After the Storm...

[Treasur]

Hello, all. Good morning update. All well here. Decided yesterday to resolve the £ stuff via my L remotely and to refuse his requests to talk. (As those of you who are MLC-trained will guess, there were emails from him last night.) Took my wedding rings off last night and let go of the last strands of the rope. And I'm ok this morning.

I do love him, OwnIt, and I know that my STBXH is full of good qualities and is a good person. But right now he is a broken good person in a long spiral of self-destruction. So I suppose I love the core of him and who he was, like I still love my father even though he has died. But I've always believed love is a choice as well as a feeling.

I'm not perfect. Our M wasn't perfect. Do I regret any of it? No. It was a big love and a blessing. With hindsight, I think my only mistake was to marry someone who was more broken than I thought or less able to repair than I thought. In a way, it was a testament to the healthiness of our relationship that he didn't implode years ago.

Being as objective as I can, here is what I see. We had a tough year of illness and bereavement. I struggled through it; my H broke. Part of that was possibly because I wasn't as available to support him. Not my fault, just as it was. He had a breakdown and was diagnosed with severe depression. He saw a psychiatrist who he is still seeing 2 years later, and was put on industrial quantities of ADs which he is still on. He chose to deal with his internal demons by running away from his life and self-destructing. As he was coming out of being suicidal and reaching back to me, he met OW and obviously decided that a new face was a better choice than facing his 'demons' as he calls them. Since then he has procrastinated, lied and done the strangest things.

If I look at it as if it were someone else, before his breakdown, he was loved, respected, financially secure, a church elder, not on meds or seeing a psychiatrist and full of joy. Now? He camps in his aunt's flat during the week, works all hours and his only friends are work colleagues. He spends the weekends at OWs house in our old home town. He has no car, no house of his own, is almost bankrupt, is still seeing a psychiatrist weekly, on ADs for life, has sexual problems, uses cocaine, is 3 stone overweight and looks 10 years older. He is a whisker away from losing his job. He is an emotional half-life, incapable of empathy or honesty or peace. He does things which are not normal or healthy, but can't seem to stop. For instance, in a fit of anger at me earlier this year when we had been NC for a couple of months, probably shortly after filing for D, he threw my £3000 watch in the river but doesn't know why. He has grown a beard because he can't bear to look at his face in the shaving mirror. He self-harms by cutting. He lies to his psychiatrist about his drug use. He lies to his family about his life. He probably lies to OW too. He has basically erased 20 years of his own life, and 2 years into this, he has only progressed from being a shaking anxious mess to being a sort of cold pretend person. I have no idea what it feels like in his head, but unlikely to be good. All he wants, as far as I can see, is to 'move on', keep running and marry his weekend OW as soon as possible to make a new life/him. None of this is good or healthy or likely to produce a happy calm life. None of this is about me or even about our M.

The simple truth, although I accept that other people may not see it, is that my much-loved H is mentally broken and still broken after 2 years of weekly psychiatry and meds. He may have 'vanquished his demons' as he calls it enough to now do paperwork, but he is far from coming out of his self-destructive spiral and his behaviour is really random. I don't know what will happen to him. Maybe OW will be new scaffolding, although as he isn't living with her full-time and it's been a year, I'm not sure that will do the job either. I'm not an OW fan obviously but to be fair to her, an almost bankrupt, overweight, drug-using, broken man of 40 isn't a great catch! I'm happy that I got the best of him to date. Will he recover? I don't know and if he does, I won't be around to know.

And me? I'm collateral damage in this, but I'm rebuilding after the storm. Life has been hard. It will carry on being hard for a little while longer. But there are new things to do, new friends, other people to like and love in the world. I always knew my H was ill, that he just broke, because it was the only explanation that made sense of how extreme and self-destructive he was. I loved him and I kept faith with my H because I hoped he would get well enough that, even if our M couldn't be repaired, I could support him in rebuilding a healthy life. I don't regret doing that although the cost was high. But I have to give up, pray for him and let him go. I couldn't protect him from himself but I need to protect me.

I know that some of you in MLC land know what it is like to see someone you love take a flamethrower to themselves and their life. How hard you tried to limit the damage and hope they would get well. How hard it is to watch the craziness and the destruction, or to try to talk to someone when you just can't reach them with love, logic or kindness. How painful it is when other people don't understand and think it's just a 'normal' M problem. Tbh, if this was just about an alluring blonde, my life and his would have got better at least a year ago!

The sun is shining at the little house by the sea. Soon, I will tidy up the L stuff and be D'ed. I won't see my beloved again and I suspect his life might get worse before it gets better. But there are still songs to sing, blessings to count and lots of sane people to spend time with. And shoes and good coffee and purring cats and nice lingerie and books to read and things to be created and enjoyed. And I couldn't have seen this through my pain and grief a year ago, so I am awarding myself a progress badge!