DnJ, Wooba, Ownit... thank you for your words here. They've helped me through the week, as has the support everyone has given on others' threads as well.
Own, if I find myself second-guessing any small action I'm about to take, whatever it is, I hear your words: Don't walk on eggshells, and then I get on with it.
Wooba, you wrote to enjoy the present and let it go. I had a wonderful moment of that early in the week, when H came home after work and I lay in bed listening to him move about the house—making something to eat in the kitchen, coughing, etc. Everyday sounds. Or what used to be everyday sounds, then, you know, BD, then long periods of coming home very late. I am not used to his being home so much. In bed in the dark, I just felt deep gratitude for those sounds in the moment, with no expectation of whether I would hear them in the future or not. I listened and was glad. (In another thread, you also reminded me I better be detaching whether or not there's an OW, and you're right! I'm finding it harder to detach from the more normal, friendly H's actions. To observe without expectation.)
DnJ, thank you so much for the time you spend turning over my own words and holding up to me so that I may see them in a new way. I find it so, so helpful! I can tell I need to learn a different way of thinking and processing, and you're guiding me through it. I hope you'll allow me to mull it over here at more length!
Originally Posted by DnJ
You are looking within to your expectations and hopes. What you are looking upon is your desires. Then cataloging them - wishes, hopes, and expectations. Acknowledge and validate where and what each desire is; fantasy, time based, etc...
This, I mean, I am slowly learning how to do this cataloguing. You offer a helpful concrete example, which happens to be true in my case:
Originally Posted by DnJ
If you look at what is driving your pressure I think you will find things like - I thought he’d be further along by now, therefore it must be over or not going to happen. Bah! Remove the timeframe. Expectations are hope with a timeline. Remove the time reference and make them hopes.
Okay, I'm starting to get it, I think. But how do I remove the time reference? What does it mean to remove it? What does that look like exactly in terms of what I think to myself? You start to break it down further for me:
Originally Posted by DnJ
You expect him to file. Why? Set expectations to zero. Hope he doesn’t and keep moving forward.
A fantasy if he doesn’t. One in a million. Again why? Because you expect him to file.
Both of these - expectation and fantasy - turn them into hopes.
Hopes do not have deadlines. Expectations have deadlines, because once I associate the likelihood of an event happening/not happening with a timeline, well, that places a deadline on it. So instead of focusing my thoughts on, for example, whether or not or when filing will or will not happen (look at all those references to time!), I should focus on a more general hope for reconciliation. Not: "I've made it through another day without papers, I hope it won't happen this week," (and, yes, fear drives much of that focus), but, simply, "I hope for reconciliation. I hope one day (not a day far or soon, but just one day) for reconciliation."
Is that what it looks like to change an expectation to a hope?
I think the idea of filing and all the timelines that go along with it (30 days for this, 60 days for this, can be final in x number of days, etc.) has made me all the more prone to obsess about time, unfortunately. As if the court can impose their timeline on my personal hopes. As if the law has a say in when my hope should become instead expectation or fantasy. Isn't that kind of arbitrary, when it comes to matters like love and faith and compassion and hope?
This makes me think about when we were dating and then apart for some time many years ago. I didn't spend each day thinking, well, if we're not back together by X day, it must mean Y. Now it seems I'm stuck in "What does it mean it's been X number of days?" It means nothing or it means something—but does that even matter? Back then I just hoped, and one day it happened.
Am I getting closer, DnJ, to understanding how to hope?
