Letting people live their lives and GALing...

[AntoniaB]

Well, it appears that my friend is pulling away from me.I haven't heard anything since Thursday from him and one email I sent and a text went unanswered and both were cheery and sort of in the vein of "how are you doing" and "this friendship is totally going to work, trust me."

So the upshot is that NOW I feel rejected and betrayed. I feel like all his talk about how much I meant to him as a friend just wasn't true. It's also making me sort of relive the way it felt when my XH left. Lots of old, bad emotions are coming to my mind and I'm not in a great place. I've been sort of sinking as it was anyway in the past few weeks, mainly because when I am off work for long periods, I seem to kind of lose it, no matter how many friends I maintain or contact or how much activity I give myself. The number of hours alone is just too much and I really feel the emotions of "this living alone far from family and my closest friends is not what I signed up for."

I think I really was looking forward to seeing my friend a lot this summer as it would help with the loneliness and now it seems like it's gone, and yet there he is, living right down the street. It's pretty torturous.

So I've felt myself fall very fast into what can only be described as depression. I really thought I was "done" with depression. I never had episodes of it till XH left, and I guess I figured once I felt mostly over wanting anything to do with XH it would be gone, but it's not. I just had it hidden a long time I guess.

I don't know what else to do but write so I took on a new writing project for a friend of mine who needs an essay for a book she is putting together. I'm concerned that my writing projects, while fruitful and productive, are a sort of escape hatch I go out of every time I get really down, and I don't know if this is a good thing or if it's just distracting me from ultimately healing. All I know is that the minute I started doing preliminary research and reading, this situation and the hurt I feel started to leave my mind FAST. It was like an instant relief for my mental ruminations to instead ruminate on literature and characters and quotes. It seems to be the only thing that works fast to stave off sadness to some extent. But like I said, I wonder if it's an unhealthy obsessive trait I'm developing to cope.

There is no reason professionally for me to write more. The only reason I'm doing it is to pull myself out of depression and give my anxiety somewhere else to focus for bits of time.

I'm going to ask my psychiatrist about all this. What I do know is that I feel sick to death that one person--XH--had the power to affect my life so deeply for so long, and to affect the way I handle new relationships failing--and I just keep saying to myself how many more years of my life does this whole mess have to take up? When can I just feel like I can rest again and stop trying to hard to "get better" and "get over this"? Believe me I am working myself to the bone in journaling and reading and GALing and I am angry as well at myself that I can't just leave all this stuff in the past and live my life without remembering and ruminating.

There are people who face much worse than I did with all sorts of things and I am angry at myself for not being able to just get over this all already and be a happy person. But I'm so jealous (another thing to talk about with my doctor) of other people who seem so centered and calm and happy with their relationships. I'm even jealous of XH. He's defied the odds about the success of affairs and is still with the OW, now living with her, after 2 years. The guy has still never spent one night alone since he moved out of his parents' house.

It's just a bad week I guess all around. Hopefully things will improve soon and my doctor will have some ideas, but I'm running out of strategies and energy.