It's a new year, and new years are all about hope. All about the possibilities and maybes, and I'm alternately thrilled and terrified. Thrilled because possibilities are very exciting, terrified because the flip side of the positive possibilities are not so exciting :)
My cousin posted this on her Facebook and I dismissed her anxieties (albeit only in my mind) because I don't think she should be identifying with it. I don't identify with the writer on a personality level, but I do identify with some specific things she said. Namely "...unhappily married people live with a particularly viral strain of loneliness, and the interesting thing about loneliness is it forces you to confront yourself." And maybe this is what has happened to me. I've admitted to myself that it's been getting progressively lonelier for me in this marriage, whereas SO has seen it as getting more secure, but there you have it. I have therefore been forced to confront myself and now find myself on the verge of being 'skinless and shivering'.
After being in a relationship for over a decade and being married for 5 years, I find that SO's family have become my family. I treat them much like I do my own, I fuss over some of them, bully others, think about some fondly and others less so, etc. And the thought of ridding myself of this family as well as the presumed security of being married is what has me on the edge of skinless, what's really depressing is that on the bad days, I would almost prefer to be skinless and shivering, than the alternative, which on bad days feels like my heart is being shredded. Talk about a rock and a hard place.
That said, it is a new year, with wonderful possibilities, and I'm still clear that I can be more than I have been so far. Not dramatically more, maybe, but certainly incrementally more.
My cousin posted this on her Facebook and I dismissed her anxieties (albeit only in my mind) because I don't think she should be identifying with it. I don't identify with the writer on a personality level, but I do identify with some specific things she said. Namely "...unhappily married people live with a particularly viral strain of loneliness, and the interesting thing about loneliness is it forces you to confront yourself." And maybe this is what has happened to me. I've admitted to myself that it's been getting progressively lonelier for me in this marriage, whereas SO has seen it as getting more secure, but there you have it. I have therefore been forced to confront myself and now find myself on the verge of being 'skinless and shivering'.
After being in a relationship for over a decade and being married for 5 years, I find that SO's family have become my family. I treat them much like I do my own, I fuss over some of them, bully others, think about some fondly and others less so, etc. And the thought of ridding myself of this family as well as the presumed security of being married is what has me on the edge of skinless, what's really depressing is that on the bad days, I would almost prefer to be skinless and shivering, than the alternative, which on bad days feels like my heart is being shredded. Talk about a rock and a hard place.
That said, it is a new year, with wonderful possibilities, and I'm still clear that I can be more than I have been so far. Not dramatically more, maybe, but certainly incrementally more.
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