Just doing some journaling again. I'm on a plane overseas currently so I have a lot of time to think, and unfortunately no friends or family to reach out to in order to help me process my thoughts.
As I said in my post before, it's been a really tough weekend. I don't know if I've felt this lost or upset since the S. I've been doing well on GAL, but hit a bit of a wall this past week - I just don't have a lot of energy to go out and do much else than work out, even though I know it's important to keep busy. I feel like I'm in a loop: I'm sad over my situation and so I turn inward, and then beat myself up for doing the opposite of what I should be doing, which in turn makes me feel worse and cycles the loop all over again.
I know that a good bit of my sadness right now is self-inflicted. Between the MC and getting together with WAW to work on logistics, there hasn't really been anything close to a clean break. And when we do get together, it reminds me and makes me confront what I've lost - a woman that I l still deeply love and the loss of a future that I was so excited about. I'm working on coming to grips with various aspects of denial: that she's the same woman I married, that there's potential for R, that she's noticed the 180s, but it's hard when I'm filled with so much wishful thinking. Maybe I'm being hard on myself here too, as it's only been a month. Or maybe she has noticed the changes, but I have no transparency into how she's feeling or thinking at all. Either way, detachment is clearly where I need the most help.
In my IC, one of the key things we've been working on is my fear of abandonment. It's been a pattern all of my life: I was given up for adoption, my parents had a terrible relationship, fighting all of the time and leaving my brother and me to basically figure things out for ourselves. They also went through a brutal multi-year D, after which my mom's health issues caught up to her and she passed away. Every relationship I've been in save one, I've been on the bad side of the breakup, no doubt to nice-guy syndrome and scars from my childhood. NMMNG really, really opened my eyes to some of my worst behaviors, and while it's good to have a reference for it, there's still a lot of work to do in resolving them.
Another thing that my therapist tries to instill in me that I cannot move forward if I am not willing and able to forgive myself for the areas in which I failed the MR. I understand that, but it's very hard to do that when so much of what went wrong traces back to things that I feel fall on my shoulders. No D is ever 100% on one side, but WAW has never really articulated areas in which she feels like she didn't do enough or things that she's regretful for. Maybe that's something to work in MC. It's probably the NMMNG/abandonment issues flaring up, but I just feel overwhelmed with guilt over things I would have done differently. We were only married two years, how could it go so bad, so fast? How could I make the mistakes I did, and take for granted the woman I loved so much more than I could have ever imagined?
I don't really have any answers. I don't know if there are any. All I can do is give it time, keep committing to making myself a more emotionally healthy person, and see what happens. I've probably said this before, but I have tremendous empathy for anyone and everyone who finds themselves reading and posting here. I wouldn't wish this pain and loneliness on my worst enemy.
This is all so hard to type out, hard to process, and hard to absorb. I feel more lost than ever. Maybe next week I'll feel like I'm back on the right track. Right now I'm just a sad, lonely man trying to hold it together 45,000 feet above the Atlantic.
