Addiction has its own agenda

This week in Tahoe has been both relaxing and emotionally excruciating. 

Tahoe is beauty, wherever you look. The lake, the snow covered mountains, the beautiful homes and little old cabins nestled into the pines. The weather has been perfect--just warm enough to spend the days outside hiking beaches and getting to know the California side from top to bottom.

But all week I've been struggling with gut wrenching anguish at the loss of my marriage and my relationship with my partner of 34 years. I feel a burning ,churning, pounding in my center, as if the heart has been ripped out of my body leaving a nerves raw and exposed.

I've realized that I have not fully let him go, and I can see better now where it has to happen. 

When he started dating so suddenly, I was put face to face with the fact that at any moment someone could become more important to him than me. That would be natural and appropriate, given that we're not working to get back together. But it's still painful to know that I'll be replaced in the heart of the person who has been the most important person in my life and who I felt so important to, the love of my life, for nearly 35 years. 

I've come to consider that we have both learned what we can and grown as much as we can grow while being together, and that maybe the only way we can continue to grow as people, as humans, is apart from each other. Maybe he needs to be with a different woman to have a chance to be the person he wants to be––someone who does not bear the scars he gave her. And maybe I need to learn that I have to have expectations, that I don't have to accept being treated badly, that I am worthy of better. That submitting to being alone is better than submitting to a partnership in which I'm not cherished and treated with love and respect. And maybe we can only take these next steps apart.

But I've also been thinking that this doesn't mean we cease to exist for each other. As I thought about it, I realized that because of what we experienced together, traveling from young adulthood to and beyond middle age, he will always be an important person in my life. Even if I fall in love with someone else who becomes my partner in life, the Addict can still be someone I love deeply and who I would always be honest and real with. And not just because he's the father of my son, but because he's a human being who was truly doing the best he could when we were together. I believe he wanted to do the best. But he was not up to the task, for whatever reason. He's been scarred a lot, too, and he's trying to work through all of that. So he could not see beyond his feelings of selfishness, self pity and entitlement to live up to his promises and commitments to me. But maybe that could be possible with someone else. 

Thinking of him loving another woman and treating her the way I wish he had treated me is crushing. But that doesn't matter. Letting him go so that it's not crushing is my work. Accepting that we gave and received as much as we could and that our relationship as a married couple has come to a natural end is my work. It's absolutely gut wrenching, but so many true spiritual growth opportunities are. 

Tonight, the three of us women have been a little bored, frankly. We've seen the sights, hiked the hikes, cooked and dined out, played games and had the conversations about this and that. And yet somehow I feel empty and hollow. Is this all there is to life after all? After the intensity of everything we did in our 20s and 30s, and of being parents, raising a boy, making big life decisions together, I'm separated from that closest most intimate bond I had and will spend my remaining days playing cards and watching streaming services and doing puzzles with the gals?

Losing my relationship with the Addict is an existential blow that I never planned for. Even after 2007, when I first found out about the betrayals and the lying. Even then, I believed we'd work things out together and spend our old age walking around holding hands and taking care of each other and enjoying every moment of life we had together. Because we were for each other. I didn't know how addiction would snap back with a vengeance. Addiction has its own agenda that is not influenced one bit by what I want in this situation.

As I sit here my insides are chaos––burning and churning and tearing and anguish right in the center of my body below my sternum. Part of me knows there is no going back, no road to repair. He has crossed so many fundamental lines with me, and he's shown that he can't or won't stop doing that. And he cannot yet set down the filters installed by the pain he's experienced in life and distinguish how they have affected the way he sees and experiences me. And part of me is still devastated and utterly grief-stricken by the loss. I cannot find words adequate to this pain, but it's an existential anguish that goes to my core. And part of me is angry with him for not having integrity and for not being able to get well enough to have a shot at spending our lives together. Part of me misses him profoundly and feels a vast emptiness without his presence in my life. It's an emptiness that hurts, right in that same center place in my body. 

Going through this is exhausting. I wish there were ways out that I liked. But this is a path I must walk even though I don't like the journey right now and I don't like where the path looks like it's going. I have the opportunity to not resist the pain and it's probably the best opportunity available to me. Only when I stop resisting and accept can I find new joys and purpose.

I need some rest. Maybe sleep will help me process some of this. It feels so overwhelming.