I went to my hometown this past weekend to touch base with some people. On a whim, I took the opportunity to spend some time at a small gathering of people I went to high school with at the home of this guy I’ve known basically all my life.
I really don’t visit home very often for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who subscribes to this, so I don’t keep up very much with a lot of childhood friends. Not out of animosity or unresolved beef or anything like that, it’s just hard to keep in touch with people like that when you don’t come around very often.
Especially when you’re up to weird shit that you don’t feel like explaining to other people who probably aren’t going to understand. It’s easy enough to just say “I’m doing an LLC grift” and crack a few jokes about it. I come from a culture where this vague genre of shenanigans is common enough that people will ask few questions after vibe checking that you’re earning your money in a somewhat wonky way that you don’t want to talk about too much in depth. It’s just a Type Of Guy from this slice of American life that we all know and love, around these parts.
At one point while knocking back drinks, the topic of my failed marriage came up. I sighed and once again gave a brief run down on the way that shit went rapidly downhill, and gave a run down of some of the more dramatic events.
My childhood friend then turned and looked at me and said, “I was glad to hear from your mom that you two were done. The dynamic you had was clearly a fucked up, raw deal. I knew you were being taken advantage of by someone who actually didn’t give a fuck about you at all and just wanted to bum off of you. Every time you were here visiting, I could tell they were weird as fuck. I didn’t like it.”
“Jesus, why didn’t he say anything then?” I thought to myself. Then I had to be honest with myself: Even if he had said something, I definitely wouldn’t have listened. I’ve been in his position before, many times. I’ve had to learn the hard way on multiple occasions that you can’t talk someone out of a relationship that’s clearly awful for them, they have to be ready and willing to leave.
I wasn’t ready to leave my spouse until I was hearing the truth out of the mouth of someone I barely knew at the time who had absolutely no incentive at all to say something like that to me, while my spouse’s erratic behaviors and concerning disposition towards me were escalating past any reasonable point of rationalization.
Sometimes I still get a little annoyed with my family for the way that they talk to me about it, but most of my frustration stems from their continued lack of real support now, and desire to just hit me over and over again in the head with “I told you so” and following it up with some unhelpful condemnations of the community of people my ex comes from, that I should take this fucked up experience as proof of their collective untrustworthiness (not worth it to point out to them again that the only person who was actually kind to me and helpful when I was leaving this bad marriage was also from that same group, and they also treated him like shit even though that was totally uncalled for, deaf ears, etc.).
To be fair, a part of the reason why I rarely listen to what they have to say in situations like this is because of shit like that, even if they are like broken clocks that are right twice a day. It’s also very hard to take a bigoted parent’s opinion of the person you’re gay-married to seriously. My mom referred to my ex as “my friend” long after we were already married. How was I supposed to separate THAT from something like: “hey this person is a compulsive liar, who is twisting your brain into knots, sabotaging your relationships with everyone else who’s close to you, and bleeding you dry financially”?
But nevertheless, I am making peace with the fact that at the end of the day, I am responsible for letting things that were objectively bad for me go on for as long as it did. I thought about that a lot on the long drive home. You’ve got to be so careful about who you chose to have around you that intimately, because if you’ve made a bad choice it’s like slipping into the sunken place and the only way out is through an internal shift. Others can’t just pull you out of hellish reality that your brain is choosing to accept every day. You quite literally have to snap out of it, like a bad dream.
And you will, when you’ve finally had enough; but only after you’ve endured all the things you felt that you deserve. How low is your rock bottom? Mine was pretty disquieting. It was actually so bad that I am still questioning if I want to commit that deeply to anyone else ever again, or if I am better off just walling that part of myself off completely and just letting fleeting people pass in and out of my life forever instead.
I don’t know, it’s hard to say right now as I am still recovering from the aftermath of the damage that my last relationship did to my life and am mostly focused on that. And sure, this sucks and I wish I wasn’t going through this right now. But it’s better to spend just five years in the sunken place instead of 10, 15, 20, 30+ years. It could have been so much worse! At least I got some really weird, fucked up personal lore out of it. That’s got to count for something, right?
-a.j.
