For four weeks and three days I have tried to figure out what I did wrong. What I did that could possibly have warranted completely disregarding every guideline we had set for if things got bad in our marriage. Warranted disappearing without a word or explanation, without being willing to discuss for two weeks if I would be allowed to remain where I was living or kicked out onto the streets in the dead of winter during a plague.
Yeah, he let me wonder about that for two weeks.
I’m not going to pretend living with me is amazing and I’m definitely not going to pretend the plague didn’t make it worse. But nothing I have done justifies the textbook abandonment he is enacting with full knowledge of how much it will wreck me. All I ever asked of him is that he didn’t just suddenly disappear one day and that’s exactly what he has done.
Every single one of my triggers. Almost as if it was meticulously planned.
I don’t even need to question myself as to “How I could have been fooled” because I wasn’t fooled. I have known for a long time, since before we got married, that I make Elliott miserable. I told him that to his face many times and tried to talk him out of marrying me like he was converting to Judaism. He told me that my mental illness was making me insecure. (And that, my dear former flame, is the definition of gas-lighting.)
But yesterday I realized the answers to these questions do not matter. Because the answers to those questions will only tell me how to keep and please someone like him, a person who obviously has no problem traumatizing and deceiving me, who ultimately does not value or respect me in any real way.
Why in the world would I want to learn how to please someone like that? I’ve been trying for two years to figure out how to make him do something that he claimed to already be doing: love me. Similarly I spent 30 years trying to get my father to do the same.
What a waste of time.
That’s over now.
Queer Pandemic 