The Winter of our Discontent

I really hate this time of year. Nothing good happens at this time of year.

Every morning at around 9am, I’ll get a notification from Facebook. You’ve got memories to look back on today! A lot of the time, it’s mundane bullshit from back in the day when checking in at a location on Foursquare often enough would get you crowned Mayor of the place, or complaints about work and the weather. Yesterday was no different, with the exception of a couple of posts from four years ago, which started with a simple, two-line status update.

“Woke up to no heat.
This shit sucks.”

That was the day that I believe our marriage started its steady decay. It was our first winter in our first house. We woke up and he said, “I don’t think the heat is working.” We called someone in to look at it, and just as the repairman finished giving us a quote for parts and repair, the carbon monoxide alarm in the basement went off. The estimated cost went from “manageable but really tight” to “we’re cashing in the last of his retirement fund” in about two minutes.

From there, everything went to shit. We had an $8000 furnace replacement. A month or later, the water heater decided to die, dropping another bill in our laps. Two days after that, he lost his job. Then I ended up in the ER twice in a three-day period. There was so much stress between us. I was terrible, anxious about everything. If it was a bad day, it may as well have been the end of the world. We probably had more good days than bad, but I couldn’t enjoy them. When he came home from a job interview at a car dealership, fucking glowing with excitement about getting an offer, my response was something like “and how long do you have before they fire you for not making quota?” I was constantly waiting for the next bad thing to come along and knock us down again.

I’ve been like that for four years now.

For the first year, it was just nonstop stress and anxiety. My trip to the ER kick started my weight loss journey, and I discovered that physical activity was a great way to give me some relief from my mental issues. I would isolate myself upstairs, lifting weights or doing yoga. The stress of simply existing was exhausting for me, and I took it out on him.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever asked him to join me in a workout after the two of us completed a “30 days of yoga” challenge. My isolation just widened the gap that had been growing between us. I remember him coming home one Saturday, after a 10-hour shift at the dealership, and I ran upstairs shortly after his arrival to do a workout. I’d been anxious and sick to my stomach thinking about us all day, and I’d been alone.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be with him.   It was just that by then, I couldn’t handle that distance, and being together just made that distance even more obvious and painful.

I won’t rehash what’s happened since then. I’ve been through it enough.

Over the last year or so, I’ve made some changes.  I’ve been journaling for almost exactly three years now, and over the last year my biggest change has been the decision to stop focusing on the negatives.  I wrote about everything that went wrong for me, never about the good stuff.  My entries were almost exclusively about my ever-worsening body dysmorphia as I lost weight, or observations on my failing marriage as we grew farther apart.  Each month, I set up a chart to track my moods in an effort to see what outside forces could be affecting me.  I charted the weather, my monthly cycle, our sex life, how things went at work and how my workouts went.  Eventually I was forced to admit to myself that the only constant was me, and I stopped tracking my moods.  If it wasn’t good, tracking it wasn’t going to change that, and it seemed like I was almost looking for something to be angry about. 

However, there’s still a bit of that negativity to be found.  I may have replaced the mood tracker with a list of things that I’m grateful for each day, but I still find it extraordinarily hard to admit when things are good.  If you ask him what his biggest frustrations with me are, one is the fact that I bottle things up too much.  He can ask me how I’m feeling or if something is bothering me, and my default is “ok”.  I’m never, ever good.  I’ll have good days, but I’m never good.  There’s so many good days that I just label as ok, and there’s so many times that I say I’m ok because I just don’t know how to handle a good day anymore.  After all this bullshit over the last four years, a lot of the time I don’t feel like I should be having good days.