Love to all. Even you.

In flaws there are weapons. In tears, panic.  In grace, sadness.

I have cried more over the last week than I have in a long time.

It doesn’t hit me. It just happens.

I realize just how unbelievably affected I am by everything that has happened to me.

I was married for 16 years. I was not the easiest person to live with. But I changed what I could and until recently, I received all kinds of feedback about how much I DID improve. I thought that, PTSD and ADHD aside (or WITH, in the case of the latter) that I was a happy-at-the-core person.  It wasn’t my base personality that needed changing, it was my temper and my fear, the PTSD stuff that would constantly insert itself into my family life.

The more I think about it, the more I learned direct-from-the-source, the more I know it was a lost cause. I am exceptionally sensitive to subtext.  In the last few years, I was asked over and over to take medication to treat my problems, even though I was reacting to a subtextual situation that was real, ongoing, and so much worse than I ever imagined.

The subtext was overwhelming. Truth was mist. I was my own worst enemy, because I am a reactor.

I was part of a goddamn puppet theater.

If I could do things over again, there are many things I would change. But the sadness comes from knowing that there’s nothing I could have done. I wasn’t well-liked for many years, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why it was more important to dislike me than to be responsible. I don’t understand, and now I have no pets.

Sometimes the sadness is that simple.

With my father, there have been one or two flashes where he nearly broke the sociopathic encasement… but he quickly retreated into lockdown. In my marriage, there were more than a couple of flashes of equal personal responsibility, but they vanished quickly.  Therapy terminated. Only I remained.

I will not allow myself to be the sole consistently-responsible-for-one’s-own-behavior party.  I would rather die than be in that situation again. It almost killed me twice. This is not hyperbole.

I am watching things change so quickly.

I have been told by parents, spouses, children that I am a fraud. A liar. I don’t know the causal factors behind some of these accusations. But I disagree. The love I feel for people is real and genuine and ongoing.

It happened again. That last sentence made me cry.

I have new people in my life who I feel like I’ve known forever, new friends who I have come to love dearly, and the patterns of family forming up on the horizon. There is a reason I’m still walking this earth.

I accept that other people can be desperate and flailing and will do anything not to look in the mirror. And that this desperation expands like radio waves, disconnecting everything it touches from the point of it all.  That people can be smart and wonderful and still descend into this sociopathic muck and that there is zero chance of return.

I accept this. But I miss my pets.

Love to all. Even you.