I’m Still Alive; but I’m Barely Breathing…

🎶 Just pray to a god that I don’t believe in 🎶

It pains me to admit that I’m writing this post now, because I honestly don’t know that I’ll be alive long enough to get around to ‘someday’. – I tried a year ago… and managed to get a whole paragraph in.

Also; I realize the song that I selected for this article is not the famous song from The Script that I’ve titled the article with… those set of lyrics just so accurately describe where I’m at right now.. both physically and mentally, that I couldn’t not use them. – The actual song, though, is the song I find myself listening to a lot lately. Except instead of ‘Halfway Down’, I feel like I’m closer to 97% of the way down… grasping for each moment as it goes fleeting by; and the harder I grasp, the less of each moment I’m actually able to.. experience…. like… I can feel the end coming, and it isn’t far off.

I haven’t written in this blog in so long. I really don’t even know where to begin…

Since I last wrote; the world went through a global pandemic, and my life has completely turned upside down. I now live a non-life; over a thousand miles from the city where we spent the first decade of our lives together, our ‘party phase’; our first real home… we left, because if we didn’t, I actually WOULD be dead right now. I may have made the move in time… I may not have, time will tell.

As best I can figure it; I lived life on a high… nothing was outside of my reach, and with Her by my side, we were truly unstoppable. My mom warned me, though, that getting married young was a bad decision. That we wouldn’t be the same people at 30 that we were when we were 20… (She died, by the way. – My mom, not Her.)… and She was right. But I don’t think that’s where it started.

I think it started during the summer of 2017… when Her and Her guy were in the heat of their honeymoon phase… I wrote a little about it back then, but not nearly to the extent that it truly tore me apart. – I should have known better… I should have known that if we experimented with doing stuff with other people, that She would find someone more compatible with Her than me… – and I think some part of me did know that… but up until then I had been so unstoppable, WE had been SO solid, that I thought we could weather anything. Truly. – Ego and ignorance were the true culprits that lead me to this state I’m now in…. because of course She would find someone better for Her than me. That part was inevitable. But I guess I thought that we could survive it…

So, in July of 2017, after Her and I spent HOURS per day talking, fighting, etc. – And when the rubber met the road and She couldn’t do the thing I needed Her to do; walk away… I struggled with it mentally for several weeks in July of that year, and then I finally accepted it. At that point, I flipped some kind of emotional switch, and put myself into auto-pilot mode… That, combined with the increase of drug abuse via my adderall prescription that I didn’t need, but got anyway because it helped me power through the pain… That’s when it started.

We fought for Months, in 2017… even after I’d already accepted it mentally in July, I couldn’t bring myself to fully come to terms with it, so we fought. And fought. And fought. And then around Christmas, we were sitting in our hot tub talking… and we decided to tap into the part of us that was still there, despite all the fighting and the pain; our foundation. And we decided that we were just going to be ‘good’, and so we were.

She stopped sleeping with Him for a couple years for me… I think that’s probably how I survived the next few years. – But the trust was broken… and the more of Her I lost, the more I felt like She was giving to Him… and slowly, we managed to slip even further apart.

Don’t get me wrong, we had already drifted apart long before She well in love with Him…. but something about me switching whatever emotional portion of myself off that I switched off in July of 2017… prevented me from keeping us from slipping further apart. And that really hit me hard…

2018 and 2019 we were well into our 5th year of hard festival-ing, partying, and the alcohol 5 nights a week as we hosted the party house for our crew (which I think maxed out at almost 30-40 people at one point) turned into more of a drugs-and-alcohol type affair, and when we were going to 5-8 festivals a year from 2015-2019, it really took a tole on our our bodies.

Just before Covid, in March of 2020, our last Festival before Covid (literally a week before the whole world shut down), She coded from taking too much oxy as we were dumping the tank on our rental camper we had rented for the weekend. I got back in the truck and Her face was blue; I jumped out, me and a friend performed CPR till the ambulance got there, and She had only been out for about 5 minutes, so She came back fairly quickly… but that was the moment I decided we needed to get OUT, before it killed one or both of us.

One month later, in April of 2020, an F3 tornado came through our city and we took the brunt of it. It destroyed our house, most everything we owned, and the auto-pilot continued, in even greater depths, while we tried to piece our lives back together, literally.

We rented a house on the other side of town, and we rebuilt our lives and party scene for one final year. – We originally had ‘planned’ to move a thousand miles across the country for the past 5 years since we’d made the plans with the couple that we dated back in 2015-2016. But the tornado threw a wrench in that, so we pushed the move back to 2021 while we tried to rebuild our lives for the better part of 2020.

In November of 2020, I had what I called a ‘mental break’. We were helping friends with their wedding… and She is so good at that type of thing… I was handling all the technical stuff, He (her guy, always capitalized when I’m referring to a Him) was handling all the photography/videography, and She was the Matron of Honor, so She was running around helping with Everything.

It was at that wedding, when we were all running around doing our own things, when the pace was 1,000 miles an hour and 40+ people were staying at this estate where the wedding was being held that weekend… it was there, that I really Saw how She was with him.

I mean, I’d known where they were… to some extent… but seeing how they flowed together, how She was by his side whenever She wasn’t helping with bridesmaid things, She was there with Him helping him… watching them like that; I realized that I’d been almost completely replaced. The gravity of how far in they were hit me, and I broke down crying at one point after the reception in one of the closets where nobody could find me.

I think that was the final straw that broke the camel’s back. The gravity of suppressing my emotions for the past 5 years, combined with running myself into the ground on autopilot with amphetamines and drugs, combined with the tornado and losing our house, combined with losing our crew (we were on the way out because of drama), and then seeing them together like that… I just…. couldn’t.

So I left. I got in my Mustang and drove an hour home… without saying anything to anyone… turned off all my location stuff on my phone… and had my mental break.

I don’t remember much from the next day; I don’t remember what I did, but I know I eventually got my shit together enough to go back and help tear down from the wedding on Monday (the mental break happened Saturday night), but I was… broken.

And then, a month or two later, at the end of 2020, She told me that She wasn’t sure that She wanted to move with me across the country.

While I admit I had considered many times that we might not work out; it still hit me like a freight train… Adding to my mental break even more. – She said She needed time to think about it… (a.k.a. She needed to talk to Him about it….)

A few weeks later, we talked again, and She said that She was going to move with me…. but that She couldn’t promise that She’d be able to end things with Him just because they’d be long distance.

What She didn’t tell me, was that, in making that decision, She had also decided that She was going to spend Her next travel assignment as a nurse (at a hospital about an hour from our house), having Him come spend the 3-ish nights a week She stayed down there, with Her. The travel assignment ran from late February through July… and She effectively made the decision to have an affair… behind my back.

Not that all of the rest of it wasn’t an affair; it was… and She didn’t tell me about how close they’d gotten… but that was different than blatantly lying to me about having Him come down there for three nights a week to fuck her, and pretending like that wasn’t happening the 4 nights a week She was back home with me…

I figured it out the week of April 20… so about a month and a half into it… and we started talking about all of it. Everything, from the past 5 years… everything that had led us to that point.

We went into greater detail than we ever had, even back in 2017… and in some odd way, we reconnected more than we had ever since things had started with Her and Him. – Her justification for the lying and the sexual part of the 6-month affair was that She was leaving, so She’d never get that again… and She didn’t tell me because She didn’t think I could handle it.

Looking back now, I think I had seen that coming somehow… I’m not entirely sure on that. – I didn’t think She would lie to me like that; even in all of the distance that had grown between us and the distrust that had blossomed because She couldn’t walk away in 2017… I didn’t think she’d go THAT far.

So from April through July, she’d spend 3 nights a week with Him and 4 with me… and every night She was with me, we’d spend ALL our time talking; reconnecting…. – While part of it killed me, it was also So good for Us, because we reconnected in ways we hadn’t since long before He and Her started in 2017.

My one stipulation, because of the ‘affair’, was that they take a 6-month no-contact break after we moved, Which She agreed to do, because She kind of had to… given I should have walked away when I found out about the affair… but I didn’t.

So we packed up our shit, and in early September of 2021, we moved 1,000 miles away across the country. And effectively we both collectively went into our own even deeper mental breakdowns.

The talking stopped when we moved… – Looking back, I think there was just too much distrust from the lying of that summer… for me to truly believe that She could go No Contact…. and that caused me to pull away from the progress we had made over the summer. Plus we were moving into our new house out here… it was busy, and I was still on Auto-pilot… and still in my Mental Break from a year prior.

I should mention that in order to handle the anxiety of me finding out about the affair, we developed an Oxy habit in April of 2021. The oxy calmed Her nerves enough for Her to be able to talk to me at that level… and I took it to handle the affair being piled on top of my mental break… – I knew it wasn’t good for us, given that Oxy was what almost killed Her after the festival in 2019. But it enabled Her to talk to me on a level She hadn’t previously been able to because it calmed Her nerves enough…

When we left our hometown in a moving truck, we only made it 30 miles before She had a breakdown and we stopped at a motel. She took too much oxy and almost O.D.’d again… I had to use Narcan on her, which we’d kept on hand after Her last O.D….. – It wasn’t good.

At any rate, in November of 2021, I wrote Him a letter that basically told Him that She was incapable of letting go of anything that She loved that much, but that if He didn’t walk out of Her life, this would eventually kill Her, and that would be on Him. (I told Him about Her ODing the night we left). It was a harsh letter… but it was something I needed to do… to try one last time to save Us.

It hit Him hard. – I should mention that I’d developed a relationship with another girl during the couple years before we left to help me cope with how much of Her I was losing to Him… so whenever She spent the night with Him in those final months before we moved, I’d spend the night with this other girl, who was as in love with me as She was with Him… For the purposes of this blog, we’ll call this girl Sarah, because I have to differentiate between Her and this other girl (Sarah).

I had Sarah deliver the letter… in person via an app that messages can’t be saved on…. plus I wanted Her there physically with Him because I knew the letter would hit hard… and hit hard it did.

My mom died in December of 2021…. so pile that on top of everything, and our mental breakdowns continued. She kept up Her end of the no-contact bargain… and I went on a no-contact thing with this other girl that I’d been seeing because She couldn’t handle losing me… and I… I couldn’t FEEL Anything It was like my mental break at the end of 2020 just kept piling on and piling on…

I didn’t even feel anything when my mom died.

Her and I had several breakthroughs in early 2022. I told Her about the letter I’d written Him…. and that Really Really hurt her… but She understood why I did it. Or so She said. But She was having Her own mental break slowly as well…

Originally, before we moved; back when She decided to have the affair behind my back, She had told me that She would need Him in Her life at some level…. – Well. Over the summer we developed what that would look like… and Her big thing with why She was spending half Her weeks with Him, was that the relationship-portion of their relationship was ending with the move… She’d still need Him in Her life… but their ‘Relationship’ part, the ‘dating’ part, was ending…. Well that led to Her having a mental break in April of 2022. We were so bad on Oxy at this point that we could barely function…. I got Her in to see a psychiatrist because She was having panic attacks that lasted for a day or two at a time…. She got on Strong medication… and those helped. But She still was Not okay.

I knew She wouldn’t be able to walk away from Him…. I knew that. And I KNOW that some part of Her subconscious knew that by spending those 7 months sleeping together, She was cementing the fact that She wouldn’t be able to let go of Him, and He wouldn’t be able to let go of Her. She claims still to this day that this wasn’t a consideration, but I knew that it was.

The break ended… and that was what triggered Her mental break; because He kept Her at a distance… – He told Sarah that He wasn’t going to walk out of Her life… but He wasn’t sure where that left things with them.

We were so… lost… over the summer. Our health had declined so much from the oxy addiction…. and my health had already been plummeting for years from the burn out on amphetamines and other drugs, and then the mental break… My memory is so bad that I barely even remember the conversations we had.

It became about trying to rehabilitate us to the point where we could survive… to the point where She could work again; to the point where we could live an actual LIFE here…. which we hadn’t to date been able to do.

Have I mentioned Kids yet? – So, when I realized after we first moved that She wasn’t going to be able to let go of Him… I came up with the idea of having Kids… – It was something we’d always talked about ‘someday’, and it was something that I could use as a kind of ‘reassurance’ that even though I was sharing her, I knew that having kids would kind of force our non-existent life out here into gear… into some kind of a life… even if it wasn’t the life I’d dreamed of; it would be Something. – So I had broached the topic shortly after we moved… and she’d agreed to it, so long as She could keep Him in Her life.

Well, after the mental break; around July of 2022… during one of our many talks that I remember virtually none of… She finally told me what I’d known all along… – That She couldn’t live without having Him in Her life from a dating/sexual perspective.

That changed our deal. That piled yet ANOTHER thing on top of my already completely nulled sense of ability to experience any emotion other than panic…. and anxiety.

I didn’t take that well; but I think some part of me had also seen that coming… – I’d known since I saw them together at our friends wedding that they had what Her and I used to have… and that She wouldn’t be able to give that up.

I also knew, from how bad Her mental break got in April, that I couldn’t just remove myself from the equation either… because she’d go through the same kind of life-shattering mental break if She lost me that She was going through from the possibility of losing Him…. and I love Her way too much to have Her go through that from losing me… so I had to come to terms with sharing Her. I had to.

We’d originally talked about Kids before She saw Him again; but obviously with Her mental break in April, that timing didn’t work out… and then in July, She threw a curve ball at me with the whole ‘she needed to date him’ thing… and with that, She also slipped in there that She needed to see Him again in person before we could get pregnant.

Wow. As if things couldn’t get any less manageable mentally for me…. just… wow.

So, we booked flights, and in early August, we flew back home. Almost a year after moving away… – The trip was for Her to talk to Him, and for me to talk to Sarah. – And it went… surprisingly well. – As you might guess, He was ABSOLUTELY COMPLETELY AND ENTIRELY opposed to seeing me after the letter I’d sent Him in November…. but Sarah kind of ambushed Him and just brought Him over to where we were staying the first weekend night that we were there.

And it went really really well… – I know I’ve mentioned this before; but He used to be one of my best friends before all this happened… so we put aside everything else, and just pretended like things were completely normal. Had normal conversation about normal shit… went out to a club… had a Normal night. – And the next 3 nights that we were there, She’d spend 4-8 hours with Him, talking about everything from the past year, and where that left them, etc, and I’d spend that time with Sarah… talking about much of the same.

We left that trip with Her in a better mental state than She’d been in since the move. – Obviously seeing Him was great for Her… and we only had like 4 weeks before we were back again for a festival with the crew… and She got to spend a couple more nights after the festival hanging out with and talking to Him while I talked to Sarah.

When we got back from that trip… She once again threw another curve ball into the mix…. – She told me that before we could have kids, She needed to sleep with Him. – I’d already agreed to Her needing to date him… We had agreed on them getting to have a long distance relationship, and at least twice a year, they’d go somewhere and spend a weekend together, so they’d get to sleep together at least two weekends a year… that was something we could both live with (well, it was the maximum that I could live with, so She made it work) – She had already talked to Him about all that… but throwing this ‘needing to sleep with Him before we could have kids thing…. that just…. was One. More. Thing.

I didn’t handle it well; but as I always did. I gave in to Her… under the condition that it had to be here at our house. We have a bunch of flight points, so we would fly Him and Sarah out for a long weekend in December, and the last night of the visit, She’d spend with Him and I’d spend with Sarah.

Somehow, She got Him to agree to this… so we booked the flights, and they’re supposed to fly out in a roughly 4 weeks to stay with us for a long weekend.

How am I going to handle that? I have no idea…

Ever since my mental break, I’ve not really been able to… feel… things. The anxiety just builds and piles on top… and I hadn’t really planned this far. – To be honest, I think I sort of thought that my body would give out before now…. I didn’t know what future Her and I would have, if Any, for most of 2021… and with how expensive the move was, and Her not working for a year, we maxed out all our credit cards, and now have $185,000 in credit card debt. Financially; we are completely fucked.

Our plan, had been to wait until She got a really good paying travel nursing job, and after about 2 months of that; apply for a debt consolidation loan with our credit union that we’ve done all our loans through over the years.

And despite us netting almost $18,000 per MONTH; the credit union denied our application when we applied last week. – And that threw things even higher into chaos.

Not only can we not have kids if we can’t get a debt consolidation loan… we won’t survive financially if we can’t get one. Whatever level of panic I thought I’d felt before because of EVERYTHING from the past two years, this tops all of it. Now that we Finally have a plan… now that there’s FINALLY a light at the end of the tunnel… we’re screwed because of finances. The icing on the proverbial cake.

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Ever since we’d agreed on the ‘them coming to visit us in December and we’d start trying for kids in early 2023’ in Early October, we haven’t really been talking… hardly at all. – I think we’re so worn out from the last year of talking (that I can’t remember), and we just want to enjoy being ‘good’ for a minute…

And that’s been… nice… – to an extent. – Part of our agreements were that She’d read me in on where things were at with Her and Him… even down to letting me read some of their texts occasionally… -Well, I mentioned last week that She hadn’t really been doing that, and She confided in me that He had been keeping Her at arms length… so there really wasn’t much to share. But a couple nights ago, She offered to let me read a few texts before She left for work… so we did that, and it was nice. All very generic texts; from Him keeping Her at arms length. – Well, later that night, She sent me a long text explaining that I might have seen one of Her texts to Him referencing that He hadn’t responded on Snapchat; and She explained that before I got into my head about that text, that they weren’t talking on Snapchat… She went it a ton of detail… because I had kinda freaked out when I saw a snap come in on Her phone back in October, accusing Her of switching back to talking to Him Snap so there was no log of it… and She wanted to reassure me that this wasn’t that.

I responded that I hadn’t even seen that part of the text, but that even if I had… She and I were good enough that I believed Her when She said they weren’t back to talking on Snapchat previously. I told Her that the financial situation we were in was so much higher on my stress level right now, that I literally don’t even have the mental bandwidth to be worried about something like that. – I told Her that even if my worst-case-scenarios were true, and they were back to sexting on Snapchat and She wasn’t telling me… that my anxiety over being financially FUCKED so overpowered any stress I might have from that; that we were good regardless.

She responded with something that surprised me… She said it surprised Her that my worst case was that they’d be Sexting… because yes; over the course of this whole thing, I’ve always loved the masochistic part of Her having better sex with Him… and I’ve always loved watching them fuck, or Her telling me about the times She’d fucked Him… – What I didn’t have the heart to tell Her that night (a few nights ago) was that the sexual part may have been a turn on for me over the years because of my masochistic side… but since the move; the sex life between Her and I has all but fallen completely apart. – I KNOW why She needs to sleep with Him so badly………. and that’s probably the part that hurts the most. – They have better sex than Her and I do…. and I’m long past letting that turn me on… now, it just hurts. Like fucking Hell.

I got off adderall in October… hoping that would start to fix my health issues; but it didn’t. I’m hanging on to life by a thread…. physically, but more importantly; mentally.

I am a shred of the guy I once was… and I’m not even sure I remember who that person was anymore. Not only do I not now know how we’re going to survive financially; I’m not sure if I’m going to survive Physically…. and all of this… every part of it.. is still behind that floodgate of emotions that, the longer I keep the switch flipped off; the harder it’s going to be to flip back on. – I have to get to a point physically where I can Physically survive flipping that mental emotional switch to be able to handle the flood of emotions I’ve been suppressing since my mental break…. and I don’t know how to do that. – And on top of all of that, Her nursing contract expires next week, so we could be financially FUCKED in less than 30 days. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

There’s so much I didn’t get to cover… but in case I don’t make it…. I finally took a minute to write this down. Because I may not have the chance to if I don’t survive this physically.

And even if we do somehow find a way to survive financially, and the December trip goes great, and even lets say we make it all the way to having kids early next year…. am I even ready for that? Is She? Can She handle being off all the psyche meds She’s been on since Her mental break in April? Plus, can we get off the Oxy habit we’re now 18 months into? 🤯

And then what? Will kids be enough for me to be okay with being second-best to Him for Her? It’ll have to be…. but there are so many obstacles just to getting to that point that I don’t have any idea how we’ll get there….

Whoever said ‘and they lived happily ever after’ clearly never actually lived… because that’s Never how the story ends. – Even with ones that started as strong as ours; we’re here 11 years after we got married, hooked on drugs and barely making it both physically and mentally. Me, alone really, despite Her being here physically… She’s mentally with Him…. and I have to live with that for the rest of my life. – Her, doing whatever She can to not lose either of us…. what a fucking goddamn mess.

I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to write again. I hope I do. I hope I survive this~