Advice Welcome, separating and W moving out soon..

[jedi]

Zues,

I wish I could say I've had breakthroughs, but to be honest I don’t know if I can say I have. Yes, I'm still not smoking. Or I guess I should say not smoking cigarettes, I have an e-cig that I'm crutching on but I still consider it a win. I'm still getting exercise regularly, and my weight is still dropping and I can see physically the changes. So from a me/health standpoint I'm doing well, it's turning from "I should be in better shape" to "I'm enjoying working on getting in shape".

Career wise, I think I've figured out I'm just not satisfied with my work, but this happened in the weeks following BD. So that's great, I have a plan to try something new, but class doesn't begin until august so I can't really 'start' down this new path until after the first of the year.

For the rest, I'm just not sure there's this long road with a checkered flag at the end and I can say that I’ve made a journey and I’m better for it. I have thought long and hard about my relationship with W from the day we met leading up to M and the BD. I can see how I let go of working on us after M, stopped making her feel loved and that she was my priority, and can see how I was most likely controlling and co-dependent. Most of this revolves around my lack of romance due to the smoking thing as I've alluded to before, controlling the finances and paying off *my* debt, and my general unhappiness with career as time went on.

I definitely pushed an agenda and that my way was best, and in hindsight a lot of my excuses for moving forward in life (babies, for example) were actually just fear of change and my trying to know the future and the outcome of any changes we would make in life before I was ok making said changes. And yes, I do see now how futile it was to try and predict the future or control things I simply was never going to be able to.

None of it was intentional, and none of it was that difficult to see once I actually looked into myself and questioned my behaviors and emotions. Sadly I think a lot of it would have been easily fixable had this happened differently.

So, I guess where I am now is I think I know where I need to work and be better during my next M/R be it W or someone else. And I’m working on it all now, in the background, but a lot of these changes need a M/R in order to gauge how well I’m processing. For example, if controlling finances was in fact an issue, I can’t necessarily ‘work’ on that since it’s just me now. It's more like I've made a list of what NOT to do next time around.

This is where I feel I’m just in a waiting game now. I am PMA, GAL, and doing all the things I need to do for me to work through this loss. There are no kids, no spew, no anger, no nothing really. We have about 5 things left that are joint between us and all of that could be separated over a long lunch if we needed to do so.

Basically, outside of the above items and then I guess a court date, we could finalize D right now and only spend a few more hours in each others presence.

Sure, she may wake up one day and miss me, maybe reconciling is possible, and I’m open to this. However, in the last week and a half or so I’ve switched to the mindset that this is not likely. And so I’m ok now that we don’t talk, ok that she isn’t going to see me often enough to see I’m changing, and in general that I’ll be OK with a life without her in it.

I guess we can call that a breakthrough.