I had a bad weekend. I suffer from depression, and having my wife leave me has kicked off a serious bout. Slashdot user o1d5ch001 tried to warn me about playing video games and it was really that that kicked off the depression. Video games are like a drug. Using drugs for the right reasons can be fine. Using them to hide from your pain is a sure fire recipe for disaster, and that is what I was doing with gaming. I'm not saying gaming is bad. In its place as a part of a balanced, rich and fulfilling life, video games aren't bad at all. It is when they are a substitute for a rich and fulfilling life that they are a danger, like any drug. And gaming socially is different than hiding away in your room like a junkie and playing.
For those who do not suffer from depression, let me try to describe it. It is not simply being sad. In fact, during a depression, the bouts of sadness are a welcome relief from the crippling numbness. Depression is feeling cut of from everything good inside you and in your life. Nothing motivates. Things that would normally make you feel good feel feel empty and pointless. Even if you know exactly what to do to get yourself out of a depression, as I do, it doesn't help because you have no motivation to get yourself out of it. You can't remember what it even felt like not to be depressed.
I've been eating one meal a day, and that has tasted like ashes in my mouth. I felt nauseous all the time, dread in the pit of the stomach nausea. I couldn't concentrate at work, and all my grand plans for rediscovering myself felt hollow and achieving them felt hopeless. I'm ashamed to admit, I held a knife up to my wrists. No, I would never do that. Suicide is the ultimate in egotistical selfishness. It may end your pain, but it creates far more in others that care about you, so it is a net loss. It is also selling out all your future possibilities. Even if you can't see it at the moment, chances are it WILL get better, and you are wasting that opportunity. So don't worry, I won't. But that is how bad depression can be, it seems easier just to end it. Fortunately for me, I have never really been comfortable taking the easy way out of anything.
Is that a paradox? If it was the more comfortable way for me, wasn't that then the easy way? What an egotist I am some times.
Jenny had asked to spend the night Tuesday so that we could talk and figure out where we both go from here. Monday, I had a bit of a breakdown and called her in tears. She feels awful and she really, really wants to be my friend. She listened and said that Tuesday, she would be there for me to vent and process as much as I needed.
Now, I'm going to be revealing a bit more about Mr. Y. I know, I said I wanted to respect his confidentiality, but Jenny admitted to me near the end of the night last night that despite his assurances that he was okay with our polyamorous situation, he was not. He had asked her to leave me. Sorry Mr. Y., but in my book that kind of cancels out any implicit deals we had. I'm still not going to reveal his name, but I'm no longer concerned if this gets back to him. I actually want it to work between him and Jenny, if you can believe that. But last night I downgraded their chances of making it a year from 70% to 30%, as I found out a lot of things he'd been hiding from both of us.
Mr. Y.'s major problem is his childhood. I had a difficult childhood. More so than average. I've heard some stories from my friends that top mine, but his takes the cake, the presents, and the magician, then runs off and feeds them through a wood chipper, spraying the children with a bloody mist of shredded happy birthday. He had the worst kind of hippy trailer trash parents. They left him in an orphanage as a baby, then came and got him. They would go off and leave him alone with his slightly older sister for weeks at a time as a young child. Once, she stabbed him. I won't go into all the details of the physical and mental abuse, lets just call it horrific and leave it at that.
The only adult relationship he ever had was at the age of twenty four. Ten years ago. She was, by his account, a horrible, ball-busting, demanding princess, fat and ugly to boot. Jenny is a little overweight, but this girl was 250. And SHE left HIM. He felt no reason to live, retreated into a shell for ten years. Four years ago his body tried to tell him he needed to do something to fix that shit, by coming down with a horrible psycho-somatic disease. He wakes screaming from nightmares and throws up every morning. He is in pain all the time, and is on several different medications. The side effect of that is impotence.
Jenny is his one last shot at redemption. The man has a bachelor's in psych, he should see what's going on, yet he refuses to go into therapy. He's built himself a rut, but it's not even comfortable. But I'm actually getting ahead of myself here, because we didn't talk about him at first.
The night started out with the first official ritual of our breakup, signing over the lease. I got an apartment in the same complex, because I am still going to be good friends with Jenny. She has made that very clear to him, and of course he has said he is okay with that. Of course he is not. He was there, but he brought a check stub without any information on it. Did I mention he works at an awful failing small business with a crazy boss, and that he comes home in tears every night because of it? This was all shit he hid from Jenny while wooing her. Well, not the bad job part, the coming home crying part.
He went home, and Jenny and I did a thorough post-mortem. Anyone going through a breakup would be well advised to do this if they and their partner are capable of doing it relatively dispassionately. Ours went fabulously. We could finally admit to each other all the things that were wrong, and hear the other person's side without feeling defensive. We had settled for each other, and that was what killed our marriage, because neither one of us are truly capable of settling for anything less than all our hearts' desires. We may never find them, but we are the kind of people who have got to be true to our dreams.
Now, by the time I proposed I knew I was settling. It was a conscious decision for me. The wrong one, as it turns out, but conscious. She didn't know that she was settling until much later. She admitted that I had tried harder. But we both felt resentful that the other person wasn't our perfect match. I knew what I was doing, so I took it out on her much less, but my buttons got pushed when she took it out on me, and I would escalate things. I felt resentful that I was trying harder than she was, yet she still felt resentful. In the end, we crossed one too many lines in our fights with each other, one too many times.
She offered to have sex with me, but I had to ask her, does Mr. Y. know? Will you have to lie to him? Yes? Then no. That's one thing you learn through months of weekly polyamory discussion groups. Absolute, complete honesty is imperative in relationships. Now, all this was before I found out that he consciously tried to split us up. After I learned that, I almost said what's the point in being that honorable with him? He wasn't with me and turnabout is fair play. But I can't play the game that way and live with myself.
We had dinner, and Jenny got a bit tipsy. Mr. Y. drinks too, and I warned her last night. I said, "I'll only mention this once unless things get very bad. As your friend, you need to watch that shit. You and he could sink into a really destructive pattern of drinking. That's all I'll say." So that's part of why all this came out about him. but the real reason boils down to his resentment of the situation, inability to admit that, and subsequent passive aggressive crap.
She has been very upfront with him. He has great dreams of marrying her and fathering her children, but she is, to put it mildly, not pinning her hopes on that. She's had a bit of a rude awakening, and on finding all this out I had to give her more of one. The kind of healing that Mr. Y. needs takes YEARS. At least two unless you devote your whole life to it, or get lucky. There are NO quick fixes in personal growth. Change takes time, and it has to come from within.
Now, Mr. Y. has put out the effort in some respects. He's shown a willingness to change and grow, and he took up theater to shake himself out of his rut. That's how he met Jenny, so it turns out: wise move. If anyone can shake him out of this rut, it's her. But he is going to have to step up and be a mensch. He wants to, I just don't know if he has the tools or the time. But you know? I'm rooting for him. This will be the ultimate underdog come from behind victory story of redemption if it pans out. I like stories like that.
I don't want to give the impression that I look down on him. I do pity him a little, is that a form of looking down? I mean, there but for the noodly grace of FSM go I. He and I are a lot alike, and given his circumstances but my genes, I don't know if I could have done as well. You have to throw that, "and my genes" in there, even though they are part of circumstance, because if ALL the circumstances are the same, the outcome is the same. There is no difference between us and our circumstances. It's like that optical illusion of the faces and vase. Both are one thing, though you can see it two different ways.
He had said he was going home, to clean up all the piles of bachelor crap around his place. He got drunk and passed out. She called him three times to say goodnight before he woke up. She starts a new job tomorrow, and this is one of the things about her: she doesn't drive. She is terrified of cars, even as a passenger. She is fundamentally uncoordinated. She crashed the car on her driver's test, and she hasn't driven since. So she had said she needed a ride home. She would take the bus in, but she gets off after him and he lives five minutes form her work. And they are going grocery shopping. He wouldn't commit to picking her up. Like I said, passive aggressive crap and he's trained in psych. He should know better. Ah, who am I to judge?
Anyway, that is when she confessed to all the problems. She doesn't know if it's going to work, but she knows he is going to have to come out of his shell and really be himself if he wants to keep her. She is being up front about that, not passive aggressive. They are signing a six month lease, and her sister is coming out in August to room with them, so if it doesn't work out the two of them can make it on their own.
We made a pact that we would always be there for each other, that we would always be friends, but that we would never get back together as partners. We both think that's the healthiest thing for us. This happened for a reason. It was ugly and painful, but to be honest, if it hadn't happened this way, it wouldn't have and we would still be stuck in a dead end marriage silently resenting the other person, but we are both better than that. We deserve better than that. Our pact is a potential deal breaker for future relationships, we agreed on that too. If a potential partner can't hang with the fact that we are friends, it's not happening. Now, we both know that if we do find another partnership, that comes first in planning, so we may move apart. But there is always the phone, and email, and chat, (Leh turs? What's that?) and we are always going to be at least a small part of each other's lives.
I got what I needed from her last night, and it wasn't sex. It was a pep talk, her telling me how fucking awesome I am, what a great partner I was, how sexy I am, how much of a catch I am. How much I deserve a partner with whom the relationship will not feel like work so much of the time. I feel the same way about her. The thing is, we don't need someone better, we just need someone different. She needs someone who is naturally into theater, and art, and film. I need someone who is into (at least some of) sci-fi, fantasy, RPGs, video games, or the outdoors. Now, we both need someone who shares our political and philosophical outlook on life, and we had that, but that is a necessary condition. It is not sufficient, at least for us. And those people are out there, and they are probably just as desperate to find us. It's a big fucking world, my friends, bigger than any of us can imagine.
I also got confirmation that she would continue to be my friend, that I was one of the most important people in her life. And one of the best things for me, I could see the confidence in her face. She knew it might not work out with Mr. Y., but she wasn't scared. When I met her, she felt no hope of ever finding love. I've gotten her to the point where she has the philosophical and emotional tools to become the person she wants to be.
And seeing that in her, and knowing that I helped her achieve that, suddenly put my problems in the proper light. I was, again, indulging. Wallowing in my pain when I have all the tools to get out. Feelings can be a very good guide to right action, but the conscious mind decides what to do with the feelings. Sometimes it is appropriate to simply let them wash over you and control you. Most times, it is not. I'm not ashamed of my weaknesses, though. To be ashamed is to need to hide, to become unaware, and that is when the darker parts of the mind can take control in unseen ways. And that is not an efficient mode of being.
So, I am rooting for her and Mr. Y. But the sad thing is, there will need to be a lot of growth and change before he and I can be friends, if ever. Not that I have any issues, I've forgiven him. It's just that it's hard to start out a friendship when you stab someone in the back due to neediness and hurt. How can he be real with me with that hanging between us? I know if I had tried to steal someone's wife, no matter how good the reason, I would have a hard time being real with the man I did that to.
I just don't think it will work. If Jenny were stronger, yes. He needs someone more seasoned, like I had with Meg, someone who can really give themselves to his healing process. Because all this crying, sickness, and passive aggressive crap is going to get worse before it gets better. I know how this shit works, healing isn't pretty. And Jenny isn't strong enough. She's fresh out of mensch school herself, as it were. That's less pretentious than calling it enlightenment or self actualization, I think. Or less prone to misinterpretation by people who don't know what those things really mean. Mensch just means a person who does what good people do, a person of integrity and honor.
Now, I'm not claiming anuttara samyak samadhi for myself or anything. No perfect and completely enlightened being am I. I can claim with some reason and conviction to be a conscious traveler on that path. And being a conscious traveler on your chosen path is the very definition of self actualization.
I think that one can make distinctions between say, those seeking the path, those on the path, and those who have internalized the path to the point that it is no longer the path. And amongst those on the path, one can distinguish how much someone has internalized what they have learned. Jenny is a newbie, and Mr. Y. needs at least a junior class guru. Unless he has reserves of inner strength I don't know about. Or he gets lucky and achieves grace, a quite useful concept from Christianity.
Anyway, last night was a good ending to the first phase of my relationship with Jenny. I feel a renewed sense of self worth and hope, I know I'm not going to lose my best friend, and I woke up this morning not dreading having to get through the day. I'm looking forward to the Rainbow gathering. I'm taking six days and two weekends off. I'm feeling less simultaneously desperate and hopeless about finding another partner. In fact, Jenny recommended I play the field and date casually. There are a lot of decent women out there looking for a man like me. She thinks I need to find myself before I find another partner, and not lose myself when I do, like I did with her. I think she's right.