertainty of my work situation was exciting and invigorating for a while.  How entrepreneurial!  How challenging!  How brilliantly I was walking this tightrope! When I left my last job, I said that I wanted to be in a job in which I could actually fail.  And now, more than two months into the struggle, with everything else happening, I would like to be done with the uncertainty.  Done done done.  I could decide to end it myself, and take another job.  One is available — not too hard, pays insanely well, and I could probably get it if I wanted it.  But it’s not what I want.  (For starters, it’s in an entirely different field.)  I don’t want to give up what I have now.  I don’t want to be done with my current job and work at all.  I want to be done with the uncertainty about it.  The job on offer — no, that’s dread, defeat, denial of what I’ve built and what I know I’m capable of.  But no job at all three months from now doesn’t look particularly heroic.

Digestion:  I was listening to a Yoga Zone podcast this morning, and one of the speakers talked about needing to digest information and emotions, not just food.  No, thank you!  I was hoping to outrun digestion.  I wanted to be too fast for tears.  But they come to me, in synagogue, where I must be still.  In moments before Shabbat.  After clearing the remains of a strained dinner with Daniel when Milo was elsewhere.  I am digesting, when I greatly prefer distraction and dreaming.  (There’s some terrible scatalogical extension of the metaphor, digesting then defecating and leaving all the shit behind.  It amuses me a little.  Better to move it through than carry it around in my body, I suppose.)   There is so much to digest, starting with the data, the facts about all the years.  It overwhelms me how much I have seen and felt and tried not to feel or to explain away and stored without acknowledging it, and now… digestion.

Deep: I am in deep, and there is no quick way out.  My beloved friend (who comments here as Sister) and I used to describe our preferred emotional outlook as ice skating rather than ice fishing — gliding along the smooth surface of emotions rather than hacking in to see what’s there.  See Digestion, see Dream, above.  My skates have disappeared, to be replaced by an axe and a pole and a chair.  I would prefer not!  But there is no other way.  I was moving through my house a few days ago, wondering how I could leave it.  Then I realized that part of the process of getting divorced is coming to hate the things you used to love.  Hate might be too strong, but it might not.  Maybe “developing a deep aversion to”?  On Friday night, I could see that I might be happy to leave my house because staying might be (might be?  Oh, cautious, mendacious Dorothea.  Might be?!) unbearable.  I might hate my house because of the requirements of living here.  And I have to live through that terrible terrible process of coming to hate what I used to love.

Duration: How long do I wait for Daniel to change or repair?  He’s seeing a therapist now.  How long, Oh Lord, how long till he is restored to himself and to me?  Can I wait? Should I wait?  Do I want to wait?  I would like someone else to give me the right answers to the first two questions, so that I can dodge the third (answer: just a little bit, and for not too long).  And, would I trust any change to be durable?

Divorcing: That’s the title of the book Daniel recommended I read yesterday, when I said I wanted something enduring but not too challenging.  The book is out of print, and he had it by his bedside.  I wonder if he knew what he was saying?

Duplicity: 2:55, but with some hiding because Daniel asked me what I was doing and I want him not to know.  Also, is it deceptive that I tell Daniel I love him, and seek to hold his hand, and put my body against his, while I all of the above is in my head and heart (and body)?  I don’t care, really.  I need the days we have together to be calm and stable.  I desperately need love in my life.  I need not to suppress my feelings or needs, even when they confuse me.  I have no one else to go through this with, just Daniel, and I can’t live in hostility or emptiness, or holding back-ness.  So Daniel might be confused, or hurt, later.  As I am.  I have no more try left in me, so I am doing, and not trying.