Sometimes I Just Need to Write - Bear With Me

Word vomit: 1-14-2024

Sometimes, I feel the need to just sit and write about what is happening in my life. I used to have a journal, but I don’t know what it is about writing knowing other people will read that makes me want to share more.

I guess in the past 20 years or more, since I’ve been blogging and sharing my life on the internet, I’ve grown used to people knowing everything about me. Some people hate sharing their life online and I get that, but since the first time I posted a journal entry on my website back in 1999, I have loved sharing everything about my life with strangers.

You are likely to be able to go on the internet and find blog posts and articles about my time in mental hospitals, and the suicide attempts that got me there.

You could probably find out everything about my long-distance courtship with Flora, and how I immediately fell in love with her and proposed to her after two weeks. You are likely to find out about every hurdle Flora and I have jumped in the past 12 years, and how despite having a rocky marriage, we are more committed to each other now than at any of our time together.

You would probably find out how I went from a thin, immature man with all his hair to the bald, beast of a man I am now, who despite all his mistakes and challenges, changed himself and his life. I am mature and understand the value of commitment. I’ve lost so much but value my family and the people who surround me with love.

I do not recognize the man I was at 20, 30, 40, or even 50, as I was going through changes and turning myself into a better person. Flora struggles because I am not the man I was when we met. She doesn’t know how to handle the promises I make now after being let down so many times before.

Flora and I are dealing with learning to love each other after having our life turned upside down. I almost died in 2015 after a suicide attempt, and again in 2022 when I had a heart attack. I have big plans that I want to accomplish now that I have graduated college and am putting my health first. I have a long life ahead of me, and she isn’t sure that she has a place with this guy who is not who she married.

As I think about travel, career, education, and starting businesses, she struggles with finding her own place in this new reality. She has made so much of herself into making sure that I survived, that she finds she has to create a new identity for herself, and is anxious and panicky over the thought of taking on new challenges.

She knows in all the plans I make that she is always right next to me, but she feels like I somehow left her behind because I worked so hard to improve myself. I learned how to live with a mental illness and be successful, and I graduated college. I bettered myself while she spent most of her time supporting me and not tending to her own needs.

I am still trying to decide if I was too selfish letting her prop me up to the detriment of her own identity. I did what I had to do to learn how to live my life without wanting to kill myself, and she helped by giving everything she had.

Now I want to give back and start making it about her, but to do that I have to make a career and make more money, so she can go to college and have a career of her own. I have to start gently pushing her to leave her comfort zone and start taking chances, so she too can change and become the best version of herself.

But the effort to help me change has left her with her own set of challenges. She has crippling anxiety and panic, and she is frightened of a future where, now that I have improved, will leave her behind

No matter how many times I tell her that every future I see has her in it, she still thinks that she is being forgotten and I am frustrated, beating my head against the wall to convince her that I love her and only want the best for our family.

The challenge now is to make plans and start finishing things that will put us closer to being financially healthy, and that involves me moving out of my comfort zone and working to better our lives. I have to do this without triggering her panic that I will go away and not come back.

I have grown as a person. I am a different man, but his man is one who knows the value of the people who got me here and who continue to stick by me, even when things are difficult. My wife is my life, and as I become a success and do things to make our life better, I have to ensure that she knows that she is going to be right by my side.

Things are only getting better, and I hope she can come to terms with her fears before they destroy any good future we may have together. I hope she can trust that the mistakes I made in the past only happened because I needed to grow and change myself into the man I am now.

I hope she can get past the panic and anxiety that I will leave her behind in search for a different life.

I do want different, better. But better only comes if she is a part of it.