My pain popped. That's the only way I can describe it and I am as flabberghasted as you are! I am sitting here with the weirdest of sensations after almost two years of the most incredible pain, confusion and internal chaos I have ever experienced (if you've read my other blogs you'll know, so I won't elaborate too much) I feel very spaced out, but will do my best to explain it to you in words, as it literally just happened this morning.
I fully intended my next blogs to be about the most recently realised part of my healing I had been addressing, which was going back to my childhood wounds from my dad's adulterous behaviour and realising how it had affected me in my own marriage, but that can wait!
God I feel fucking weird! So spaced out and odd.
I have no idea if this is simply timing and was going to happen anyway, is because of the counselling I've been having, the reading I've been doing or the work I've been painstakingly carrying out on myself, and I have no idea if it's going to last, but I woke up this morning feeling like something had popped in my chest and a sense of clarity I have not had before about my own state in my marriage in the years leading up to this affair. Now, this is not and never will be an admittance of fault for the affair as the choice to cross the line was not mine, but it is an admittance of what I absolutely needed to address in my relationship.
Last night going to sleep, I was distinctly aware of how unhappy I felt. Really unhappy. I've felt it before, but the difference last night was that I really allowed myself to feel it and acknowledge how long that unhappiness has been present for. I have been really, really unhappy and not giving myself permission to feel that unhappiness for a really, really long time. Last night, I gave myself permission to. I lay there and surrendered to that deep, deep unhappiness. I stopped pretending and admitted to myself what I could feel in my gut. I let my inner Knowing rise as I went to sleep. When I woke up, something felt different. It's so hard to explain as I was still semi-conscious and it was very visceral, but it felt like something had popped in my chest, like the pain had detached itself somehow. There was a definite physical sensation in my chest cavity. An air pocket, bubble or cyst type entity that had been making its home in my chest, finally had its membrane popped and its contents freed. I could actually feel it. It was bizarre.
Along with this bizarreness and finally acknowledging this inner knowing of unhappiness, allowed a distinct awareness to breakthrough. An awareness of how I had been masking my unhappiness for so long by incessantly "doing". Hunkering down and throwing myself into just powering through. Being an Army wife, that's what you do, because you have no choice but do that. Throughout my marriage I've had no say in where I live, how much support is nearby, what kind of house I live in, whether I have family close, how long we stay there for, if there's people or places nearby that match my needs, whether my husband is home or not and if he is how long he's there for. I've had no control over any of this, so there has been no point in moaning about it. It's just head down and get on with it. Don't complain, because what can I do? No choice, no control, so no discord allowed. So instead what I've done for years is head down and power through by trying to fix how I felt through "doing". For me, that doing was mostly in the form my business. If I could just get more clients, if I could just get noticed, if I could just cut a break, if I could just write another course, release another ebook, if I could just......, if I could just.........Moving again?? Right, I'll just do this, and this and this and this and this and this............
......all the while looking after two small kids, moving around and starting again every 18 months to 2 years, then in the last few years decorating a house from top to bottom while throwing myself into networking, going to events organising events, keeping up a social media presence, re-branding, making videos, trying to figure out the next marketing strategy etc. etc. etc. Everything I talked about in "Owning My Shit!", I could feel intently this morning.
I couldn't stop "doing", because stopping would mean feeling the void. The huge expanding emptiness of space. Stopping would be admitting it existed and acknowledging the intense dissatisfaction and unhappiness inside it. Fuck! I was so "head down and powering through" in complete distraction mode to avoid it, I wouldn't even have noticed if my husband was feeling disconnected. I had nothing left for my relationship. After all, he wasn't going anywhere was he? We were married and once you're married, you're married, right? If he was feeling like we were drifting apart I would not even have realised it. I wasn't present. I was head down, pushing through, don't stop as the harder I work the more likely I am to succeed, right? Everything is right around the corner, can't stop now, this one is going to smash it. Everything I thought would make me happy was just out of reach but I could get there if I kept going. Those "outside in" strategies I was talking about in "So How Do You Get Through This?", relying on external sources to fix internal voids. I have been reading Glennon Doyle's "Untamed" this week and what I realised I was doing was ignoring my Knowing. The Knowing, I now see, lives in those voids. The voids I had been ignoring, avoiding and distracting myself from within an inch of my life. What I did last night was let it be heard. I listened to my Knowing.
As I said, I don't know if this allowance created the pain to pop, but God! I could literally feel his detachment in my episode this morning, and I could also feel my ostrichesque, head in the sand intense distraction, totally oblivious to it. *Deep sigh*
I said sorry. He said I had nothing to say sorry for. I said I did, lots.
It was like I could see things so much more clearly with the detachment of pain. I said to him "I can see why you did it. I don't agree with it, but I can see it." I could also see what a shit storm was created when you throw into the mix the complexities of the type of person who is willing to get involved in this type of situation. *Another deep sigh*
This affair has consumed me for 6 days short of two years. My every waking moment, my every thought, my every sensation, my every living and breathing cell has been completely and utterly saturated in this affair. Every single minute of every single fucking day it's all I thought about, whether I've wanted to or not. It's all I've wanted to talk about because trying to comprehend and make sense of this fucking nightmare has been my life for two whole years. An endless, gruelling internal battle with myself for 718 fucking days. Everything else has been secondary whether I allowed that to be seen or not. Everything else was blurry in the background, fake and unimportant. What else is there to talk about? My husband had a fucking affair, my life is in pieces, I am in pieces. I am seething. I am teetering on both suicidal and homicidal intentions. A flea's whisker away from being either headline news or the next viral video sensation. Walking the fine line between normality and insanity with every individual breath. Why on Earth am I going to be concerned with the small shit?
But now it may not be quite so much. Aaaaaaannnd B R E A T H E.......
Once again, I am reminded the way out, is to go in.