Duty, love, and attitude

[Crazy Eddie]

I doubled my dose of stimulant, and in true ADD fashion, this has made me downright lethargic.

Of course I haven't been to the gym in a week or so. I seem to be developing joint problems. Time to go back and force myself into a lighter workout until I get some MRI's done. I'm way too young for this crap. I wonder if my parents never came looking for me because they dropped dead 15 years ago.

Damn, that's way too much pessimism. Something's out of whack. Oh yeah, need to go back to the gym. Or something.

Now I'm sure a lot of y'all are wondering how to connect with someone who's firmly in his shell and wants nothing more than to be left alone. That's a good question. Thinking back, I remember hoping that she'd lovingly draw me out of my shell. Of course that would have involved either (a) reading my mind and talking about whatever I was thinking about without giving any hints that my thoughts worried or upset her in any way, or (b) since she wasn't reading my mind, she'd have to ask questions, ignore my defensiveness when those questions concerned things I didn't want to talk about until later (or at all), and keep changing the subject without much direction from me. Or better yet, question me about things that I didn't want to talk about in some magical way that would have made me want to talk about them, and then make me feel better about them somehow. Which, again, would have involved some mindreading. And anyway, it wasn't fair to expect her to do any of that all the time while remaining upbeat, positive, and generally happy.

Or maybe just been upbeat, loving, nurturing, and all that good stuff for a good long while, without much in the way of reciprocation, and truly enjoy talking whenever I felt like talking, and maybe I'd have wanted to open up more eventually. Kind of like they tell LBS's to do all over this site. Which, again, involves a hell of a lot of one-sided effort.

Or just do what she did, which was to stay put, pick up where I was leaving off, and do a moderate amount of griping and complaining and fighting until I got so miserable that I was more afraid of continuing the path I was on than I was afraid of facing my problems and trusting a professional to help me fix them.

Part of the problem of opening up to her was that she was depending on me, since she was home with the kids and hadn't finished college. I couldn't bring myself to tell her that I was unhappy in large part because I was having an incredibly hard time taking care of her the way that I had promised to, or that I saw a real possibility that I wasn't able to take care of her now or in the future. I mean, how do you tell someone that you're feeling down because you might screw up and land them in the poorhouse. The best case is they don't believe you and pat you on the back and say you're being paranoid. If they believe you, they can't just nurture you and support you while knowing that you might screw up and lose everything they're depending on for their own well-being and that of their kids.

Well, anyway, your spouse might be holding back fears of that sort, justified or otherwise. Or he might be holding back general fears that he can't resist the charms of some woman he knows. Or he might just be depressed and thinking that his whole life is miserable and having unkind thoughts about you that he would see as completely absurd if his mood were better. It's hard to tell.

Stay tuned, and maybe I'll hit on a magic formula somewhere in these musings. Or maybe I'll reach the conclusion that it's hopeless until something happens to him, which may or may not involve you running out of patience.