I'm trying to talk myself through some spinning. It's the unknown logistical stuff that I have the hardest time with! I've been working on tracking my expenses so I can get an idea of how much I'm spending on groceries, gas, etc. on my own, and starting to document household bills that we pay, since most of that has been H's doing. It's scary to see the first month's total, not so much because of my personal spending, but because I have to imagine being responsible for the household bills on one income—car insurance, utilities, health insurance, which I can't really calculate at this point in time. I already know it will be difficult to pay for housing and other basic living expenses based on my current wages and spousal support, which is why I've been focusing on applying for better jobs, but it's scary to see numbers in a spreadsheet. The cost of living here is high.
I also happened to see a fairly normal purchase H has made in our account, but it's a concrete reminder that I don't know where he is when he's gone. It seems like there's so little I know about his life now. It's a reminder I have no control over what he decides to do, and it's a reminder of the ways a D would affect my life, in terms of having to be financially independent, in terms of paperwork and all that. Here's where my anxiety kicks in, and I'm carried along by thinking about the unknown future--what if I can't get a job? All the way to, Should I change my name back?
So I realize all of this is fear-driven. I'm trying to stay in the present and remind myself I'm doing all I can to find a different job, we are still sharing expenses, he hasn't filed, who knows what will happen. It's all fear of the unknown again, of the what-ifs. It's being confronted with the fact that I don't have the control over my life that I thought I did pre-BD. But in the darkest pit of the spinning, it always comes back to the fact that I don't know what he's thinking and planning, that I don't know when/IF, trying to stay in IF, he might file.
To have such big question marks in both my work and personal life right now is, as you can tell, a challenge for me. Ha. Understatement. The old me would have been in a constant state of anxiety, but I feel like moving through heightened bursts of it like this is a slight improvement. I am preparing as best I can for what is unknown. I don't need to get ahead of myself. I'm scrambling to solve problems on the route, before I've even reached the problem! Apparently I have a fear of lack of preparation, too?
