This is a marathon. I've never been a runner--well, once in high school I tried to take it up, running loops around the cemetery down the street. Kindly, you're around seven months now, I'm at around nine. I think I've said this before, but the time has flown by for me. I'm not sure how it feels for you. Maybe I'm better at pacing myself than in the first 6 months. The way I hope has changed--it's a longer-term hope now, more open-ended, on good days, whereas I remember feeling like it seemed so possible that H and I would be going out to dinner, that all this could shift as quickly as it had come, in the first few months after BD. Is it common to also feel bouts of hopelessness as time stretches on? I imagine that settles too as the state of compassionate indifference becomes habit.
I think a positive change in my sitch is that H seems to have slowed down. He's not running himself into the ground every night, his moods have stabilized around me. As I stopped leaving him little notes (usually about practical things, as we were hardly in the house at the same time)--notes he saved and still keeps in an area of his room--and stopped engaging him first since January (mostly! see above election encounter--ha), he has engaged me more. He is still seeing his IC.
Why is he still seeing his IC? I don't imagine he talks about me much--my guess is he sees the R as in the past now--but I hope he is slowly learning more about himself. I think he must have many places in which to compartmentalize past and present pieces of his life, as he manages to be both open to self-exploration with IC and yet closed to exploration of our M and his role in what it was, what it could be.
As I've written before, sometimes I struggle with the fact that this year he has seemed, on the outside, much less volatile, much less angry and depressed. I struggle because I suppose I equate that with "moving on." (Yet I just listed this decreased moodiness as a positive above!) As in, I was the problem--he removed me from his life and he's good now. It really was that simple.
How could it be that simple? Suddenly pull the plug on a 10-year marriage, and everything falls into place! I know it's not that simple.
I suppose it's more than that--it's that I know inside he probably is still struggling with, as DnJ wrote earlier, emotions cranked incredibly high. I feel he's unmoored in himself but appears steady. Maybe even to himself. When I am not rationalizing my anxiety that he is magically all better without me (see above: I know it's not that easy), I worry that he appears stable but is actually silently, slowly spinning of control, just in a much slower, less obvious way than he was last year, while convincing himself everything is perfectly fine; he's perfectly happy. His new friends don't see all the layers of him, which includes old H as much as new H. He spins slowly, out of orbit.
I don't have hold of that rope anymore--maybe I haven't really dropped it yet, but it's frayed, anyway; I can't pull him back. I have to trust that he'll find his way back somehow.
