It’s a stressful day. We still have no idea what’s going on, legally. We won’t even have a clue about the next step(s) until after noon, when he can finally get an answer from the lawyer about whether or not he needs to even be at the meeting tomorrow.
We texted a bit at his first break. He tried to get answers when the office opened, but they told him they couldn’t give him an answer until after 12pm.
Me: How's you?
Him: I wish I could say I'm good but I don't think I am, very anxious
Me: Me too
Him: Almost sick
Me: But in an hour or so you'll have an answer
Him: I'll deal
Me: And then we go from there
Him: In my mind I already know
So, we wait.
I’m not in work today, as I asked for tomorrow off – just in case – and my boss gave me today off, too. The extra day off is helpful in some ways. My anxiety has been ramping up as today got closer. I haven’t been sleeping very well. We talked about it last night, neither of us is necessarily having bad sleeps, but they’re definitely not truly restful. My mind no longer races through the spiral of doom before I finally fall asleep – at least not as often as it has been known to – but it’s more an absence of any thoughts. More often than not these past couple of weeks, I lay there thinking my mind is too quiet, unsettlingly quiet, what did I normally think of right now?
I took the opportunity to get some extra sleep this morning. To stave off some of the anxiety, I did a long workout already, and I’m mostly writing this to keep my mind off everything. Yesterday, I looked in the mirror and was scared about how I looked. There’s bags under my eyes that no amount of concealer will cover. I want nothing more than to curl up under the covers with a tub of ice cream and aggressively eat my feelings.
It feels like I’m going at this alone. Last week, it was made clear to me that I have pretty much no one in my corner. That’s not entirely true, because there’s people who probably would be in my corner, but only if I did what they think is best. Everyone thinks that I should just wash my hands of everything, pack his things, put him out and change the locks. They think I should have done it the day he was arrested, and I’m an idiot for even considering anything could possibly be repaired. “How can you reconcile the fact that you’re not going to see your family again?” I can see family. I’m not giving up family. As much as some of them think I’m giving up everyone, it’s simply that things between me and them are back to normal.
Which is to say, I don’t call them, they don’t call me, and we see each other at holidays when it would look weird if I wasn’t invited there.
But, to some people, because they offered me some emotional support when I needed it, things should have changed between us. Mind you, none of them have reached out to check in on me. Not that I would tell them much, because every time I see some family, someone else knows something they shouldn’t. I’m no longer going to feed the gossip chain.
In some ways, the visit with my grandmother was super helpful. I gave her the scoop, what she didn’t already know from my gossipy family, and told her my theories about what went wrong. She was supportive of any decision we might make. “It’s a disease, like drug addiction, like alcoholism, and he needed to hit rock bottom to see how it needed to be addressed.”
This is the bottom.
Start climbing.
