Is it humanly possible to drop the rope?

[AntoniaB]

Thanks for the responses, everyone :-) I am in a really good place, I have to say. I'm just finding lots to write about and lots of opportunities and feel really open to new things in my life. I'm feeling I'm finally in the "right place" for me.

Anyway I saw something over on Tad's thread from Delboy that I thought was interesting--he asked Tad if Tad could be in a good rel. with his XW since she went into crisis mode. That got me thinking about the fact that I know I certainly could not. (I also think with the many changes to me and my life I couldn't be in a good rel. with my XH even if he went back to "pre-crisis" mode).

So anyway, if that is the case for a lot of us, that if we took our egos and emotions out of the equation and just asked ourselves that question, "Is this person soomeone you could be in a decent relationship with right now", most of us would say "absolutely not." So that leads me to say that for me at least, I think I hung on to XH despite knowing that a rel. with him would be truly bad because of my ego, because of my need and desire to be "right". I have wanted to be "right" for a very long time. To be able to say look, dude, you had a great life with me and you effed up big time. You made a colossal mistake in choosing the type of woman who would see a married man and go after him as opposed to the moral wife who would even forgive what you did to her and take you back when you left her the first time.

There is still a part of me that wants to be proven "right". What's weird is that IF he came back some day and said, "You were right, I messed up really badly", I'd still know that he's not the right person for me anymore, because of what AJM said--his actions set me free.

I actually have a hard time giving XH credit for setting me free. This is where I almost feel like there is evidence for some higher power in the world, whether you want to call it God or karma or just the universe's way of creating balance. I'm Buddhist-leaning more than anything else, and I think of myself as a spiritual person now with some rituals in me still from being raised Catholic, but I'm not Catholic. Anyway AJ is right, the anger at some point has to be converted to thankfulness. And I guess the easiest way for me to visualize things is to believe that some force in the universe saw a terrible imbalance in my world where I was not able to be myself, and I was sinking fast and didn't even know it. Enter OW and XH in the MLC, which created the situation that removed him entirely from my life and forced change that put me in the place where I have balance again.

So to this day, the idea of wanting to be "right" still gets me from time to time. But I think I'm going to try to keep focusing on how I may have lost that battle to be "right" but won the war? Not that it's about winning over him, but about winning for myself, if you catch my drift.

The challenge for me now honestly is going to be in trying to write about the past. The novel I'm writing is of course based on my experience, and my character is going to lose her mate. I have really shut off that part of my life where I was in that nervous breakdown to the point where I almost can't remember it. But to write authentically I need to confront it (I have diaries where it's all laid bare). I was reading this book Wave last night--about a woman who lost her entire family in the tsunami, and just reading the way she was so suicidal really made my skin crawl, because I started to remember what that was like. When AJ refers to the time we were in the worst as "unpleasantness" I find that interesting because I think the human brain can be so resilient that it does learn to forget the worst of things we've been through. And I know in reading this woman's work in Wave, it's more than just unpleasantness. It was unrelenting horror for all of us to undergo what we did.

So the challenge to me now is to find a way to visit that place long enough to write about it authentically but to leave it there, in the past.

Thanks for reading my musings. Now that I'm off for summer I guess I'm all introspective :-)