Okay so many thoughts.
I was really discouraged yesterday. I just felt down and gross and depressed. It’s so hard when it happens. I don’t ever know what quite triggers it.
Sometimes it’s just life. Everyday can’t be happy, happy, happy. Like Friday, I wasn’t depressed but I wasn’t happy. I’m very glad I kept working all day. I practiced good self-care all day and kept going at it all day, got a lot done.
I felt alot of tension around going into another weekend without any plans. Jay doesn’t have much need for social time or as much as I do. He never plans anything. He’s always tired from work. It’s just gotten to where I don’t know what to do. It creates even more anxiety in me when this happens. I don’t feel I can depend on him. I don’t feel I can bring any of these things up because he’s always tired and stressed and overworked. It’s been like this our entire marriage since he started the company in 1996.
Yesterday, he mentioned that he’s having a lot of feelings around his attachment issues and his birth experience. His mom gave him a big bag of papers and photos a few months ago, and he’s finally going through it. One letter inside contained a letter from the adoption agency, a handwritten letter from his foster mom for three months and photos of his first few weeks and months of life.
That’s really rocked him. It’s made him think back to that time, the night terrors, the crying, the fear.
There was also an article in the Inlander about loneliness. Their research is finding that people who are depressed, tend to stay shut down and guarded after they encounter other people. Depression triggers being guarded later. It’s a vicious cycle.
I feel alot of anxiety in my body right now. There are things still happening in our marriage after all these years that continue to trigger me. I feel it right now. I can’t seem to get on my feet and keep moving forward and some of this is this constant state of triggering or disconnection I feel with him. It never really goes away. He is fine in himself and to everyone else, he seems fine. That’s been our whole marriage: I’m fine. So that makes me crazy.
The Cassandra syndrome. That’s my life.
How much is this stressing my life and my body? Would it be worse if I was alone? What do I do?
He said yesterday he realizes he’s probably hurt a lot of people. I would be at the top of the list.
Today a close friend did a podcast on her favorite topics. A few other friends run the podcast. It’s so neat to hear voices of people I know closely, not just people who are out there speaking to thousands.
She mentioned me in the podcast. i was cleaning the kitchen and the interviewers asked how she heard about her therapist, Queen Kay. She said my name. They were like, “Oh yeah, Piper. We know her.”
It made me realize how much I crave being seen and heard and acknowledged in some way for my work, for my efforts, for the beauty that I’ve created and am creating, for the suffering I’ve gone through and still go through. I wish there was some way to feel more secure, less triggered, to be part of a larger conversation.
I am hopeful this somehow ties into and will dovetail into my PTSD project about the Palouse. I hope I can generate a bigger conversation about mental health and PTSD and beauty and art and the earth. I am so hopeful I can get permission to use Neruda’s horses poem. It would be a gift if I could. How amazing would that be.
Somehow in all this, I want to keep my triggers under control with Jay. I want to honor our partnership and marriage and honor what he is struggling with as a person. He is going through a lot of suffering. What would honor him and me right now I believe would be to acknowledge what he’s going through but also express how much triggering I still have in our marriage and with his behaviors. So more say, this is where I’m at. You do you and heal and hopefully continue to expand and grow, but I have to be safer somehow. I have to take better care of myself and maybe we go into a season of being roommates again. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.
He is feeling so many things now w/ his bio mom in the picture, but I don’t feel a lot for him. I feel numb toward it all. He keeps saying, “This is my mother” and I feel nothing really. I occasionally have a twinge of sadness if I imagine Jay all alone, crying, abandoned, a child that didn’t get a fair chance. Being put into a disengaged family and not having the ability to connect to anyone. It’s just so much pain.
But I’ve had so much pain in this marriage.
I want to embrace the good and not focus on the pain. I would love better coping skills to handle when he’s hurting like right now, when he’s processing and not turn him away. But I have to protect myself.
I don’t want to do what my mom did for years, which was make excuses for my dad. Am I doing that? I’m glad I talked to KT before her wedding and told her the truth of how hard it’s been, this marriage, and that I want better for her.