I'm really bad about comparing things to other things and then trying to suss out what those comparisons mean.
The silliest thing is, I logically understand that most of my comparisons are silly, and while the things I'm comparing might seem like good parallels, they're actually total bullshit, and comparisons are toxic and dumb. 98% of the time, this is where I land within seconds of comparing something to another something. The other 2% of the time I know I'm comparing solidly, and then I fucking PANIC. It's fun in my brain always!
When Dan deployed, I was a fucking weeping mess for the first....oh, three weeks he was gone. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop, since Dan's original line on us "staying together" (my words, not his) while he was gone was, and I quote, "Euuughhhghghghuuughhhhh....." You can understand my assumption, then, that any day he was going to tell me to give up the ghost and this was exactly the timing and distance he'd been looking for to rip off the Band-Aid. But he didn't, and he did tell me he missed me, and he eventually started expressing excitement to see me when he got back. For as aloof and emotionally unavailable as Dan was, I never once felt like I was in danger of being forgotten, or replaced, or that time away from me would make Dan realize what a fucking lame loser I was and how he could do better (which was true in a lot of ways, and I really hope he HAS done better than me. I was absolutely awful for Dan in a great many respects. Like...90% of them), quite the contrary; I was holding out hope that he'd seize the time away from me to realize how great we were together (oh honey. Bad news from the future.) and that he'd take me more seriously. That... I mean, it KIND OF happened, kind of sort of, but in the worst of all possible ways, and I'm not even sure how real the after effects were from it. I don't want to write about it in here, because the truth is, the way everything unfolded in the months after Dan returned STILL fucking hurts. It was one of the biggest breaks my heart ever got, and I never really worked through it completely. Maybe I will one day, but today is not that day. I'm getting sidetracked.
The primary point here is, I actually felt fairly confident in where I stood with Dan while he was gone for nine months.
Derek is only going to be gone for three. He's been gone almost two weeks.
I already feel like I may as well resign myself to separation when Derek gets back, and it is the worst fucking feeling.
One of the worst things about how my Borderline manifests is how inappropriate my fears are regarding my relationships. Well, at least my relationship with Derek. He's done a fair amount of things that make me terrified of trusting him, and it's definitely DEFINITELY infuriating when he tries to pass those fears off as merely presentations of my BPD. Binch. No. You don't just get to scoot things under a borderline personality disorder rug and make it all my problem when you've crossed lines repeatedly. That's not how this works.
While yes, Derek and I are married, and him untangling himself from me would not only be complicated, but problematic for him due to army, I feel confident that he won't be coming home angling directly for a divorce or anything, but that doesn't mean I feel confident about how confident he'll be in me. When I'm separated from people for a long period of time, I start to think about all of the negative traits I have and how being away from them will make people understand that I'm just a waste of time, and there are better options out there.
Before Allen and I lived together, when we went months without seeing each other, I was always terrified he'd figure me out for the fraud I was and he'd ultimately decide I was below him. I don't know how Dan got away with being the one person I felt confident in maintaining affection for me while he was gone for so long. It may be an indication about how very very very in the dark I was about what it was that was actually going on with us. By all measures, I should feel the most confident that Derek will come back in three months way more enamored with me than he was before, because logic tells me that you idealize someone when they're gone and you remember them as better than they actually are and it makes you miss them more. This is why break ups can be so traumatic. It's easier to lie to yourself about someone when they're not in front of you to show you the truth, so you romanticize the best parts about them and pitch the rest. My brain isn't working that way about Derek being gone, though.
I am wildly insecure. This much doesn't need to be said. I wasn't always this way. Much to my detriment, in fact. I was so convinced of my superiority to my daughter's dad that I never in a million years thought he'd cheat, because I was such a fucking gem, why would he jeopardize losing me on some throw away poon? I was way off. Stratifying yourself and the person you're with in a relationship is a fucking mistake, not only because it's mean, but because it can really lull you into a false sense of security/make you think you're not worth their time and any bad behavior they act out is fine, because you're lucky to have them. I know this, but I still do it. I'm so guilty of it, and I rarely come out on top of my relationship caste system.
With my daughter's dad, I really did think I was better than him in every fucking regard. I am better looking (that's just objective science, you guys. Still true), I am smarter, I am cleverer, I am more interesting, I am more well read. It put me in a position to completely give up any sense that I deserved to be on equal footing with Chris, and when he pulled the rug out from under me, I didn't know what to do, so I just let him have all of the power and I took myself far less seriously. When Bekky came into the picture, I compared myself to her, and while I was smarter than her, I was not prettier than her, I was not as openly sexual as she was (then. I wonder if she's why I took the fast train to Tartesville and I just never realized it. If she is, thanks, Bekky!!! I fucking LOVE Tartesville the most!), I was not as old as she was, and I did not take the time with Chris like she did. I loathed her wildly, and partially for good reason, but some of it wasn't her fault. I've tried to track her down to give her a really real apology (and also to kind of see if she's doing shit that's mockable, because old habits die hard). I'm an adult now, and back when I was making it my life's goal to tear her down, I was an 18 year old child in the middle of an emotionally abusive relationship with a manipulative man, and I thought that I had to pit myself against Bekky. And all women in general. I delighted when she made mistakes like calling radicchio "rad-itch-EYE-oh", because what better way to feel confident in your intelligence superiority than using the pronunciation of somewhat obscure and highly pretentious chicories as a measuring stick? When I found her writing, I was ecstatic to see she was a mumbling fucking idiot. I took that shit and ran with it, I trolled her, I shared her stupid prose with my best friend, I went on to share it with my writing friends for years to come. In truth, all of her writing is STILL funny. In my last quest to find Bekky and make good on my failings regarding my treatment of her, I succumbed to my baser instincts and found something she wrote and had a field day re-reading it. It's all just as ridiculous. The point here is, while Bekky shouldn't have been fucking my boyfriend, I shouldn't have wasted so much time in a relationship that was imbalanced, and never in my favor. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I had either given myself in to my stratification and ditched Chris because I WAS above him, or if I had seen myself as equal and not tolerated how he treated me for as long as I did. Tolerating it is a weird thing to say. I enabled it. I hated how he treated me. I cried a lot, I was miserable, I felt awful about myself, I felt ugly and low once reality really kicked in for me, and by that time I was already knocked up and he had talked me out of an abortion, and somewhere, I still deeply regret Chris for choosing my life for me, and I deeply regret myself for meekly allowing him the authority to do it.
Whether I was aware of stratification being a bad thing then, I can't say with any certainty, but I don't think I was. However, with Allen, I really saw us as equals, with Allen edging me out in a few places. Allen was smarter than me, and he is a more gifted writer than I am, and he was a lot more thoughtful in his approach to things. The first time Allen and I got into a big argument, I called him an asshole and I will never forget him slowing everything down and saying, "hey, I know we're mad at each other, but I'm not calling you names, please don't call me names". I hadn't ever been around someone who thought name-calling was inappropriate in times of anger, and it really struck a chord with me. Not so much in the long run, because I am more than happy to rattle off nasty names when Derek and I are angry at each other. Do I get points for that interaction staying with me after all this time? No? Well. Ok. Anyway, I always saw Allen and I on equal footing. I never felt powerless with him, and I never felt intimidated by the things he was better at than me. I knew he made me better, and I kept up friendly competition with him that was never about ACTUALLY being better than him, rather being better than I was before we were together. I credit Allen a lot for where I am now as a person, because he really did make me want things I never saw for myself when I was with Chris. I gave up a lot of my identity for my daughter's dad, and I never thought twice about it because I thought I was supposed to. Allen really cleared that shit up for me, and when I realized that Allen wasn't going to go along on my self-actualization journey with me, I was pretty beaten up about it. I broke up with Allen because he wanted to be stagnant and I didn't, and we got back together for a little while because I truly and absolutely loved Allen as much as I was capable of. I just loved me more, and I wasn't going to be my best self with Allen if I stayed with him in a romantic capacity. But being my best self not working with Allen was never because I saw myself as better than, or saw myself as less than and wanting to change it. It wasn't anything like that. I always always always saw Allen and I as equals, and while I see myself as a better person NOW (though not better THAN. An important distinction), and I recognize how different I am and how far I've come, I have never and will never see Allen and I as anything but equals when we were together. I've said it before, but my relationship with him was the best relationship I've ever had.
I didn't always maintain that Dan didn't see me as his equal. When Dan and I first met, I totally admit I thought I was out of his league in a lot of regards. I wasn't socially awkward (emphasis on wasn't. I am now!), I wasn't stodgy, I was charismatic and fun and a free fucking spirit. I make jokes about Dan all the time, and I cannot stress enough that it's just years of bitterness leaking out. I was definitely attracted to Dan, so if I make jokes about his appearance, that's on me, not on him. That being said, I did think I was a little bit better looking than he was, but not so much that I was going to just write him off. Spoiler alert: obviously. Dan very much outshone me academically. He was pretty accomplished, he had a bachelors already, and I hadn't bothered trying to do anything academic with my life since I lost my scholarship to Duke due to pregnancy other than read studies in my spare time, and read textbooks for fun because why wouldn't I? He had a solid job with army, and I was just kind of flying by the seat of my pants, taking shit jobs when I could get them and always failing at them because I hated them. He really had his shit together, and at 26, I definitely did not. I can see why Dan may have thought I was below him. In the ways that matter when it comes to winning at life, I was. I was directionless and I didn't give a shit. I wanted to do the bare minimum so I could do shit like get high on the weekends and have boozy panty dance parties in my apartment with my friends. I wanted to experience life as fully as I could, and that meant exploding my way through it like a bad fuckin' star. Life should be fun and full of purposes that delight you, and I don't think Dan agreed with me there. In retrospect, I definitely think Dan saw me as someone hopelessly below him, and after a few months of never being introduced to his friends, never being spoken about to his parents, never being invited to partake in his life at all (and him never wanting to engage in mine despite my many invitations), I understood that Dan didn't see me as a serious equal, and I stopped seeing myself as vaguely out of his league, and started seeing myself as beneath him. I evaluated his treatment of me and told myself it was justified, because in his estimation, I was found wanting. I tried to be more serious after he came back from Afghanistan, because I really fucking wanted Dan to love me. I wish he could have loved me for me, but I was never really honest with Dan about who I was after I figured out why our relationship sucked. I tried being someone more his speed, and I think I really failed myself there. This was kind of why I thought his deployment would change things for the better, though. I thought he'd be away from my zaniness and my devil-may-care approach to the things he took so seriously and he'd be like, "huh. This crazy girl really balances me out. She's got her head in the clouds, I've got my feet on the ground, it's PERFECT! Together, we're a giant that can take on anything!" That wasn't the case. I really wish I knew why Dan stayed with me for so long, because it doesn't make any sense to me. I don't think his assessment that I was beneath him was a subconscious one, I think he was acutely aware of our respective statuses and how he was better than me in the ways society puts emphasis on. I really do not know why he stuck it out as long as he did. We had a small break up of sorts before he went to Michigan. He had this whole month long period where he was way fucking distant and I didn't understand, and my friend Ian tried to say that's typical of someone coming home from a deployment, but I think that's giving Dan too much emotional credit. I've secretly believed he used that month to try and force me into breaking up with him because he didn't have the stones to do it himself. He said something to me in the car before he left for Ann Arbor to visit his school that still haunts me, and I'll get to why any of this matters in a bit. He said, "It's been hard for me to stay faithful to you". He said it in the parking lot of Balanced Rock, and as a means of exorcising one of the most hurtful things anybody has ever vocalized to me about me from my brain, I fucked three rando dudes in that very same parking lot. Not all at once, just to clarify. Anyway, while yes, I hadn't been faithful to Dan by any stretch of the word while we were together, I know that Dan didn't struggle with fidelity because I made him feel insecure in the relationship, or because I never validated his existence to anybody that mattered, or because I never referred to him as my boyfriend (in fact, when I brought up the whole "girlfriend/boyfriend" thing to Dan, I got a mini lecture about labels and how they weren't for him. Which was awfully rich coming from the dude who would later go on to make sure I promised that if I took up stripping again, I'd only come home to him. Bad news from the future!). Dan struggled with fidelity for one of two reasons:
a) I wasn't enough
2) he felt trapped
There's always the possibility that it was a combination of both, and that's what I lean toward, except with quadruple the emphasis on the first. I don't think Dan was saying that he was trying to like, start new relationships with women, so the first thing may not make much sense from that standpoint. I definitely think it was mostly because of me, and that's how Dan reasoned it away. I'm not sure at all that Dan thought the flatline of our farce of a relationship was ever his fault, or that he ever did any reflection on how he treated me. When Dan called me to say he had read all of my blogs highlighting how sad and empty and alone I felt in our relationship, his response wasn't to apologize or make it better, it was to extricate himself from the situation entirely. And what an easy way to cut ties with someone that you never thought was worth your time to begin with. While I definitely regret cutting ties with Dan a few years ago in a fit of rage (pent up rage that I never got to properly vent), mostly because it was childish of me to do so but also because I was so angry when Dan did that to me rather than to say he'd work on his behavior, I wish we still talked. With as much credit as I give Allen in helping me realize I wanted to be a better person, I give equal credit to Dan for me being who I am today, and where I am today. I really, really, really wish I could thank him in detail, and apologize for how awful I was, and make amends for the havoc I wrought and explain the chaos and just...get all of that shit off of my chest in a way that was meaningful for me. Because of course talking to Dan wouldn't be for Dan. If Dan thought I was worth his time, or if Dan missed talking with me at all, he'd talk to me. I think this is the crux of why I still think about Dan. Thinking about Dan is such a fucking mirror for how I saw and see myself. I knew Dan saw me as beneath him and unworthy of his energy, and never getting responses to any of the small attempts at an apology I sent him, or the well wishing emails trying to bridge the gap, pretty well cements that in my head. The possibility that maybe talking to me is painful for Dan emotionally because he actually DID love me has crossed my mind, but the idea has zero staying power. I think I just gave Dan an easy out to snip me right out of his life because I was a tacky hood ornament that never belonged there in the first place.
And all of this leads to Derek. The entire reason I'm writing this blog (before I move to a picture blog! Yay!). Dan saying, "I've had trouble staying faithful to you" plays itself in my head constantly. The truth is, I still measure myself against people, and I hate that I do it. I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't. I can't help it, though. And Derek has made that all the harder.
When Derek and I first started talking, I was fucking MESMERIZED by him. I could talk to him for hours and not be bored, he engaged me, he was interested, he showed concern and care for me. I had been completely missing that emotional directness from Dan, and it was intoxicating. It was even different from Allen, because that had been a slow build up over time. This was a huge POP directly from jump. I was deeply reluctant to add fuel to the fire, though, because I was still super fucked up and reeling from Dan. It had only been a few months since the last time I saw him, and I was still hopeful enough that something would come out of Dan and I that I lied to Dan about seeing Derek. I lied to Dan about seeing everybody, which was a stupid fucking thing to do, but that's not the point. Far more than once, I expressed to my friends that I was being the Dan to Derek's Ondrea, and it wasn't fair to Derek at all. I didn't lie to Derek about Dan, though. There were a great many things about Derek that were intimidating to me....he was divorced, he had a kid (nevermind that I had two. Nobody is talking about me right now), he was well traveled, he was shockingly smart, he was VERY social, and he was just...I mean...he was a fucking stone cold fox. A total god damn smokeshow. Great body, great face, great hair, sexy as fuck voice that sounds like deep, warm caramel, fearless laugh. Above all of that, he wasn't into the typical masculine dating runaround. He told me where he was, asked me where I was, and wasn't shy about it, and that was so fucking refreshing. As intimidating as all of that was, though, I didn't think Derek was out of my league, I didn't think I was out of his league, my only concern was that maybe he was too available for me and I'd get bored, or that I was too UNavailable for him and he'd cheat. I saw us as equal in my shitty relationship strata, even though I recognized that I was less together than Derek in many of the same ways I was less together than Dan. I never worried about being enough for Derek. He plainly let me know I was more than enough. That I was everything he'd wanted, I was perfect, all of the things you hear in sappy romances. I felt pretty confident in that, so imagine how crushing it was every single time I found Derek acting against that belief.
Every new time, I found myself worrying about me, and how this was surely my fault. I compared myself to all of these women, and every time, I figured it was because I wasn't as hot as Brittany, or I couldn't beat the FOMO he had with Cylie (I think I'm misspelling her name. It isn't on purpose), or I didn't have the facial beauty of the girl from snapchat whose name escapes me, or I didn't have the appeal of Amber, my best fucking friend who I have ALWAYS physically compared myself to because so many of my friends vocalized how short I fell in comparison to her looks (that one hit especially hard because it reaffirmed everything I had always feared, anyway), and I didn't have the mystery and beauty of Anna (who....girl played it so fucking right. When Derek hit on her, her response was "how are you and your wife doing?" though...thinking about that now, that could have been some sort of testing of the wwaters to see if maybe shit was rocky and she had an in to Dickville. I feel pretty sure it was the former, though, and thank you, Anna, you are a god damn goddess), and I didn't have the emotional pull and safe space feel of Stephanie, a girl that Derek had wanted to date but never got the chance. While I was clearly and rightfully angry at Derek for being this way behind my back, especially when I had given him so many outs of monogamy after we closed our open relationship, I was angrier at myself.
The real issue here is, I haven't felt like I was ever enough for anybody, with Allen as the exception to the rule. And even then, at the end of our relationship, Allen kind of shit that bed, but he gets a pass because we were both checked out, we just hadn't admitted it yet. I shit that bed, too. Dan telling me it had been hard to stay faithful rocked my world, because it was the first time someone had ever confirmed what I had always been terrified of. It has stayed with me and haunted me, and I don't blame Dan for that. It isn't his fault. I don't even think he's an asshole for saying it. He was being honest, he absolutely SHOULD have been honest. I commend him for that, because being vulnerable and open is so fucking hard. It isn't Dan's fault specifically. He just takes the lion's share of the credit because he stopped it from being a nagging suspicion and threw the thing into the real world and contextualized it. Derek doing the utter most to make sure he told me every chance he could that I was so totally more than enough, I was eighty notches higher and better than enough, was a welcome tonal shift, but it never stopped being a fear that he was just lying because that's what people do to get what they want. I always had a sneaking idea that Derek was totally full of shit, and it wasn't so much ME that was special and amazing as much as it was Derek just not wanting to be single anymore, and I was just next at bat. Every single time some new girl made her way into the frame, I would sink back a little more into feeling confident I wasn't special and I wasn't enough and I never, ever would be.
All of this is to specify that that's how I feel when I'm around Derek. When specific reminders about the few things I DO have on people (I really am fucking smart. It's like, the one positive thing I know about myself. I'm also so god damn wildly in love with the world, and I really think that is appealing to people, because of the fresh lens you get to see things with when you're with people like me) are front and center constantly, I still feel like I am not enough, and Derek already knows it. He's shown as much by his interest in other women, which he STILL passes off as not actual interest. It's not like he has to confirm it vocally to me, he already confirmed it with his behavior and the subtext of the things he's said to all of those women. I am constantly terrified that I am not enough, and I don't know how to be enough.
With Derek gone for three months, I have this sinking feeling that in two weeks or so, the initial missing the familiarity of me is going to wear off, and he's going to rediscover how liberating life is without me. That not having me around is infinitely better than having me around. This is something that Dan definitely knows, and I don't even think it took him three months to figure that out. It was hard for Dan to stay faithful to me, and it has been hard for Derek to not flirt with straying, too. I definitely had fears that being away for nine months was going to be the death certificate on whatever it was that Dan and I were doing, and I wasn't necessarily wrong, it just took longer than I banked on. I had every reason to blame myself and who I was and how I looked and where I was in life for the impending separation with Dan. I had concrete shit to look at and be like...oh, yeah. Yeah, I get it, that's the thing that's going to do it. For the most part, I didn't, and I think I deserve a gold medal for those mental gymnastics.
With Derek, it's just...just a looming fear. I can't quite shake it. I know for a fact that I am not very pretty. I don't have a great figure. I will never be a bikini model, I won't ever be mysterious and exotic. I'm always going to be a plain woman that dyes her hair stupid colors to make up for how average she feels all the time, and how visually indistinguishable she is from the pack. I don't look anything like the women he's crossed boundaries for, and I know that that's their appeal, but it's not something I can fucking fix. I look the way I look. I am the person I am, and while I am evolving a lot of things, I'm working toward my masters, I'm bettering myself, I'm learning all the time, I am deeply involved in figuring my shit out so I don't repeat things that fuck my world up, I am still fucking floundering against the current of feeling confident that I will never be enough for anybody.
If people can struggle with honesty and fidelity with me around, how much harder will it be to tell yourself no when I'm out of sight, out of mind? It sucks to not be able to talk to Derek about this with any seriousness. He always blows it off, says this is just my BPD, or says that I'm wrong about his intentions with all of those women (bruh. Lie better), or he gets angry about my fears and says I'm ridiculous instead of hearing me and trying to understand.
Relationships are hard. Relationships with any kind of distance are hard. Relationships with any kind of distance when one of the people in it is me and I'm constantly suffering from an acute fear of inferiority to...like...the entire fucking female world at large, plus my husband? That shit is next to impossible. If I see Derek using his phone and holding it in that weird way he does so I can't see what he's doing if I glance in his direction, I have a panic attack over what he's saying, and who he's saying it to. Every time I meet some new woman Derek is around, I assess her and then I measure myself next to her and I ALWAYS come up short physically. Sometimes I come up short personality wise, too. As I've gotten older, I'm less inclined to be social. Either that, or I'm just so fucking sad inside that I don't really have the energy to be the social butterfly I used to be.
I don't know what my deal is, but I wish it wasn't my deal. I wish I had an inflated sense of self still. I really wish that the things I value most in myself mattered on a large social scale, because I really just ONCE want to feel like the biggest fucking prize in town. And while the commodification of people in relationships that leads anybody to view them as a prize is repugnant to me, the shoe still fits. It irks me that I have to carry around insecurity while my husband gets to flounce around, worry free about what it is his wife is doing. I've mentioned this before. This isn't new. I just...I guess I just felt like musing on some of the reasons it's so shitty.
I wish I felt equal to again. Feeling small and inferior and ugly and pitiful is seriously the fucking worst. Allen told me once that I was a brilliant ball of light, like the fucking sun. He said it better than that, though, I just don't remember what it was he said. Amber described me once like lightning. My mom said I'm a thunderstorm. People used to tell me I was a free spirit. I feel like a dead bird now. A dull, dead bird at the bottom of a cage that, while dead, is still managing to feel desperately sorry for itself. I'm not a terribly huge fan of this feeling. I have wondered if maybe the solution is a divorce. I will always worry about Derek wanting other people now. If his bullshit had been a one-off, I'd be a lot more secure, but it hasn't been. It's been repeated, and it's had long term repercussions. I love my husband so much, and I don't like when I'm in the place where I'm thinking that maybe a divorce literally would be the best thing for me, because I'm just not built for always thinking I'm less.
Except the problem wouldn't die with Derek. I am the problem. I am the bad star. I don't mind being alone, but I don't want to be alone forever, and I have a well documented track record of not seeing myself in the best light as compared to the person I'm with, for whatever reason. I don't know how to fix this. I've given therapy several gos, and I eventually stopped trying to work through my Chris/Allen/Dan/Derek issues because I legitimately worried that my therapists would think I was obsessive. I really want to figure myself out so I can rise above all of these problems, and be enough for me so I can feel fulfilled and confident in my standings in any relationship I'm in. I even feel disconnected from my friends now. I message them a lot, and I don't get responses for days, and I'll get annoyed because they're supposed to be my friends, but then I worry about maybe they don't want to talk to me because I'm boring, or a bad friend, or there are other friends they have that are more worth their time. Poor Allen is the most willing to talk to me, and I don't even think he actually wants to, my guess is he knows I'm just lame, sad, and lonely. Even then, though, our conversations are generally fairly short (sometimes he'll talk to me for awhile) and relatively superficial.
I wish I didn't have to deal with this shit. I think it's definitely important to, but it gets so heavy.
