I'm about to get really honest

As opposed to my previous bouts of lying I guess

And I hope that’s okay. I’m not sure. Honestly (ha!ha!) I’m frightened. But I realize that the fear I have about being honest, about not censoring myself or finding a nice or kind or gentle way to say what needs to be said is a leftover habit I need to break. It’s from years of feeling that I had to tiptoe around things that were honest, because if I didn’t it would lead to backlash that I didn’t know how to handle.

I didn’t know how to handle being blamed for someone else’s unhappiness.

I didn’t know how to handle it when expressing my opinion was immediately translated into me being controlling.

I didn’t know how to handle it when, instead of parenting with me, the father of my children competed with our children for my attention — and punished us all with his cold withdrawal and anger when he didn’t get the attention he felt he deserved.

I didn’t know how to handle it when my husband flirting, pursuing, expressing his love for, or being physical with other women was somehow my fault… and when being angry and hurt about his behavior meant that there was something wrong with me.

I didn’t know how to handle it when he got rid of all of his personal belongings except what would fit in a backpack, and told me that he had to be ready to leave, at anytime, to pursue his higher calling of learning how to truly be himself.

I didn’t know how to handle it when his inappropriate and predatory behavior created some many relational rifts that we were ostracized from the community I loved.

I didn’t know how to handle it when women I knew and respected tried to warn me, tried to call it out, tried to show me what was happening.

I didn’t know how to reconcile all the pieces, how to make them all fit into a single puzzle. I didn’t know how to bring it all together and make it make sense.

I still don’t. And that’s why I’m done censoring myself and I’m done being vague and I’m done glossing over the treatment I’ve endured from the person who was supposed to be my partner in life. I don’t know why I’m still trying to protect him.

I didn’t make these choices. He did.

I made the choice to try to deal with it, to try to clean up the messes he made, to try to hold it all together when he kept breaking it apart, to keep hoping and keep enduring and keep believing (isn’t that what love does?). I made the choice to try to handle it, over and over and over, because despite the many, many reasons I shouldn’t have, I loved the man I married.

I loved him and I did everything I could to keep seeing him as someone I could love, until one day, I couldn’t.

And now I need to go back over what my life has actually been. I need to work my way through my own memories. I can’t understand it all, of course not. And I don’t expect to come out of this process understanding his choices. I don’t need to understand him, but I deeply and desperately need to find a way to make my own life coherent to myself.

It’s like in one hand I’m holding the story I told myself for so long, the story I had to believe to keep going, and in the other hand I’m holding the story that was actually happening. You know when you try to push together two magnets with the same polarity, and they repel each other? It’s like that. I feel like I’m trying to pull together these two narratives, trying to integrate them, make some sense of them and realize that they were, in a sense, happening simultaneously, and that simultaneous happening was my life — but they won’t go together. They repel each other, they push away, and I’m just standing here feeling mentally and emotionally pummeled by this disconnection, by the disparity that exists in my own singular experience.

Writing has always been my tool for understanding, for working through the impossibilities of life and trying to find enough clarity, or peace, to move forward. Has everyone always been puzzled by life? I have. I don’t remember a time in my life, ever, when things made sense. I remember always feeling puzzled, feeling like I was missing something, some important clue that others had gotten at birth and I’d somehow missed. These days, I feel less that way about life in general but more that way about my life in particular.

So I’m going to examine it — my life. And, sure, I could do that privately as I’ve been doing for decades, journaling, working it out on paper in words that I never show to anyone else. That’s still happening and will keep happening.

But I also know that when you keep things to yourself you can spend years and years trying to understand them and make very little progress. There’s something powerful about putting things out in the open, out in the light, out on the table where anyone can wander by and take a look. There’s something powerful about saying: This is my story, and I have the right to tell it.

So that’s what I’m doing. Maybe it’s petty. Maybe it’s small of me. Maybe it’s an unhinged need for revenge or something. Maybe I’m just being immature, an attention whore, a white-trash girl in a social-media world looking for validation. Could be. I’m not going to rule it out.

I’m also not going to let that possibility stop me.

Buckle up, kids, we’re going for a ride.