It has been a tiring few days. There is so much to process. But we’ve finally decided to take a break from talking and just let things pan out the way that they pan out.
It has been an exhausting few years. The cycle goes:
– I bring up something / a thing.
– I’m told this is not how I should feel / process things. That what I want is unrealistic, etc. My thoughts are invalidated by someone who thinks they know better. Who thinks that I should believe what they believe.
– We argue, or not. We say that we’d revisit or come back to it. We agree to vague promises such as “Taking one step at a time.” We ignore ultimatums. We make up. It gets swept under the carpet.
– It bothers me again eventually. > I bring it up. I’m told I should’ve brought it up earlier. That we need more time to process this because it has been sprung on some unsuspecting party.
– We give it time. We make up. We never come back to address it because the making up is interpreted to mean that the issue has resolved itself even though not enough has changed.
– I bring it up again. We talk in circles. You ask ridiculous, irrelevant questions that I either have no answers for or do not want to answer for fear of my answers being used against me in future, as they often have been over the years.
If you have trauma, so too do I.
You keep reminding me that not all days were bad. That there were good and bad days. I hope you can come to terms with the fact that, for me, this ratio of good:bad, and especially this trajectory, is not something I want to continue with.
It’s not my fault if I have never been taken seriously and always seen as an unrealistic, immature child whose values have been shaped by “Hollywood”. I feel compelled to document everything. Because: gaslighting. I’d bring things up only to be belittled and ignored, only to be blamed for not mentioning it earlier. Sometimes you even do a 180 on things that you have said to me. You convinced me that my memory was faulty, too many of them have gone unrecorded now. But you protested when I tried to record our Covid conversation. That was a clue.
Past conversations have gone:
– I want to be alone.
– You mean you want to sleep with other people.
– Not really, but if that is easier for you to understand, you can choose to see it that way.
– Isn’t that a slippery slope? Isn’t this the beginning of the end?
– And if it’s the beginning of the end, we should not be forcing it together with our physical proximity
– We need to let whatever happen happen. (Two years later, he says this as if he came up with it.)