July 25, 2024
For those who don’t know the story, a quick recap. It’s been a little over nine years since my ex-affair partner dumped me. I had known him seventeen years … long enough to hear him complain about his marriage on and off the entire time. I always thought the world of him, and then when a family crisis brought him to me for advice … things turned.
For about four months, that is. He decided he wanted to divorce, moved out … and that was the end of that. His wife insisted on counseling, which she didn’t put much effort into, and everyone in the family threatened never to speak to him again if he divorced. So, that was the end of me. Almost literally. For the better part of nine years.
Prelude to a Kiss … Oops, I Mean, a MESS
I spent most of those nine years absolutely fucking miserable. I think much of this wasn’t about him. It was about never having, or having only very briefly in my life, the types of social acceptance and family support most people are simply born into and experience as a given most if not all their lives.
The day I met my therapist, I told her the two sickest families in my hometown had their two oldest children meet and get married right out of high school, and I was the oldest kid. This claim is no stretch of the truth.
My paternal grandmother and all five of her sisters were bipolar, untreated for most of their lives. This means my father grew up in a house where the parents cussed, threw things, and fought, and his father cheated with prostitutes. No kidding. My handicapped cousin told a story of getting trapped in the house with my dad’s younger brother, both children hiding under the kitchen table during an argument, with my grandparents screaming at each other and throwing things. A terrifying environment for a child to grow up in.
My maternal grandfather told of his mother being felled by what was obviously clinical depression, sleeping in her room much of the time while the oldest daughter fed and cared for him and their six other siblings. His father was abusive, from what I remember being told.
My maternal grandfather grew into a man who cheated on my grandmother once that we know of, beat the children, and sexually abused my mother. My mother was so traumatized by this she sexually abused my aunt, her younger sister, at least once that we know of.
So, I grew up in a house with a borderline mother who became a professional victim. We kids were her support system as she had disagreements with everyone she knew and made her life one long tirade about who did what to her when. My father was only around long enough to insist I make nothing less than A grades under threat of the belt or the flyswatter, before dying abruptly in a plane crash when I was twelve. Parked in “gifted” classes, I struggled under tons of homework, and then came home to a punishing load of housework every Friday night.
Clearly, something was “off” about me socially, because when we moved to a new town when I was seven, every kid in the school decided I was the perfect bully target from day one. I spent the years from age seven to twelve being laughed at and picked on, gum thrown in my hair, beaten up at the bus stop, riding home with an entire busload of children laughing and jeering at me with no adult intervention, and generally made to feel both at school and at home as if something bad must be very wrong with me for everyone I knew to treat me this way.
Only my father’s rather spectacular death when I was twelve stopped the bullies at school, since it was graphically splashed all over the papers and the news.
Nothing ever stopped my mother.
When she married her second husband and we moved again, what I now know were the screaming rages of borderline personality disorder got worse. I felt completely alienated from other, “normal” kids at this point, and would never have invited anyone home, especially not a date, because of the borderline rages and fighting between my mother and stepfather that was going on at home. From the time I was fifteen, I read whatever I could by therapists, desperate to understand the chaos at home and stop it if I could. I felt so sorry for my mother and yet hated her for the way she treated me, and my poor stepfather, at the same time.
It was the eighties and I am a short person, so on top of all this came the shame about not having a model-or-actress body. At 125, everyone said I was “too fat.” I almost literally starved eight pounds off, and when I was still “too fat,” the lifelong war with the undereating-hunger-binge-weight gain-self-hatred-undereating started.
I struggled through college and professional school not really knowing how to make friends, but somehow still making a few anyway, and being sure no man would ever want me because I was “too fat.” The most I ever weighed in college was 145 … still in the NORMAL RANGE for my height.
I discovered the self-help and psychology section of the bookstore while struggling painfully through my first few jobs. My profession requires a good deal of mentorship while new graduates solidify their skills in the career, something that is generally acknowledged now. Unfortunately, in the early nineties, it wasn’t. If you weren’t bang-on right out of the gate with almost no mentorship, something was wrong with you, and it was your fault.
This was very traumatic for me. I ended up fired from nine jobs, sure I would end up completely unemployable and homeless. It was a scary time. I determined that if that did happen to me, I would be homeless, because there was no way I was ever going home to my mother again.
Still, I read and read and read, which got me through being dumped by the first boyfriend I had — at the ripe old age of thirty-two — in part because by now, I really was fat.
I developed an escape fantasy of being a successful novelist, which would bail me out of my scary career and simultaneously allow me to save face with my family, who wouldn’t be supportive if I failed in my career at all. (Why did I care so much about what people thought back then, when now they are all dead or I’ve had to cut them out of my life anyway??)
This was where I was when, two weeks after my first boyfriend dumped me … the man I would marry asked me out.
For the next eleven years, it looked as if everything that didn’t work out in childhood, I was finally good enough to be able to get. I cobbled together a career doing locum work that I eked out a living on even though I was terribly underpaid. I found a steal on a condo and moved in. And, best of all, a person I had admired for years thought I was wonderful, and, despite the usual stumbling blocks over chores and, in our case, elder care rather than child care, we built a grand partnership and dreamed of being self-supporting writers.
I now realize that promising beginning was just a red herring from the universe, there to be snatched cruelly back to force me to heal.
Because then, the bottom fell out. We hadn’t even been married five years when my husband was diagnosed with brain cancer, and after a valiant two-year battle, he died.
Here’s where I was when the married guy and I grew closer, and that explains why I suffered so much over the succeeding nine years.
I spent most of my life with my nose pressed against the glass, watching other kids have friends and happiness I didn’t get to have. They only came around the glass wall to bond among themselves by torturing me.
All I ever wanted in my youth was a normal, functional, happy family, and friend experiences like everyone else got to have, and for close to eleven years I got to have those things … although it was only a family of two.
When my husband died, all my friends had moved out of state, and there I was … alone. I had serious doubts I could survive financially on my own. I had been so sledgehammered by life that I didn’t really even know how to relate to other people at all anymore. I ran a little writer’s group for a while, but when the people in there told me my novels sucked, I had to finally understand that the writer fantasy was just that … a fantasy.
Why I Suffered for Nine Years
My married guy was everything I wasn’t, so of course I had idolized him. He was tall, and I had always thought this guy was absolutely the most handsome, the sexiest guy I had ever seen. He was effortlessly successful in his career, whereas I struggled and struggled. His wife didn’t even have to work, something I envied as I labored to take care of my bipolar eighty-six-year-old great aunt and the cousin who had hidden under the dining room table, while working and staggering under student loans and my own medical bills.
He seemed to know everything there was to know about popular culture, classic literature, movies, and music, while I felt like a dummy. He made friends effortlessly and had the most ingenious hobbies.
He was fascinating.
Basically, this guy blew me away. I thought I would never, ever, ever, ever be able to be, do, or have any of these things on my own. So, I constructed a fantasy in which I would provide what he didn’t get in his marriage (Perfect Wife, v.2), while finally, finally, someone would actually help me for a change.
Wham!!
Right after Memorial Day, 2015, that was gone. As it always is, if you are the Other Woman.
What followed over the next nine years was me desperately hanging onto the fantasy, even as he went back to a marriage with a shrewish woman who didn’t want to work on the problems (verified through a last phone conversation in 2017.) That the guy continued to hang about on my website encouraged me to hang on. Surely, surely, he’d realize that marriage was hopeless, find the strength and self-belief to handle the family members, and get the fuck out of there, finally.
Meanwhile, I gave up on my writing dream. I started to understand, watching my aunt and cousin die in their nursing home, that this was what was on the way for me, and not some “blazing glory” of a future in which some Big Five publisher fell in love with something I’d written and someone made a movie.
I simply wasn’t that good. I never would be.
Meanwhile, all the reading I was doing on loneliness and attachment disorders and mental illness and love addiction and infidelity and astrology was turning me into a person who didn’t have anything in common with anyone else I knew.
I started to understand that I was approaching an old age I would endure alone. I started to understand that even though we paint romantic pairings with an impossibly rosy brush in this culture, what they really are is a grueling series of hard, hard lessons and not the effortless road to happiness portrayed in the Julia Roberts romcoms I had cut my teeth on in my prime pairing years.
I started to understand that I was still living life like that child with her nose pressed against the glass, feeling too different from “normal” children but still needing all that familial love and peer support children really do need at that age.
I started to understand I wasn’t a child anymore. I was about to be an old lady, a fat old lady who wasn’t going anywhere else in this world, and who would die in the same nursing home as my aunt and cousin, alone.
I started to understand that I needed to buck up and handle that reality. I needed to accept what I had in my life, because that is what I am limited to. I needed to accept that those ten years the married guy and I could have started a new life if he had’ve left were gone, and now we were really too old.
I needed to make myself happy with what there was, because there would only be less from here on out, not more.
I’m a different person today.
Today is my birthday. I’m fifty-six. I woke up this morning and completely forgot all about it, until I saw a few happy birthday messages on Facebook.
In all the previous years since my husband died, birthdays were a reminder of how different and left-out I was. How I didn’t have what other people got to have, what I was supposed to have, and I was shaky and unsafe without. Didn’t normal people have friends and family to take them out and celebrate? What would happen to a person who didn’t have that in their life, as they got older and older and more feeble??
Every other birthday before this one was like standing far from shore on thin, thin ice.
I used to go out after work and walk and jog and feel afraid. Suppose something happened to me and no one knew where I was? Every other person had someone close who cared about them and knew where they were. I didn’t. If I got jumped, raped, or robbed, I could lie there in the bushes for days before anyone missed me. It was a very scary and empty and frightening feeling.
Everything you read these days is about how people need other people, and how desperately important it is that everyone somehow build a support group of other people at all costs. You’ll DIE SOONER if you don’t!! Social isolation is killing us!!
What I’ve discovered about that is the answer isn’t “Finding Someone!” or finding anyone, really. It certainly isn’t “borrowing” someone else’s husband (whom that person remains steadfastly committed to no matter what.) It’s not becoming J. K. Rowling.
The answer is finding yourself.
Instead of being scared of a future alone, I had to become strong enough to just, handle it.
That’s it.
I just had to accept that I was going to be alone, I am going to undergo whatever ravages of old age and death I am going to meet alone, and the only thing there is to do is just buckle down and do it. Nothing, and certainly no one, is ever coming to save me.
I am completely alien to other people now. I ponder what I know about psychology, about relationships (kind of useless now except on Medium, since I’m not attractive to one and I don’t want another one anyway.) About astrology, about the nature of evil, about life.
I peck about at fan fic and entertain myself.
This isn’t a young life anymore. All that “Find Someone and set up a home and find glory in a career!” stuff is over. I will be old enough for retirement soon.
Nothing else is going to happen in this life. I only have a few jobs left: Scrape together enough money that I won’t be poor. Get old. Die.
That’s it.
I wrote something to that effect on my blog the other day, along with the observation that the person in question doesn’t visit my blog anymore and hadn’t in some three months. Clearly, he had moved on and didn’t think about me anymore. I hoped he got it together with his wife and the marriage was a happy one now.
And, this is when it happened. I got a few lines in my email from him, telling me he was reading and that he does still care about me.
(This confirms my suspicion that the enshittification of Google Analytics is now complete, and the new GA4 does, in fact, suck.)
I was happy to hear from him. (At least he isn’t dead.)
But I don’t have any fantasies anymore about him and me … or anyone and me, for that matter.
The difference on this birthday is: I am no longer a part of normal human society.
AND I DON’T CARE ANYMORE.
I just don’t know how to talk to normal people anymore. I write, and I think about psychology and the planet. I know a lot about affairs, and I write about that. I write fanfic about evil Sith lords.
I don’t miss normal people anymore. I don’t worry about being alone if I go someplace anymore, about no one knowing where I am, that if anything happens to me, I am alone.
I am alone, and I will handle it. If I can’t handle it, then I will bear what happens. That’s it.
I care about what I care about, and other people don’t. And the things they care about are so completely foreign to me now that I have no common ground with anyone else anymore.
I really am an island, and at age fifty-six, I’ve finally gotten comfortable that way.
So, it’s nice to hear he’s still alive, and that’s about it.
I expect nothing. I want nothing. I’m comfortable here alone in the peace and quiet.
I don’t struggle to achieve anything except maybe some toehold of financial stability in old age anymore. (Which I know I won’t have. It’s far too late to save a million dollars to invest and live off the interest.)
It’s far too late to “Find Someone!” and put up with getting married again. At this age, all that’s left for me is the final illness and more caregiving again anyway.
I don’t long for a normal human life anymore.
I’m done being that sad child with her nose pressed to the glass, watching normal children have friends and birthday parties.
And that has made all the difference.