I walk around each day with this pain in my chest. It feels like there is 200 lbs of pressure on top of me and my heart is going to explode all at the same time. It is an emotional pain but I feel it physically. It is very real to me. It wears me down through out the day. I may sit at a desk but the amount of energy it costs me to communicate with other people through out the day is huge! It feels like I am having the worst day of my life every single day. I have been fortunate to have not lost anyone close to me to death. But through my empathic abilities I have felt the lost of parents, children, and siblings. That feeling is so intense that every time I sense it I am taken to the ground with grief. The feeling I feel in my chest every day is close to half that pain that other people feel with they experience a loss. It takes my breath away. It is like my body is trying to grieve over a loss that I wasn’t aware had even happened.
But it did. I am mourning the loss of myself. The person I once was is no longer here. With everything that I have been through my body has adapted. I have changed what I like, how I think, how I act.
I have told you that I picked up smoking in order to help myself sleep at night. But what I haven’t told you yet is what happens to me when I smoke. While I am high, things are great. I am relaxed physically and mentally. My mind wanders but only to the lightest parts of my brain. No bad thoughts occur to me. But when I start to come down… My mind is relaxed enough for me to keep the mental walls down but while those walls are down and I am starting to come back to reality and get a grip on time, place and other specifics, memories start slipping through. Memories that I have buried. Memories that my sober mind would not dare to recall.
One question has plagued me for some time now:
What did I do to make him so angry at me that he would be willing to sacrifice his job, his money, his own child even just to make me suffer in our divorce?
And one day that memory seeped through. I remembered. I know what he is so mad about. You see I’m not his first wife. Shortly after his first marriage he lost a loved one (No, he didn’t kill his wife). His wife left him before he could recover. For the longest time I could not figure out what would posses a human to do such an awful thing. I couldn’t understand why she’d stay with him for the majority of their adult lives and then just leave while he was down.
On the first day of my honey moon, it made since. His mood had changed over night. We did not have a glorious wedding night like I’d hoped. We did not make it on the air plane without two arguments. He did not even make it through the honey money without threatening to divorce me because I had lost my $50 cell phone. In fact he demanded that I take a separate plane home because he could not stand to be near me. I was positive that this is not the same person that I married a day prior so I pushed. I pushed through the arguing and we made it home in one piece.
But now I understood, she did not leave him because she was a shitty person. She left him because she saw what I was now seeing after the wedding. The real him. She wasn’t a monster for leaving him when he was down; she was smart. She took a chance that her life would be spared if she left while he was took weak to fight. And it was.
A little over a year later I had trouble with my boss. She belittled me repeatedly and I pleaded with my husband to let me search for another job. That was out of the question. If he was home I was not to leave the house. Even if he was sleeping. My boss tortured me trying to get me to quit so that I could not file for unemployment. I didn’t give in. The inevitable happened. She left one morning to go to the gym of all places and she had one of her minions tell me “It looks like you’ve worked yourself out of a job.”
When I got home I didn’t know what to do. I was so terrified of what my husband would say. He got mad but not as mad as I thought he’d be. I was so relieved. I felt like he was going to be there for me, for once. The next day I got up at my usual time and went job searching. The phone calls and texts started rolling in before noon. He wanted me home. When I returned I told him that I was still looking for a permanent position but that I got an interview at a clothing store as a seasonal employee. It wouldn’t be much but it would be something. He was livid. He broke me down until I believed that I could not be trusted to fold clothes. I just wasn’t good enough. The next day I blew off my interview. I had never passed up an interview before. I instead looked for the most menial job I could find. I found an ad to be a traffic controller/monitor. I’m not sure what the exact title was but you get the point. I’d stand in the middle of the intersect and tell people when to go. (Please don’t take this as my belittling anyone who has this job, it pays more money than what I make now and has great benefits from what I hear.) I showed the ad to my husband. He laughed, in my face. He told me that I am too short people would look right over me. He told me that I am too heavy, I would never be able to stand outside for that long. I am too weak; I would not be able to hold the sign all day. It went on for hours.
I was already been loosing sleep because I was receiving constant messages that my husband has been seen several times with his female coworker. When he was in the shower I peaked at his text messages. He deleted everything that he wrote but he left the messages that she sent. The messages where she tells him that she loves him and sings him the lyrics of Am I wrong?
I could just not sleep. He had been working late hours and then not coming home for several hours after his shift. I had found text messages saying that he was meeting this girl after work. But none of the messages proved that he was actually sleeping with this girl.
At what point do you leave an emotionally abusive emotionally cheating husband?
Do I wait until he hits me?
Do I wait until I find him in bed with another women?
After he had convinced me that I am worthless and not capable of any job, he went to work. I sat up for hours just thinking about my future.
What will this marriage be like in 50 years?
What will my career be like?
I had already dropped out of college before my last semester started because I was not allowed to be outside of the house for so long and I was repeatedly accused of cheating on him with other men. Mind you I didn’t so much as glance at another human being because I was terrified that he was following me and would see. I was now jobless. I was completely helpless. How was I to move forward in life with this person who is supposed to be my partner telling me that I am less than a person. Less than that bug he took pleasure in torturing.
So I waited. I sat up until his shift finished. I waited until he was done with his mistress. And when he came home I said, “I cannot sleep. I just can’t go another minute without talking to you. I need you to let me go.”
The rest of what I said is more than my currently sober mind will let me remember. But as I came down from my previously mentioned high the memory that slipped through was his response. He said, “That is exactly what she (referring to his previous wife) said to me. She could not wait any longer. She waited up for me just like you did. She left me right before the holidays.”
And as I continued to recall the memory I realized that the reason I didn’t catch the similarities to his previous wife’s break up before embarking on my own break up speech was because I was weighing the likely hood that he would decide to harm me. But I realized that I didn’t care. I couldn’t. If I stayed I would not be granted the same rights as any other human. I would be a slave to his sociopathic tendencies. I left him knowing that he might kill me. I chose death over my marriage.
My semi-high recollection appeared to me just in time for the gruesome divorce proceedings. So that even when I am not in a relationship with him I am still tortured every time I see his face. He could very well show up at any minute and take my life. It is a waiting game and he is still in control. I am not free. I am terrified. I have PTSD which may never go away. I jump at the sight or sound of anything that reminds me of him. I am still his slave.
survivaloftheempathic 