The year of not my problem

[AJM]

Journaling:
I met a woman at the gym yesterday. Linda. She is a talker! She talked my ears off for a while, and believe me, if you knew me you would know that's no small feat
We talked about all kinds of things, but then she found out I'm a former Marine. She started talking about her exH. How she left him. I pointed a few things out, and she got a really odd look on her face. She later told me she thought I was right and that exH was right at the time. I found that fascinating. It was 22 years later for her. She still wasn't done....
Spoke to a friend last night. We talked about the guilt/anger cycle. What hell that must be for somebody going through that. Glad that's no me and that I'm working very hard to get rid of the anger. I do NOT want to carry that with me. I have no guilt in this - I've made my peace with who I am a long time ago. I like me, and I realize now that much of what I was going through was getting her out of my head. She got in there many many times. Almost did the other day as well. But I'm building up antibodies to her and can more successfully keep her crazy out of my head. I see a lot of the craziness as being the outward manifestation of that guilt/anger cycle. Looking back a lot of it has been exactly that.
Funny thing is, it has not been anything that I did. Well, I guess being nice and trying to make things work no matter what, even though there were boundaries, may have taken a toll on her. By not getting angry (showing it) at her, I didn't give her an outlet nor an excuse to be angry. That led to more guilt and her searching harder to find "something" even if she had to make it up. Bizarre to my thinking, but I suspect it all makes perfect sense to her somehow. She knows, somewhere inside. But that no longer matters to me. To her, it stopped mattering a long time ago. Last summer if I had to guess. I do have to guess because that is one of those things I'll never know.

Anyway, been a good weekend so far. Monster is out of town and it's just me and the kids. Relaxing. I realize I can't relax around her because I have to be on my guard to keep her out of my head. Like watching old episodes of Star Trek when they land on a planet with aliens that look like people and they find out 20 minutes in that the people are actually trying to get in their heads. I think in this episode I'm the unknown guy with the red shirt that gets it before the science officer figures it out and stops everything in the nick of time.

Later,
AJ