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One month in – still a fucking mess


It’s been a month.  A whole 31 days since I found out my fiancé had been having an affair and my world fell apart.  I really thought I’d feel better by this point, but I woke up yesterday with the same sharp pain in my chest that I had the night I found out – I spent the morning hours doubled over with the same kind of sobs I cried then, too.

In some ways, things are getting easier: I’m no longer in London so I’m somewhat less reminded of our relationship every single second (it doesn’t help that we spent a lot of time in SF, where I’m currently living); I’ve finished all the packing and shipping and logistics of getting out of the flat where we lived together for four of our seven years; I’ve gotten rid of some of the wedding decorations that were haunting my closet.  In other ways, though, the pain is endless: I’ve hurriedly left behind the city and friends who made up the majority of my life for the past five years; my wedding dress still hangs in my brother’s closet, waiting to be sold; I’m tetherless and at a loss for a career path or even just a place to live that doesn’t belong to my parents; my left ring finger still feels bare and empty; I’m still in contact with him far too much for most sane people’s liking, simply because I can’t seem to let him go completely; I still love him more than I’ve ever loved anyone, but I also hate him for what he’s done and don’t trust him as far as I can throw him and can’t see any way for us to reconcile from 5000 miles apart.

It’s all exhausting and sad and confusing.  One minute I’m thinking about first dates with other people and the next I’m curled in a ball, sobbing over the hole he left in my life and my certainty that I'll never be happy again.  I can go from furious to depressed to concerned about his well-being then back to bitter in the space of a couple of hours.  Even facebook is confused: the sidebar ads still feature things like bridal salons and wedding venues, but I’ve also started getting ads for dating sites.  I don’t want to look at any of it – the last thing I need right now is to be reminded of my singleness, or worse of how excited I was to marry him, and how much I was looking forward to being his wife, but new relationships and engagements and weddings and general happiness seem to be everywhere right now.  Except in my life.

I tell myself it’ll be okay; I’ll meet a few guys for dates and reassure myself that I will eventually find someone else, if he and I don’t work it out somehow.  But every time I think about how long it’s likely to take (by most accounts at least one year, probably two) I just want to climb into bed and never come back out.  Some days I think I really would do something drastic to stop the pain, if only I had a little more energy and a little less terror of the emptiness that lies beyond.  I guess I should count myself lucky that I don’t.

For now, I’m keeping my goals simple: don’t totally screw up your job; try to motivate yourself to find a therapist who can help you cope; don’t avoid your friends, but take it easy on yourself if you’re overwhelmed by meeting new people or socializing in groups; just get through every day, and when you do, and you climb into bed at night, cry if you need to and pat yourself on the back for making it through.

So far I’m meeting those goals.  It’s not making me feel any better but I can only hope it will make a difference someday…

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