"The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly. It's not the shattering itself that breaks you—it’s the silence that follows, the quiet space where you realize there’s nothing left to salvage. And in that moment, you know that you’ll never be the same again. You’ll build something new, perhaps, but it will never be what you lost."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
This is the exact reaction I have every time my life falls apart. I feel like I am just standing there, staring blankly as the world as I know it falls apart. If it were a movie, I would be standing there dumbly as the world around me crumbles, at first there is a great deal of noise, but then there’s just silence, as the world just implodes.
It is just me, the silence and the wreckage.
I have felt this more often in my life than I would like to admit...
I think the blank stare is a protective thing. A mechanism to keep you from totally going under. From losing your shit, permanently.
For me it is a going within, a holding onto myself in the midst of chaos, real or imagined.
The world circles and things go flying past me, but I am just there standing amidst the chaos understanding there is no way back to where I was before, but also understanding that there is a part of me that will never, ever be the same again.
And while I know that in time, the blank stare will give way to something else, perhaps looks of terror, or hurt, or blame or maybe even serenity. But in the moment, all I can do is just stare off into space knowing that all I just knew to be true, has ceased to be true anymore.
I feel like this is where I have been for the past two months. Staring blankly...
But now, I am done with that. I see what I lost and after some time, I can see that I never really had anything at all. It was all smoke and mirrors which is a totally different kind of loss. I mean, I felt like I had it, I felt like it was real, but it never was. None of it. It was all lies, manipulations, bullshit, toxic sewage designed with one thing in mind and one thing in mind only, his needs and wants. It was never about me, or love, or my family or my kids or sobriety or anything that I thought it was about. It was never what I thought, or what I wanted. And I am not sure how one gets over grieving that which you never had but felt you did only to realize that it was all a lie.
And I won’t ever be the same again. I will now question everything and accept nothing on face value. I can’t afford that kind of luxury anymore. Any and all relationships will be in a slow march toward intimacy. I cannot handle anything else. I worry about the living part of relationships, whether I will always be on high alert, running every conversation through a fact checking process. I hope not. Sounds exhausting and unfair. But how could I not?
I feel sorry for the next person I date. So much so that I am not sure I am going to do it. Date. I mean, it feels like I would be doing the person a grave disservice. How does one move on from what I just survived? How does one trust again? How does one recover from two years of living a lie, knowing the entire time that things weren’t adding up and staying anyway? How does one exactly recover from loving someone who was just fucking using you?
Maybe I will just return to the blank stare phase...seems safer than to survey the damage. And rebuilding seems like a task that I just don’t have the energy for...or ever will again. I feel as though my entire reality was reconstructed. And now I doubt everything. I have to go back and relive each experience, each memory, each engagement with fresh eyes and see that it was never, ever what I thought it was. It was all just a con, a game, a play. And oh my fucking God, did I get played.
I think the best worst thing is that I have to deal with the part of me that was susceptible to all of the lies and manipulations. I mean, I suspected all along, but I could never prove. What was it about me that allowed all my feelings, intuitions, fears to be so easily cast aside in favor of his version of reality? Why did I let him co-opt me like that? What is wrong with me?
Well, after a two month long inventory, I will tell you...
I wanted to believe that someone loved me like that. I wanted to believe that it was real. I wanted to be that important to someone. I wanted someone to love me like I loved them. And I kept showing up hoping every single day that he would turn sweet again, like he was in the beginning. And I fucked up my whole life, the lives of my children, lost friendships over him, ruined my relationship with my sponsor and intermittently lost and gained weight all because I could not and would not give up the fantasy that his love was real. There was always ample evidence to believe, but there was also always ample evidence to not believe. And I can see now, it was my choice, my fucking choice and I chose poorly every single fucking time.
I got where I am because I allowed it. I put up with it. I needed this to work out and that became the chief vehicle for me to remain ensnared for over two years. It was my need to believe that someone loved me that I craved and I was willing to follow that need down to the depths of my soul. I could have drank over it. I could have done a lot of things. So I know I could be way worse off. But the self betrayal is what makes me most ill. What I did to myself which allowed him to do what he did, that is the thing that kills me.
I know I will never be the same again, but what exactly did I lose?
I lost naïveté. I lost some innocence that I somehow held onto well into adulthood. I lost faith and trust and belief in myself and in others. I confirmed for myself that sometimes you are right, even when you most do not want to be. Sometimes, sometimes you are just fucked up beyond all measure and the only way you are going to learn is to jump in and give it all you’ve got.
And just like Jay in The Great Gatsby, I was in love with an idea, not a real person. Daisy was never what he made her out to be. She was a real person, but the woman he loved was a figment. She was never really real. The real person, betrayed him, choosing the vile she knew over a chance at freedom. And Jay made a deal with the devil that had an ever increasing price tag. And while I am grateful I am not shot dead in my swimming pool, sometimes I feel like that would be a kinder fate than to have to go on living knowing that you loved your best and it more than anything else, landed you in this position to be decimated.
Love is like that really. To truly love you have to offer up your body, your mind and your soul. Loving means handing over yourself to a person who you know can and will hurt you. Love is having the belief that it is still in your best interest to do it. Despite the risk, the reward of love exchanged is worth it.
So I stand in the rumble, humbled by the silence, no more loving words that ring hollow. And I am not sure which is worse, the falsities or the silence. I survey the terrain and see the work required to rebuild and I would be lying if I didn’t own that there was a part of me that just wanted to continue the story one more chapter. Or to start another horrible novella all the same. Great works of fiction come once in a life time and I have just had mine. It is hard when a dream dies. It is hard to move forward in life, relieved of the burden of a dream you carried since you youth.
In the final analysis, I didn’t lose much, just everything. But as it turns out, the losing of everything was the exact thing I needed to move on free from old ideas that kept me trapped and locked into a lifetime of pain and sadness and disappointment.
I will rebuild and hopefully, if there is grace in this life, I will never, ever have to have what I lost again. I don’t want it. I don’t need it and I am grateful it is fucking lost. May I never, ever find it again.
Please...
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