Alas I do not always have as much time as I think I do because much of my time these days is diverted to dealing with my depression and a fucking dog I don't want. I haven't slept well in I can't even tell you how long... pretty much since the Sailor got back from being out at sea for 7 weeks last summer. When he was gone I was blissfully happy. I missed him, I genuinely did, but I loved the freedom of not having to worry about him. I didn't have to get up at an ungodly hour (4:45) to take him to work... or have to spend the last few hours of work wondering what to do for dinner and thinking I would really rather just go to the gym or get drinks with my Cali BFF but nope I gotta get home to feed him. As soon as he got back we found out we were being kicked out of our apartment because the owner wanted to sell it... so starting in June my stress levels began to spike and they've just been increasing ever since and I feel like I'm going to explode.
In a whirlwind we had to find a new place and move by the end of July which wouldn't have been as bad if I hadn't had a week long vacation planned for the end of July back on home visiting with my younger brothers. And naturally I couldn't rely on Sailor at all to take care of any of it so I'm trying to hire movers and rent a truck and other nonsense while trying to wrap up things at work before heading out for a week.
Almost as soon as the dust settles from the move, shit starts going down hill at work and now all of sudden work is really slow and things are going to be slow for a while. But they were not very forth coming with how bad everything really was... .I decided to come home for a few months and help support my old office so that they didn't have to fire someone in our group and I could be home for the holidays. But then it quickly became apparent that I didn't have a job to go back to, and we couldn't afford for me to be unemployed and I was offered an opportunity to be trained in an emerging sector of my field and how could I say no after I sacrificed a sure career path in this office before to leave for San Diego and be brought down to part time temporary with no benefits, no vacation, holiday or sick time and to miss out on two years of raises.
Of course throughout all of this and before I left San Diego, I let him talk me into getting a dog, A dog he's been talking about wanting for three years, the dog he was never allowed to get growing up, the dog that would keep me company when he was out to sea. I've never wanted a dog, that was never an aspiration, but I didn't not want one, so who was I to stand in the way of him getting a dog. So I did the research and read up on training and looked into pricing and breeders and health plans and what not and I went and got him this dog as an early anniversary present. I never stopped to think about hey do I really want this dog cuz it's me who's gonna have to take care of it!
So now here I am living with my sister in law in a town house for the next year with a dog I don't really want and haven't had the time or the patience or allotted the circumstance for enough consistency to train him well. A dog that can't seem to hold his piss for more than four hours, a dog that refuses to sleep through the night. A dog that causes me to start and end my days it fits of fury because he won't shut the hell up. I punched his crate two weeks ago. I barely remember doing it, I'm pretty sure all I saw was red.
I hate my life. There is no part of it that I want anymore. I don't want a dog. I don't want to live with my slob of a sister in law who has yet to pay me a penny in utilities and we've started our 4th month living together. I haven't even bothered adding up how much she owes me in groceries for the first two months before I cracked and wrote passive aggressive sticky notes and took a big red sharpie and wrote my name all over my shit in the fridge. I want nothing to do with his friends or his family. When I talk to him and his family it's never because I want to, it's because I feel obligated to do so. I live my life with the immense weight of guilt that I should just be so grateful that he puts up with my crazy and how mean I am to him and my ridiculous mood swings.
But after my last post my bestie from college told me to look up "gaslighting". It's a form of mental abuse and I relate to it on a level that has shown me I've been in an unhealthy relationship for years. Obviously I haven't experienced the extreme cases of cheating or the malicious side of gaslighting... but I have spent the last 5.5 years being talked out of my own feelings. Being told I'm being unreasonable and over-reactive. That oh you must of talked to your mom or your friends, they fill your head with doubt. Or my favorite, the subliminal guilt trips... Some how, some way, doesn't matter how serious or little the issue is... it's big enough that it's caused me to raise it as an issue and discuss it but somehow by the end, I end up apologizing for being crazy... not once do I ever get an acknowledgement from him that he's in the wrong or that things should change or that I have a point. Maybe near the end he'll say you're right honey just so the conversation is over, but does anything change?? DOES IT EVER CHANGE?!?? No.
It never changes, it never gets better. Not for more then a few days at least. Because why would anything change when he doesn't see the situation as being wrong? And what I've learned over the last few months being home is that i don't think he'll ever see the way he treats me as being wrong because he grew up in a sexist home. Sometime you have to get to a point where you realize that what's bothering you is the person themselves, not something they're doing or not doing. There's things that you think don't matter when you're younger and naive, and then there's things you don't even think about....
When you marry someone, you marry all of them. Their family, their friends, their hopes and dreams, the faults and flaws. When we talk lately I tell him how depressed and unhappy I am and that I don't want any of this and I don't know how to make myself want my life again. And he just says well this hasn't been an easy year and a half of marriage, it won't always be like this it will be better. But the thing is, I haven't been happy since 2010. I've been waiting for him to grow up, because I thought that was the issue, but the issue is I've been waiting for him to change, and people don't change. My Dad said it correctly, "waiting around for someone to change isn't love".
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