My Complex Relationship with the Love of my Life

I have struggled with depression my entire life. Even as a child, I never seemed to find it easy to be happy. I normally joke with close friends that I was self-aware at 7 to the point that after that, I could never choose to be happy.

I’ve learned so many things in my marriage. I have learned what it means to fail my amazing husband (which is the greatest regret of my life). I have also learned what it means to support him, even when it sucks for me.

The greatest thing I have learned in the past two or so years is that he cannot give me happiness. In our marriage vows, he never promised to make me happy; he just promised to be there no matter what.

That may seem like a bad thing, but that is the best thing he could ever offer me. I have to choose my own happiness. No one can ever give that choice to me. I cannot grow if I have a soul mate who only gives me everything I could ever want or need. I need someone to strengthen me, to challenge the person I thought I was before we married.

One of my closest friends told me the first year of marriage is the hardest, and I didn’t believe him. But, that was only because our first year of marriage was apart. The instant I moved in with him, everything changed. He drove me crazy. He was never home because he was in the army. If he was at home, he spent the entire time spatting out his day without even acknowledging my presence/absence or what was going on with my life.

And, meanwhile, I wasn’t supporting him, either. I just nodded while he recanted his stories. I had to stop acknowledging him in my emotional existence in order to still feel. I pretended almost as though he were a figment of my imagination.

For almost an entire year, we yelled, even screamed at each other. It was the worst year of my life because it was the year I yelled at and hated the man I married because he was the only man I would ever consider marrying.

I hope to erase the guilt of that year one day, but as of now, I only hope to save our marriage. A life without him is a life I cannot fathom.

I cannot remember the time it took or when I finally came to him after that year. I just remember that the idea of not holding him, not laughing with him, not living with him, was more than I could bear.

Stephen is, after everything, my love, my only, my dream man, the one I would always wait for. When I decided to let my pride down and hold him, I regretted nothing and regretted everything that made him feel insecure about our relationship. If I could do it all over again, I would start at the time I met him when I was 17 and change nothing from what I felt for him, then.

This is a love letter to you, Stephen. I am SO imperfect, but I would like to spend the rest of my life showing you that you are worthy of love and acceptance. I want to prove to you that you are THE best man I know and the best friend I will ever have. Until the second I die, I will love you the most. I know we are meant for each other because every time we try to make it work, I love you even more than the last time we try. We can do this. I believe in us.

How to Believe in Yourself

I am a regretful person.

Not only do people regret knowing me, but I also regret being myself.

And I've gone a long time believing that I'm the only one.

I know people regret their mistakes.

I am NOT the only one who stays up at night thinking, "WHAT HAVE I DONE?"

I've lived my whole life being bullied by fake people. They did not personally bully me, but they bullied me through their silence.

There needs to be...more honesty. So many of us make mistakes just because nobody else speaks out. We think if everybody else is perfect, we might as well just stick to our imperfections.

I have only longed for one moment:

a day,

where I get to look in someone's eyes,
and know,
someone's only asking for me.

That is understanding:

Someone who can see through all the mistakes you made and see beyond it.
Someone who can see through your own brokenness
And understand your brokenness
Because he's broken,
too.

"People are not good to each other,"
that's what Charles Bukowski said once.

And it's why I love him.

He never wanted admiration; he hated crowds.

He just wanted that one person to knock on his door,
and he would open,
and she would look into his eyes,
only asking for him.

But, I guess people are not good to each other,
So there's nowhere to turn.

This is why we fall apart.
This is why people don't belong to each other.
This is why we can't believe in ourselves.

Survival

You wake up in the morning and you don’t know what to say, what to feel, who to believe, or who to speak to. Every single goddamn morning we wake up, and we have no idea what the rest of our day will consist of. We don’t even know if today is the day where we can’t take it any more. Where we quit our jobs. Where we get fired. Where the person we love doesn't love us back. Somehow, every single morning, we have this innate courage which causes us to survive and at least see how the day plays out. I am not sure if this is accurate, but I can’t really believe in people killing themselves the instant they wake up. Even though every morning sucks with uncertainty, we still all possess that incredible hope and beauty that makes us feel like. maybe, we will finally turn things around...today.

"With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."

-Max Ehrmann

22

Okay, so I know blogs don't really mean anything in the scheme of things. However, it's nice to pretend to feel needed in a society where technology supersedes most of our efforts to make ourselves meaningful in any way.

Right now, I'm listening to Bob Dylan and thinking of Joan Baez/Bob Dylan's wonderfully complicated relationship.

On an unrelated note, I'm learning what it means to be an unemployed housewife, which is the last place where I thought I would be. Strangely, for the past 22 years, I thought I would do something incredible with my life. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

Surprisingly, there isn't much you need to do to sustain a life like mine. You clean, you cook, you think about the dreams you would have at this time and never kept, and then you move on with your day until your husband comes back from work and validates your existence. It's not that complicated.

It is HARD to live in a world (can we all accept that being in the military means you live in an abnormal/alternate world?) where one is an army spouse. I live in the middle of nowhere (which seems to be the general location for the military).

In the middle of nowhere, I've found that I have to come face-to-face with myself, in a sense. I have never had to do that before, because I've been too busy keeping pace with the busy version of myself, who finished grad school at the age of 22.

The thing is, I deserve this month, this year, where I get to "take a look around" and figure out what it is I actually want to do with my life. I deserved it when I went to Kindergarten at the age of four, and I deserved it when I graduated college at the age of twenty. However, does it help whilst dealing with the people significantly (or a year or two older than me) that say I should have my life together?...NOW? No, no it doesn't.

No, I don't have my life together. No, I don't have a job. No, I have no idea what I want.

And, strangely, this blog doesn't have me worried about resentment with myself.

The reason why I feel this way is because I remembered what I said earlier: Life is too short.

Do I hate the job that makes me reconsider all of my former decisions? No. Did I marry someone who has accepted me no matter what for the past five years? Yes.  Have I written anything worthwhile? Yes, and there's more to come.

I didn't win the "greatest achievement award," but I know who I am and what I think I want. I don't have to be an exquisite businessman, but I need to know that I made enough of a difference to help people with their seemingly meaningless lives.

News flash: You do matter. You do exist. And, you do mean something to a meaningless person like me, who thinks, no matter how you screw up, that you do contribute.

Moments

"If I am going to spend eternity visiting this moment and that, I'm grateful that so many of those moments are nice."

-Kurt Vonnegut

There are so many times in my life where I take for granted the wonderful life I have been given. I wallow in despair over the fact that I will not be able to get to live with my husband for a year. I stress over my job and school, frozen with fear of inevitable tiny failures I will make. I can't look in a mirror all day because I feel ugly. I get angry with a friend.

But,

There are moments in my life that make me realize how lucky I am to even be alive. I've had long, revealing walks with friends. I've listened to the roar of the ocean while gazing at thousands of stars on a porch. The feeling after I've written something that reveals something about me or others is one of the best feelings I've ever had in my life. All of these are moments that make me feel that I'm not alone in this crazy, twisted world.

I thought about collecting all these moments that make me feel that I am a part of something in this world. Douglas Coupland even suggested it (and explains it much better) when he wrote:

"My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station.

And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives."

Though I attempted to write them down once, I found there was something significant in not allowing it to be permanent. That if we remembered every special moment, the next special moment wouldn't be as "special." Sometimes things just can't be written down, just like there are things in my heart that I will never be able to express in actual words. Who can describe the feeling one gets while looking up at the stars at night?

Even now, I flopped on my bed and looked at the ceiling, thinking of Stephen while listening to a good song. I feel so blessed to even be able to think of someone as amazing as Stephen, and know that through some miraculous event, he is thinking of me also. You probably can't even comprehend that moment, how the smell of my sheets almost still smells like him and why I smile as I think of the way he laughs at me when I do something weird. Though you can't understand mine (and might think it's super lame), you have your own moment too that makes you think, "Wow. I have been given life. What a blessing that is," even as you are dealing with troubles, no matter how small or horrible they may be.

I will end with yet another excerpt from a Bukowski poem (who do you think I am?):

there is always that space there

just before they get to us

that space

that fine relaxer

the breather

while say

flopping on a bed

thinking of nothing

or say

pouring a glass of water from the

spigot

while entranced by

nothing

that space

there

before they get to us

ensures

that

when they do

they won't

get it all

ever.

Obsession

we've got a world full of dreams and sometimes

when I can't sleep

and my mind won't think of anything at all then I

spend the night

looking up at the dark ceiling.

-Charles Bukowski

When I read Bukowski for the first time, it was like meeting my soul mate. I was a seventeen year old blonde in high school living in suburban Maryland, but somehow this dirty, vulgar old man became something that I know will be a lifelong obsession. I have about eight of his poetry books on a bookshelf and I keep the one I am currently reading close by me. I used to spend a few days solely reading them but now I realize, since he's dead, that eventually there will not be any more new ones to read so I savor them for longer now.

I've written poems about him even after I stopped writing poetry. He is the only thing I feel like writing about now poetry-wise since he was the one that inspired me to write in the first place.

Like any adolescent obsession, my obsession with Bukowski has lessened, although it seems that in my darkest times I imagine him, looking up at the dark ceiling, feeling as alone as I do.

One thing I love and need in writing is honesty, and I have never seen any other author match how honest he is in his writing. When I say honest, I do not mean non-fiction, I mean just honest about the human condition. Many authors masquerade their own horrible emotions through outlandish characters so as to hide their own insecurities and terrible thoughts. Or sometimes, these things will be written off as a joke. He had the courage to tell the truth, which is so rare nowadays, but I bet people in other lifetimes felt the same way about this lack of courage, both from their writers and from each other.

One good thing about blogging is that I'm able to write all these thoughts down and then I can erase them right away, and forget. I have probably erased about five paragraphs just from this post alone. It's comforting. Most of our thoughts aren't real winners, and this post is no exception, but sometimes adding a little permanence, however futile and meaningless, is just what is needed to ease our troubled or discouraged thoughts.

One more Charles Bukowski excerpt for the road:

I promised myself never to write old man poems

but this one's funny, you see, excusable, be-

cause I've long gone past using myself and there's

still more left

here at 3 a.m. I am going to take this sheet from

the typer

pour another glass and

insert

make love to the fresh new whiteness