My Therapist Graduated Me From Therapy Today
It's the end of an era.
Ten years. It took me ten years to recover from my affair with a married man … and I never even slept with the guy.
Fuck knows what would have happened if I had. Suicide, maybe?
(Let’s hope not.)
I have to thank my therapist for putting up with me. It’s been ten years of … very … slow … change. (She’s also had to put up with a lot of astrology.) But, I am no longer the person who walked with trepidation into my first appointment ten years ago.
When I walked into my first appointment, I was suffering from very scary panic attacks. Not ones where I would be screaming and hyperventilating, but ones where I would be struggling to act normal while wondering whether I should be calling an ambulance because I was having a heart attack.
And wondering what I would do when I either was or wasn’t diagnosed with a heart attack and then had to pay the bill.
I was still believing that nobody could possibly ever be happy without constant contact with other people in a close network of complex relationship. I felt lost because I had lost my husband after a very happy marriage, and now that life was gone, and I wasn’t ready to lose it yet. My life had only just started to turn good.
I hadn’t gotten enough yet.
And this poor guy sounded so sad. After the life he’d had, I was just the thing.
I hadn’t ever had anything much in life that was remotely normal. I had looked forward to one day experiencing the good things the things other people got. Marital rituals you could count on every year. “Every summer we go to the beach.” Just the simple comfort of having happy traditions like that. And being able once we were old, to look back on having enjoyed that sort of rocklike happy stability.
We never could. We didn’t have any money. And just when we started to have a little bit … we were out of time.
My ex-affair partner had all those things and money to spare, but they were hollow. He had all the trappings … but no relationship. He was the kind of guy who helped out. Who did actual chores.
He still didn’t have a relationship.
I was still working part-time — you have to, with a husband debilitated with brain cancer — and I had no idea how I was going to provide enough for myself in my old age … by myself.
So, I and my affair partner talked about what kind of life we could have together. He sounded excited, and I was, too.
I thought I was tailor-made to make him happy. And I was in love with this fabulous creative mind he had. He knew more about literature and old movies than I even knew existed. He was so droll and funny. I pictured good times we could have had.
And then I mourned them for ten years.
I was a person who put everything in relationship with other people. Because I grew up in a gravely ill family and then got hazed all through elementary and middle school, I thought Achieving Happy Relationship was everything. Because, by and large, I didn’t get to have Happy Relationships.
I still believed what the culture says about human happiness. Romantic pairing is the ultimate in happiness, and unless and until you achieve it, you are missing out.
You Must Have Human Contact. You Must Have Close Friends. You Must Have A Spouse, Or At The Very Least, A Significant Other. Long-lasting Relationship Is The Point Of Human Existence.
Well, this guy had missed out for quite the while. And I didn’t want to be done yet.
I thought, when I blundered into this friendly group who actually thought I was an okay person, and then met my late husband and this other guy, that at last the happy-family-and-friends things that happen to everyone else from birth through their early twenties could finally happen to me.
Sadly, that was the belief that kept me a child most of my life.
After my married ex dumped me, I was engulfed in grief. I sat out in front of where we’d met once and cried and cried. I was sad going to the meetings, thinking of the potential that had been lost. Surely he knew that a wife who was acting the way she was wasn’t going to make any breakthroughs in marriage counseling. Surely he missed me.
He certainly acted as if he did. Reading every word I wrote for some seven or eight years isn’t something you do if you just forgot and moved on. Okay, you might glance in … but then most people would just shake their heads and leave.
As long as he looked hooked, I stayed hooked.
If he wanted out of his marriage, I would never abandon him. And I thought that having people in my life was the only way to be happy.
I thought that no other love relationship could make me as happy as that potential one.
Meanwhile, years went by. Everything I was afraid of having to face by myself … I had to face by myself.
I got norovirus while I was out of town once and ended up violently ill. I had no one to call, no one to bring me anything, no one to look after me. Not only that, but I was stuck in a hotel room out of town, and had to drive myself home sick as a dog. The only saving grace was I had a packet of my great aunt’s Depends in the trunk and we wore the same size pants, so I could avoid soiling myself while I drove an hour and a half home on a sick stomach. Then I just had to lie around at home and tough it out by myself.
Then things fell apart at home. We knew we had sewer line problems when my husband was alive. We’d hear this rushing sound in the walls and water would back up in the sink. Now the laundry room started flooding, my condo was overtaken by drain flies and cockroaches, and then the entire sink line stopped up and neither I nor my upstairs neighbor could use our kitchen sinks. This took forever to be resolved and in the meantime my kitchen sink, the kitchen and laundry room floors, the backsplash, and the front of my refrigerator were all ruined. Then I injured my hip and my knee and could barely walk for months.
Then a partial power failure to our building rendered the power out in the kitchen, laundry, and dining room on Christmas Eve, 2023, and the power was out for an entire month. Basically, with all this going on, my condo was nearly unlivable for about six months.
All the sort of thing I had thought you needed a man to help with.
Somehow, I survived all of that. Somehow, I figured out how I was going to renovate, and designed and paid for it all myself. These were things my husband was going to do after his last book was finished … but he was diagnosed with brain cancer halfway through it, and only lived long enough to get through the first rewrite.
I’d post things to the guy who still lurked on my blog. Every time I did, he’d reread them over and over. I’d ask him to just stop lurking and speak. He’d read that over and over ... and lurk.
Then my stepfather died, and no one told me.
I’ve been no contact with my family for years. My mother is obviously mentally ill, and I just couldn’t deal with her behavior anymore. Still, when something important happened, usually my brother told me about it.
I found out when an old colleague of mine who now lives in my old hometown read the obituary and contacted me on Facebook to express condolences … two weeks after it happened. I wrote on my blog how shocked I was … and there he was, my lurker.
I wrote about how grateful I was that he was there. At the times it seemed like not a soul in the world cared about me, his silent support meant something.
And then I realized … What was the point?
He was never going to speak to me again. I’d never see him again. Wasn’t it a bit stupid, to live for the momentary happiness of a short second of proof he hadn’t forgotten me?
Yep. This was a stupid way to live. Time to ask him WTF he was actually doing there, and to just order him off the page if he was never going to speak to me again.
What happened after that was hiLARious. The guy stayed up all night, reading tons of my old blogs he hadn’t read before.
It took him all summer, but eventually … he started staying away. Or, at least, it looked that way. Eventually I heard from him again, and things ended with quite the slap in the face.
I evolved a lot over time. I realized it was an awful thing to recruit someone into your life and give them a job, and it was certainly no loving thing to do. I realized anyone leaving a long-term life plan might feel lost for a bit, and I understood one would have to be flexible. You can’t expect someone to just fill in with blazing color, the lines you drew in fantasy.
They’re a person, too.
Only … this was a person who wasn’t here.
Over time, I finally accepted it. Everything I had built my young life on would have to come crashing down.
No, I was never going to be a Writer. No, I was never going to be thin and attractive. No, this person was never coming back.
I needed to just be okay with what was.
So, I sat there, and that is what I tried to do.
I just gave up on everything.
And I found that giving up on everything I had ever wanted was a RELIEF.
When you acknowledge that everything you ever tried to do was always impossible, so now you don’t have to try to do it anymore, a whole new space opens up.
It can be the greatest thing to just sit. It can be so comfortable and pleasant. You don’t need anybody around. You don’t have to talk to anyone. You aren’t lonely. It’s okay.
Quiet and solitude can be beautiful.
And they had better be, because if you live long enough, eventually you lose everyone and can do next to nothing.
If any of that bothers you, you’re going to have a hard time if you make it to ninety.
I sat alone a lot, and I slowly became happy with my little condo, and I was comfortable on my little couch, and I realized that all I was going to have was this and work, and I am fine with that.
It’s so much better than flogging myself to death to reach this goal and that goal, which I can’t reach, and which don’t matter anyway.
I did not realize how much I just wished I could quit beating myself to death trying to accomplish, accomplish, accomplish, accomplish, and just quit and be.
I can be happy like this. I don’t have to have a “relationship.” I don’t have to have close friendships.
I don’t have to have anybody. And I don’t have to have “success.”
And I don’t have to be afraid of life because I don’t have anybody, and I don’t have “success.”
Whatever happens to me next, I will just buckle down, and I will handle it.
Just like I handled the last ten miserable fucking years.
I clung to those years I knew my late husband and this guy because I was still a little child who needed a family, someone to love me, someone whose hand to hold.
Now those years are all gone, and I can let them go because I grew up. When you are an adult, you can get along on your own.
Finally.
Yes, I really am a different person, an adult.
And these last ten years were just the growing pains of a sad, scared little child finally growing up.