Maybell XIV

[Maybell]

So I just went back again and read through Betsey's first post to me.

I am sad to see how broken I am, in spite of all the work I've been trying to do. I have such a long way to go. And here I thought I was so great.

I can't keep doing this to myself. Or him or anybody else.

I need to be different for myself. I need to relax and let life happen (Claire, you used to say, the river will flow...)

I have been the fortunate recipient of so much wisdom here. I need to sit with it for a while. I need to pull it together into one place for myself (now there's a project!) and sit with it and learn it and live it. I do not know best.

Labug, you've asked a few times if I really want this marriage and right now I'd say, yes and no. I've gotten pretty dinged up in the last 17 years. I've done a fair bit of dinging too. But I wasn't nearly as much of a peach (thanks GGG!) when I met him as I am now, and for all my flaws I'm better for having been married to him. How much of that is him and how much of it is just the life I've lived while he was off working, I couldn't say. But I know for sure that for many years I really knew that he wanted what was best for me, and that he really, really wanted me to be happy. (And I want that for him, too, still; I just also selfishly want it to be with me). Also I married him because he was the first person who I felt really thought I was great, better than anyone had ever thought I was before. I tried to spend our years together living up to that.

The IC incident has shaken me. With all the cheerleading, etc., that surrounded that week, I lost track of what I found upsetting about it. It exposed just how vulnerable I am alone. I no longer feel safe the way I did when I was married. He didn't lend that much actual safety to my existence, but I feel more vulnerable.

I'm going to try to take a break for a little while from posting here. The thinking is that I need to stop and think and if I'm writing I'm not reading or processing. I haven't been living in reality and it's time to re-evaluate.

I feel like I want to apologize here for freaking out again; the writer in me recognizes that it makes for dreary story-telling. I'm not going to, though. This space was made for that, and if my bad patterns didn't show up here there would be no one to put the mirror up for me to show me how dreary I'm being.