Well, it's quittin' time, guess I'll laser off your nards tomorrow.

I fucking finished school yesterday.

31 days off and then forever to go.

How did I spend my first day of freedom? Playing motherfuckin' Skyrim. I'm still cheesed I never got to beat the game myself. I didn't see a point after watching Allen and Dan beat it while I was relegated to picking locks for those two shitheads. But enough time has gone by where I have forgotten the bulk of the game, so I felt pretty confident in picking up. Derek doesn't have the time to play it, otherwise I'm pretty sure I'd be watching ANOTHER person beat the game instead of me.

I have to get cracking on studying for this stupid bullshit test, but uh, I also have to get cracking on finishing my website. I started redoing it a year ago, I paid someone to build it for me, and I have no delivered on my end of the bargain. Because I am a piece of shit.

Shoots this weekend just pile more work on my stupid, shitty shoulders, but uh...thems the brakes?

I also haven't worn a bra in three days, and I must say, free titties are the best titties.

Blow blow me out, I am so sad I don't know why

When I was with my daughter's dad, I was so unhappy with our relationship. I knew Chris was fucking around on me with his ex girlfriend, but I didn't quite know how relationship dynamics were supposed to work. He was my first serious relationship, and I had no fucking clue that it was acceptable to just vocalize that you were unhappy for any reason and walk away. I thought relationships were like court: I had to provide evidence of why I was unhappy, prove Chris was cheating, show that I wasn't being unreasonable. For some reason, I spent a lot of my life trying not to be "that girl", even though now, at 34, "that girl" is my fucking hero, and I long to be as true to my gut and my values as the "that girl" that so many women are desperate not to be. 

I tell myself it was because of the age gap. Chris is seven years older than me, just like my husband is, but at 17 (listen, I do not have the time to unpack how fucked up it is that a 24 year old man was fucking a 17 year old girl. Just....leave that bit alone), his age felt like it granted him more authority than me. So my way of voicing my displeasure and my sadness with him? It's glorious, really...I wrote in my journals and would leave them open for him to just innocently stumble upon. I did this for YEARS. Just pouring my stupid fucking heart out about the problems we had, and the problems I wish he would have fixed, and the things I wish he'd stop doing. I have no idea if he ever saw the journals, I have to imagine that he just laughed at them, if he did. Either way, our problems didn't resolve themselves. I DID get up the gumption to leave, though, and told him off all at once at 3 in the morning, right after he said we should get married. Which was fucking glorious, by the way. Letting loose years of pent up frustration and sadness and anger and hurt was cathartic as fuck. It didn't matter, and in the grand scheme of things, I think Chris wins. I still think about him often. Not fondly, I hate his fucking guts, and of all the people in the wide wide world, he's the only person I would risk jail time to physically assault. And in a manner of speaking, I'm still leaving open journals for him to find, though I doubt very much that I cross his mind at all. Which almost makes me hate him more, but I think I'm at full capacity on that front. It doesn't even matter if he knows how virulently I fucking despise him, he has Rhyann, and the ability to spin whatever narrative he wants to about me to her, or to erase me completely. I'm not quite sure which version is worse. 

I didn't have to leave journals around for Allen. Allen and I didn't last, obvs but I think, for the first few years, we had the best relationship I've ever had. Our relationship was fair, neither of us was any better than the other, and our problems, while not great, were tackled together rather than us butting up against one another. I wrote Allen love notes, instead. I left those everywhere he'd find them. I hid them in his wallet, I posted them on the mirrors in the house, I'd leave them as bookmarks in his books so he'd find them when he opened them. I did this a lot. I'd make him dumb little drawings with silly love notes over the years we were together and happy. Even when our relationship went sour, I was never afraid to tell Allen I was unhappy. The only thing I was ever afraid to tell Allen was when I started seeing other people, even though we were no longer together. I don't know why I felt guilty about that, it's not like he didn't know. It wasn't even fear, and he went on to be my biggest fucking ally when it came to vetting dudes. Men would come pick me up for a date at the house, and he'd come and get me and be like, yeah, you'll fuck that dude and never talk to him again, or he'd come in and laugh and tell me that I would never put anything of mine near that guy's penis. When I started seeing David, Allen signed on to him IMMEDIATELY. With good reason. David was incredible. I chose way wrong, and I should have kept seeing him instead of cutting him loose for Dan (sometimes I think that, if I had cut Dan loose instead of David, I would have married him, and we'd be stupidly fucking happy together. David was that kind of unicorn, and you can pry that fantasy from my cold, dead fingers). Allen and I have kind of a strained relationship now, which sucks, but I still think of him like my big brother, and I think I will always credit him for showing me what a healthy relationship should be like. He was kind to me, he was fair to me, he loved me well. I loved him the same way, until the end of our relationship. Shit went south FAST. I was unhappy, I told him, he didn't fix it, I didn't want to do all the work, and when Valentine's Day came and went with nothing from Allen, I went up to FoCo, slept with Matty, and came home and broke up with Allen the next day. I'm widgy on whether or not that counts as cheating, but it doesn't much matter now. 

I picked up journaling again when I was with Dan. I chronicled all of our problems, all the time. I have three handwritten diaries full of sadness and anger and hatred. It is a testament to both how much I loved Dan and also what a fucking pussy of a pushover I was to see the shit I pushed through just to be with someone who, as a whole, treated me like a pet. Allen and I would talk about Dan and he'd be like, dude, you can do better, just fucking bounce. And I'd come so fucking close to it, and then I'd back down, and I'd go write about it in my journal instead. I wasn't leaving these ones around for Dan to read, though. I think I brought my journal with me like, four times to Dan's, and I wrote about how hateful he was and how much I despised him and myself for continuing and enabling his bullshit behavior toward me, but my intention wasn't for him to like, peek over my shoulder and see what I was writing and be like HEY, WHAT THE FUCK? Or in the hopes that he'd get nosy and read them for himself. They were only for me. And then, when I switched to blogging, I had two hidden blogs that I honestly and truly set up thinking Dan couldn't find them. I didn't want him to. I wanted to be able to be honest about how sad he made me without having to worry about how it would make him feel if he saw it (and honestly, fucking gag meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, his reaction to my feelings shouldn't have mattered. Because fuck him, that's why), so I separated them from the blog I knew he read, I thought I made them private. When Dan called me to say he found them and realized he hadn't been a very good person to me, the 17 year old in me that had hoped for that reaction from Chris was fucking THRILLED. The 29 year old in me was furious and embarrassed, and that's the version that won out. I whole-heartedly agreed with Dan, let him have it for about 30 minutes, and then went back into Huhot where Allen and I had been having a lovely buddy night out together in absolute hysterics, angry that I had gotten the attention I wanted when I was 17, but not the reaction. Dan's reaction to seeing all that wasn't to apologize and fix it, it was to stop talking to me because he was bad for me. I mean, he wasn't wrong, but what the fuck? Similarly to Chris, Dan wins for life. I still think about him quite often, as well. Not with hatred like Chris, but not with affection, either. It's more like confusion and still a little bit of hurt, but not for anything connected to feelings like love. I stopped loving Dan years and years ago. It just hurts to not get closure when I have to carry around so much Dan related baggage that I never got to really hash out with Dan like I did with Allen, or even like I did with Chris. I wanted to be friendly with Dan, and I still do, but it gets really old having to remind myself to not send him a birthday email every year, or to not send him a random email wishing him well and saying hello because they won't be met with friendliness, they'll be ignored. It is weird to have people you think about and wonder about a lot and to tell yourself to cut the shit, because they haven't given you a thought in years and years. It really is strange to think that I'm forgotten to people who still have so much rent-free living space in my head. 

I don't really keep handwritten journals about my husband. I don't have to. I tell Derek everything I'm pissed about, I tell Derek everything I'm happy about, I tell Derek when I think he's being a shady mother fucker, as he so often is. I don't hide blogs from Derek, I don't have to worry about him seeking my blogs out (I was touched that Dan read my blogs, though. My friends didn't even read my blogs. They still don't. It was like, the one nice thing he had on everybody that I've ever known), I can write about how much I fucking despise him, but rest assured anything I've written about him in here, negative or positive, I've said directly to his face before, or shortly after, I wrote about them. I tell him everything. 

But that doesn't make our relationship any better. I tell myself I've learned a lot about how to be good to myself in a relationship, and to see myself as important when I'm half of a whole (like I did with Allen) rather than seeing my other half as the only half that matters (like I did with Dan), but I haven't. I don't trust my husband at all. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I spend the vast majority of my time holding my breath for the inevitable. It is far from my fault that I don't trust him, he has had his dalliances over the years, and he has earned my misgivings. I think I'm more sad in my marriage than I have been in any of my relationships, even though I'm more honest, and I refuse to not speak up about shit that bothers me. I read somewhere that sometimes, the best person for you is nobody, and I wonder if that's true for me. I don't think I'll ever trust Derek fully, or even close to fully. I am skeptical of most things he says, and his behavior that may be very normal to someone who trusts their spouse seem out of place and questionable to me, but I'm too exhausted by my own self-doubt to do anything about it. I don't think I'm good enough to find anybody better. I'm not pretty enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not thin enough, I'm not young enough. I'm not enough of a good anything to land someone better, and I think that's why I have just resigned myself to staying in a marriage that doesn't quite fulfill me emotionally. I love Derek very much, and we have a good enough time together, but it gets old being the only person that tries to put effort into making your relationship not boring, or trying to keep shit fun and not stuffy. I used to leave Derek love notes all the time. I'd tape them to the door so he wouldn't miss them on his way out of the house in the morning, or I'd put them in his underwear drawer so he'd see them first thing when he was getting dressed. I don't do it very much anymore, because part of me resents that I haven't ever gotten one back, and part of me just doesn't care enough to anymore. I feel like it's minimal effort season for the rest of my marriage. That's sad, but here I am.