At this point I was sponsoring other guys and helping them to find recovery. Until now everything was about me, and I wasn’t really giving anything back. This is where things really began to change for me. Good and bad, but changes none the less. You learn more about yourself when you help others than they do about themselves. It’s an amazing experience to no longer need constant help and attention and give it to someone else instead.
I also started dating again. Once with a girl in recovery that ended badly when she told me she wasn’t ready for a relationship and then went and hooked up with a guy I was sponsoring. I wasn’t even mad though. I’m sure there was some anger, but I was happy for them and wished them well. I moved on to the next one who was a kind of a nutter. She found me on MySpace and wanted to hook up. Sex was great, but she had all kinds of issues along with smoking pot which I didn’t want to be around. But as desperate as I was, I was willing to look past it all and tried hard to have a relationship with her. Luckily for me, she wasn’t interested. I was seeing the red flags, but wasn’t willing to let them hold me back.
I met another girl online and we started dating. I always said I wanted a small girl with a big girl personality if you know what I mean. This girl had a botched gastric bypass where she lost intestines and had lots of medical issues. So she had the personality, so I thought, along with the smaller frame. She also had medical issues so she was willing to look past my own. Plus the sex was great, so I was “in love” once again. One thing was different though. She had a daughter that was two years old. Honestly, I hated kids and didn’t want to be a father, but this little girl changed that. I grew to love her, truly love her, even more than I did her mother. I began to see that it was possible for me to be a good father.
There were red flags galore and she did her best to drive me off several times, but I stuck with it. I wanted to be their for her daughter since her father wasn’t around much, and I didn’t want to fail at another relationship by giving up, even if I should have.
I moved into her parent’s house to help care for her and her daughter for a time when she had some major health issues . Shortly after we got engaged and I was passionate about someone for the first time in a long time. I had people to share my life with, a ready made family. She wouldn’t tell her ex about me, because she was still on his insurance, but I didn’t mind. He was a schizophrenic alcoholic so she had to leave him due to abuse. One day we received word that he had overdosed and rotted in his apartment for at least a week before anyone found him. I was there for them through the ordeal, helping get stuff from the house and trying to take care of the property transfer and the like.
I was full-time with the community college in Charlotte at this point. She was going to school and working part time as a TA at the community college in Rock Hill, SC. She got a little money from the insurance after her ex had died, so we decided to purchase a townhouse together using some of that money as a down payment. Being a convicted felon, I couldn’t even rent most apartments so I never thought I would own a house. This was a big step up for me. I was able to get federal assistance since my credit issues were mostly medical and I was paying all my current bills regularly. It all just seemed to work.
So I have the job, got a new car, have the family and the house. It’s all coming together and life is great. I got promoted at the office to a System Administrator, and they were sending me out of town on trainings and paying for my travel. I even started doing some training of other colleges and making presentations for national conferences. The little girl was in school now and was starting to call me daddy. I felt like life was finally turning around for me. I was happy and wanted to be alive for the first time I could remember. The suicidal tendencies and hallucinations were all but a memory now.
The pendulum swings again. All the red flags come to bare. My fiance isn’t working or going to school and she isn’t doing much of anything but watching DVR all day. She is getting on me about being at work and going to recovery meetings all the time. I try to balance things out to be home more, so I cut back on my meetings. Now I’m starting to get resentful and I’m not talking to anyone. I have a new sponsor, but he’s retired and single and has no real advice on family matters. I isolate and just play video games whenever I’m home. I long for the work conferences where I can get away.
She starts to piss me off daily and then tries to get intimate later. I don’t work like that. You piss me off, it takes a bit for me to switch gears. She starts hanging out with a girlfriend she met at school more and more. She starts telling me how bad she has it and she wants to leave, over and over, until I just don’t fight her on it anymore and tell her to just go. I would have ended it before, but I didn’t want her daughter to suffer. At one point she said she was going to leave while I was at a work conference, and I told her to go ahead. I spent the time at the conference checking singles ads, signing up for swinger sites and dreaming about something different. Then she says, “No, no I want to stay, I’m sorry.”
She’s hanging out with her friend even more. They start talking about a foursome between her and her husband and us. I’m not interested. They want to go to swinger clubs, but I’m not interested. They start “going to the beach” for the weekend, sometimes without any warning to me. One day, she finds my account on a singles site and accuses me of cheating. I admit my fault in looking, but I never cheated.
She asks me to work on her computer one day, and I decide to look around. I find dick picks from some guy. The photos are dated from a week I was away at a conference. I confront her, and she tells me she went on a date with a guy once and they kissed, but that’s it. I ask about the photos and she says they are old photos of an old boyfriend. I ask about the date on the photos and she doesn’t know. I go to show her and she had deleted the photos. Well this is what I do for a living so I recover them and show her. She still admits no fault, and now starts blaming me for it all. I didn’t show her enough attention, blah, blah, blah… I’m done.
I’m worried about her daughter, so I left and went to stay with my parents and let them stay there for a time. I was destroyed by what she had done, and things never got any better. She still has not admitted any fault to this day. I tried visiting with her daughter for a while but something always came up on her end. I tried to look at it as karma for my past and just did my best to move on. I didn’t waste any time and started looking online for dates. I had no intention of anything serious at this point, but I wasn’t taking time to heal for whatever reason. I started chatting with a girl for a few months and then we began dating.
More synchronicities came into play. My boss’ father had just passed away and she had a townhouse she needed to rent. I went to stay there for a while until the ex’s daughter finished the year in school. It was also a nice sex pad for the new girlfriend. When my ex was supposed to have moved out of the townhouse, she went into the hospital for some issue, which was pretty much a constant for her. I got a call from a neighbor that the townhouse had flooded. While she was away, a hose on the second floor bathroom sink came loose and the entire place was pretty much toast. It could have been seen as a disaster. What happened though was the ex was forced to move her stuff out overnight, and I got the whole townhouse remodeled with the insurance. Good news, bad news, who knows.
To be continued…
Evolving Psychosis 