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makenewtruths · 5 years

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It’s an Ancient Ordeal

“Give me this task?”

“Why should I trust you?”

“What choice have you got?”

This is the point in the conversation where either either things really start moving in an irrevocable direction or they spiral quickly into relative obscurity. It’s not like it should be that hard to offer opportunity but resources are limited and we all share this rock.

Coming back to the personal, if you can’t tell I’m going a little nuts at the moment; good thing I’m just in time for mental health month. :0

I have come to rely on my girlfriend far too much for the career hunt and it is biting me bad today. I don’t have a working resume still and I NEED to put in applications because that recurring awareness of my dying soul is peaking once again and it seems if I don’t get out of this job I will continue slowly turning into this man I have already partially become. Put simply I’m freaking out.

I don’t like this man, He doesn’t open up to anyone about anything. He isn’t capable of so much outside of sleeping and complaining and I don’t even want him in this house let alone in me. I am tired of being tired and I am exactly aware of how cliche that is.

So we must overcome, right? We must find a way to rise above the exhaustion and malaise and make a better life for ourselves, He and I, but how?

One curious response is to hide all of this. I am not sure why this all affects me so strongly but my girlfriend’s knowledge of these circumstance and my frustrations there in is somehow so immediately dis-empowering. Somehow her attempts to help have both lured me into a false sense of security and also shamed me. I feel foolish for how hard all of this has proven to be for me. I feel foolish for how frustrated I become with this process, and how easy she and other people seem to think it should be when for me it’s just not.

I wish I had prepared myself more for this mad world we live in, because right now all I want is to be free of it.

#job hunt #mental health

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makenewtruths · 5 years

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Wanted: New Life

So it’s the first time in a long long time that I’m writing again and I’m doing so mostly because I’m home alone for pretty much the entire evening. I find myself wanting to do everything and therefore end up feeling crippled by the possibilities. There is so much to do and so little to be done. I have seen the “elephant.”

It is times like this where I am made aware of exactly how alone I am in the world outside of my girlfriend. I basically don’t talk to anyone but her with any kind of real confidence and even she cannot handle everything from me. I struggle regularly with my feelings for her, her need for commitment, and my own inability to give it.

I, like so many, was sold the preconception of whirlwind romance that would sweep me away from my own self doubt. Being a more practical person than I was in my school days I like to believe I’ve gotten past this. There is a raw chemistry that I still feel lacking in my relationship which both leaves me wanting more, denying even more to her because of it, and stubbornly refusing to commit to anything that doesn’t remedy this secret issue.

I am aware of how ridiculous it is to hold this secret criteria. I have talked to her about the idea of opening up our relationship and have even encouraged her to pursue others. This notion by itself is exciting and breaks up my tired monotony, but does not remedy my juvenile pretense. I am alone in a relationship and it sucks.

I love my girlfriend. I want to be the man that gives everything she wants (even if that means not just me), however, there is also a part of me that has built up a notion that we may be happier if we weren’t together. It’s not a topic of casual conversation and her response to such matters is often either furious and incisive or tearful and dramatic. Either one of these responses leaves me scrambling to understand my place in the world as I don’t have a great sense of self outside of how others perceive me; which leads me to mental health. This is the first day in a long time where I thought that I understood why someone would want to kill themselves.

To be perfectly clear I do not condone the thought and I am not seriously entertaining the idea of any sort of self harm. I want to live at the very least for those people whose lives I would affect were I to turn up dead. I have striven for years to be a good and stable boyfriend, a warm and understanding brother, and an insightful, if often distant, friend. I don’t cherish the idea of anyone finding me dead, especially by my own hand. It is an utterly selfish action which I do not wish to take. I do, however, see the elephant.

When you lack perspective it is easy to look at your immediate lonely circumstances and find the ordeal of fostering new friendships daunting. As traffic whizzes by my simple corner lot a crushing vitality easily chokes the soft certainty in my perspective out. I have always been one who is willing to learn and each car is occupied by another world which I may only ever come to inhabit, but never own. These borrowed spaces are where I have lived my life and, honestly, where I live it still. I do not have control of my life because I do not consider myself an authority, and in each of those cars is a new opportunity to redefine myself, but that’s really the problem isn’t it?

If I never get to be relaxed I can never know what I am other than some sort of psycho-social chameleon. I love to question, but I am not confident in my answers because I am still fallible and this has never been acceptable to me, especially if it gets people hurt. That said too much of my time and energy has been spent self-regulating, keeping troubling thought away from those who would take umbrage has made me into a cardboard cutout of a man and I’m tired of not feeling alive. If I’m going to get better I have to learn to draw lines, but one of the largest issues currently is just where.

I founded my current romantic entanglement on the notion that a girl who is willing to follow two states and stick out the ensuing miserable circumstance is probably worth keeping around. I have, however, very little impetus to change or adapt this relationship to my needs. I accept my girlfriends presence as a welcome comfort, on which often affords me prettier environs and great food, but as she not so subtly presses me for a ring my heart gets caught on some of the finer details.

I am a pleaser and as such when I am asked to change I take great efforts. I have learned to put more effort into our relationship through compromise in house work, home ownership, and now subtly on the notions of marriage and children, and while i have done so out of love I think I feel even more robbed of my agency than I had when this relationship started.

I established early that her moving here was her own prerogative and that while I would, and do, support her that didn’t want her to move here “for me.” That didn’t really play out as I thought it would of course.

Within 6 months we were officially boyfriend and girlfriend as we were living together in somewhat miserable circumstance in a shoddy apartment we rented so we could stop staying at a jenk hotel. She took charge of the issue and found us our first real place. It was nice as, at the time, I was working anywhere from 3 to 16 hours, 6 days a week and had practically no way of making a stable schedule without quitting my job which was the only income either of us had at the time. Flash forward another 6 months and after work upgrade I suddenly find myself unemployed. This lasts like 6 months. I should be and am ashamed of this, but depression (if that’s what this really is) is brutal and I wrapped myself regularly in fury and frustration whilst blissfully ignoring the strain I was putting on my partner. At on point while we were living there I told her that I couldn’t see her as the mother of my children. As you can imagine that didn’t go over well.

Then I found my current job and we moved into another nicer apartment and I started falling for a co-worker who got me said job. She was a friend of my cousin and we hit it off almost immediately, but I stayed myself until inevitably crisis settled into my mind and my relationship grew “weak.” I didn’t do anything terribly explicit but one weekend we went out to a concert together and, for one very awkward minute, we kissed. It was a foolish mistake I have/am paid/paying for it. A couple days later I tried to break up with my girlfriend to protect her and eventually came clean about the kiss. I was proud of myself for not doing more, but I didn’t realize the depth of my transgression.

First there was fury and then there was compromise. I tried lend compromise to the situation and negotiate a polyamorous relationship. It didn’t go well. It was all deeply strained as trust had already been broken and any compromise on my girlfriends part was being made under duress as i had already tried to break up with her. I should have known better, but I had never been in such a relationship and I pushed when I should have pulled, spoke when I should have stayed quiet, and eventually my girlfriend whose trust I had broken looked on my phone and saw messages she deemed incriminating toward both myself and my co-worker. Hatred and vitriol spew forth to this day whenever her name arises and I, while largely forgiven still tense at the slightest mention of that situation and the role I played there in.

Now we own a house. This was likely ill advised, but our lease was ending and I have known I wanted to own a house rather than rent for some time. I knew that if we bought a cheap enough home our mortgage could actually be cheaper than rent and it is an investment. I love the idea, but am finding my girlfriend’s DIY attitude to often be overwhelming after coming home from a job which I know I only do so I can keep my income up and be a stable partner. I am not happy there even though things improved drastically once aforementioned coworker rolled on to another workplace.

Now, however, I am largely alone.

I cannot talk to my girlfriend about my pursuing other relationships because I hurt her, and I can’t keep up the pace of renovations and house work she expects after coming home from a job which is mind-numbing but stable which I cannot leave for greener pastures without a drastic pay cut, losing money which I barely have enough of the meet my half of the bills anyway.

I want to break free and enjoy my life. i have very little time or energy to engage in a job search in addition to the demands of home ownership. I have practically no one to confide in and am largely avoiding talking to anyone about any of my doubts or concerns because I feel as if it ill disposes them towards either me or my girlfriend. I am terrified of another entanglement like the one that occurred previously but I honestly take so much of my personal motivation from other people’s perception of me that I have very little idea what the purpose of friendship is without the joy and wonder of sharing perspective which I seem to give myself over to wontonly or not at all (as is more recently the case). I need a confidant but everyone I know is too close to all of this and/or will be if things continue on their current trajectory.

I’m not sure if i should seriously be entertaining proposing or if i’m right in hesitating, because honestly I feel like there is a lot here to sort out and it might mostly be mine, but if I want to be doing this for the right reasons I’m not sure how much I should care.

My pace is slow, but I must find joy in this life if I am going to continue building it. Advice is appreciated, but please don’t be to harsh I seriously have no one else to talk to about this.

#mental health #relationship #polyamory #love #marriage #coming of age

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