'Hiding from my resentment because it would make me change my situation'
Jan 30 2006
Transcribed below:
January 30, 2006
My brain is hurting my body. I am worried and unhappy and my stomach is in knots. Last night after Megan went to bed, he and I stayed up talking and uncovered all sorts of demons I’ve been harboring. Resentment, not a word I used last night, is an apt term this morning. The unfixable things. That I feel bad no matter what I do about this life with him. When I leave I’ll feel bad about it. He tries to protect me from the guilt he imagines I’d feel. Feeling like I’m running out on him. Which is not so bad. But while I’m here I feel the immediacy of not feeling able to do anything outside of him. It’s paralyzing. It’s a trap. To not have a life outside him is the route I’ve been going. ‘Wait until I leave, then it’s all OK,’ I keep telling myself. Put it off, put it out of my mind, because I’ve decided I was going to force myself through this agreement I made. I can’t read Henry Miller because it shocks me awake and I feel again I must change this setup. Then decide I shouldn’t. In trying to “protect” him, provide for him, I’ve killed myself. I believe now this is how it must go.
I cried last night as I realized this. I said I felt cut off from the rest of humanity because I don’t understand how they can do house / family / husband / kids / job, and still feel free enough to be truly happy. The breakdown came when I realized, really felt—that they can’t be. They aren’t. And—
They’re all doing the same thing I’ve been doing to myself lately: repressing, talking yourself into your duty, and cutting off the parts of self that push otherwise. It broke my heart to think of the throngs of people that do this, that have to do this. And that I too have learned how to do this, that I will likely need to do it again one day. To have people that truly depend on you, this is the price. This is the burden. And seeing this now, I ache for the months gone by where I have done this to myself. I will never have them back. Learned an important piece of life, I remind myself, silver lining. But, fuck the cloud! Too many of them over me. And so, to this I once again say: fuck it, this is not for me. At least not for a long while. Oh… the burden breaks me. And kills off something beautiful—the opening to possibility. And transforms the relationship. He and I once free and floating together. I now feel tied.
The financial obligation is also a large part of it. I can’t leave because he economically can’t afford me to. Even now our plan has been for me to stay till mid-March to pay March’s rent (my half in full) so that he has 2 weeks paid leeway to find his new spot. Why I do this… why I do this… I’d say I don’t know. I can’t keep doing this. So I’m giving him money and the time it takes to make it. Which is fine and good except that it’s preventing me from going off sooner and thus prolonging the half-torment of my life here. Half, but a full half. It comprises everything under the surface. I should just give him a handful of bills and leave. I’m going to pay either way. Fuck me, I can’t not. The resentment’s there anyway. For him depending on me financially for so long.
Oh heart-aching self, what are we going to do? Distracted for so long. I told him I feel half-dead, asleep. It’s so goddamn simple: I’ve been hiding from the truth because it would make me change my situation. But if I hide, it requires the whole self’s involvement: everything in me knows. I cut off deeper lines of thinking, of analysis. I do not dig. Don’t want to find. I just don’t go there. In writing him letters, I’d stop when I’d notice how negative I was getting and, finding it distasteful, I’d derail the line of thought and go a higher (less honest?) route. The only honest light thing I could say was, “Wake me up.” It lasted an afternoon. So last night, for whatever reason, I broke the pact of silence with myself. Brought up so much shit. Again, if I think about it, I feel nervous, sick, sad, stuck, heartbroken. I guess I need to get out of here, maybe sooner than I thought. He said to me last night: “Leave, please, you can leave tomorrow if you want.”
“I know I should go but I’ll probably stay, and that’s all you can do about some things.”