2020 – The Year of the Great Social Upheaval

This year is not turning out the way any of us wanted. The Covid-19 pandemic has turned the world upside down. There is the very human loss of life, which is agonizing for the families and friends of the thousands who died. There is the loss of personal freedom of movement as millions are under strict restrictions that prohibit gathering with friends and loved ones, even for such milestones as weddings and funerals. There is the loss of financial stability for millions who can no longer earn their livelihood in these uncertain times.

So what I’m saying is that I realize that I’m fortunate more so than perhaps billions of people on this planet. I have a job that allows me to work remotely even before the closure of offices around the world. I have a comfortable home that permits me a safe and cozy place to self-quarantine stocked with electronics, internet access, wine, food, and soft blankets. I am reminding myself of how very fortunate I am because all is not well in Nicole-land.

Thankfully, it’s not my physical health. Some of you have been worried about my silence on the blog for the last few months. Rest assured, my last dermatologist appointment went extremely well. No bullet holes, no “let’s keep an eye on this” notes in my chart. What a glorious relief to mark my five-year milestone! I celebrated by going on a rock-and-roll themed cruise with one of my closest friends, a long overdue girls’ trip to be silly and have some fun and blow off steam. Then I got to spend time with my best friend both before and after the cruise.

But all was not well in Nicole-land upon my return. I am ordinarily very reserved and not forthcoming about my life on this blog outside of the cancer thing. I am super uncomfortable talking about things on an emotional level and if you didn’t know that by now, you probably haven’t read much of my blog. This build-up is to show how difficult it is for me to open up now. But this blog was therapy for me in the dark days of my diagnosis and an outlet for me to vent during my recovery. And so, I am going to use this forum for me to talk about something personal in the hopes that if one other person reads this and identifies with me, then that person can know they’re not alone.

I am married to an addict. It hurts my fingers to type that sentence because the number of people on this planet that know that fact is less than the number of stitches from my melanoma excision. People who are partnered with addicts will understand when I say there is some weird shame involved, as if your love wasn’t enough to help the person overcome their demons. It’s bullshit and no one except the addict himself (or herself) can want to make the lifelong commitment to get the help needed to make significant change. But that shame tends to isolate the partner of an addict.

Being married to an addict means that your emotions and experiences are shunted to the side while those of the addict take center stage in your relationship. Being partnered with an addict means that you no longer can enjoy feeling trust and security in your relationship. Being with an addict is emotionally draining and turns you into a person who feels like you must constantly check on the other person to make sure that their behaviors aren’t sending them into a spiral. It’s incredibly heart-breaking when you love someone who can only love their addiction.

If you have been with an active addict when the maelstrom of confusion and uncertainty and all of the other emotions that tie you into knots wondering “what the hell is happening here”, then you understand how deeply, deeply unsettling it is to start to see the signs and patterns repeating. When I returned from the cruise, I was confronted with the stomach-dropping knowledge that my husband had relapsed after nearly five years.

I tried to talk to him about it. I tried to make him understand that I knew the spiral was starting again and trying to be supportive to help him see where things were heading. But an addict is the most selfish individual on the planet and the addiction is an all-encompassing mistress for someone who cannot or will not face the fact that they have lost control of their demon. I took a week to try to come to grips with what I needed to do, hoping that he would realize his secrets were causing significant strain and for him to ask for help again.

But instead, the stress of his double life ramped the tensions exponentially in a matter of days. If you were to tell me that I would be typing these words a week ago, I would have scoffed at you. Surely, things wouldn’t go downhill so fast… surely we would band together as a team to confront this once more, knowing we were able to beat it into submission previously. We had made so much progress together…

Saturday night, the tinderbox exploded. His anger at me because I was so tense trying to make him realize I was a person he was about to hurt again sent him into such a rage that he hit me with a bag of takeout food in the middle of a public street in full view of our friends, spewing the contents all down my back. He screamed at me that he was sick of my shit and wanted a divorce. I stood in shock as he stormed away. Never in all of the years of battling his issues had he ever done anything physical and he had never said that he wanted a divorce. I went home alone to clean up. He later sent a text, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m staying at [a friend’s] tonight.”

I spent a sleepless night, tossing and turning and wondering where he was, what he was doing, who he was doing it with. Sunday, I spent all day researching options. And Monday morning, in the midst of increasing lockdowns of public services, I went to the courthouse and filed for divorce. I know some readers may think that it’s sudden, that I didn’t give us a chance to work through things. But I promised myself the last time that I went through utter hell with him that I couldn’t do another round. Because there had been previous rounds and the cycle eventually always reasserted itself – whether it took months or years to surface again. But the last time, the last time was so horrific and so damaging that it took all of my emotional strength to not fall apart while carrying the burden for both of us. For an addict in recovery, they get to be selfish. They get to solely concentrate on exorcising their own demons. They don’t have the bandwidth to confront the damage they’ve wrought on those closest to them until much later when that pain seems like a distant memory. “Surely I couldn’t have been that bad…” But the spouses, the partners, we have to not only be supportive and caring to someone who has deeply hurt us time and time again, we spend so much energy on the needs of the recovering addict, there is precious little energy for our own emotions and needs until it seems like our trauma has been diminished by the passage of time.

And if you have a narcissistic addict (and many are) there is the double whammy of the addict’s needs will always come first. That is the unwritten rule when living with a narcissist. You, as the partner or spouse, may have had terrible psychic damage done as a result of the addict’s behaviors but your recovery takes a backseat to theirs. In times of normality, it is a difficult situation to have your needs and emotions negated by your partner; but in times of the spiral, when an addict uses you as a proverbial punching bag, blaming you for their failures and their unhappiness, it is absolute hell.

My husband, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, is a high functioning addict most of the time. He holds a decent, high-paying job. He seems like he has his life together if you look at him from the outside. But he has troubling gaps in his employment record when his addiction has overridden his ability to effectively perform his job. It is explained away that the department was downsizing or the company was moving in a different direction or he really just wanted to change directions. He gets to appear as the carefree guy with the nagging wife when the reality is the wife is cautious and fearful of when that next relapse is going to occur, knowing that she knows the subtle signs that maybe even he himself doesn’t recognize. And with this divorce, he will paint the picture that he “wasn’t happy for a long time” because of his bitchy wife.

At this point, I don’t care what other people think about my motivations for taking such a sudden, drastic step. My very close friends have been brought into my confidence this past week because I need their strength to help me get through leaving someone I loved for two decades, a person that up until very recently I was planning years into the future with. Some expressed utter shock; some said that they thought there was something off with him lately and now it made sense why we were both so tense. When he discovered that I was telling friends about our split, he was worried that I was going to bad-mouth him (not that he worried about me and how I was doing, only what hit his public persona may take). Readers, I want you to know that I am not bad-mouthing him at all. I am merely stating my truth. And my truth is that I deserve to live without feeling responsible for the actions and thoughts and emotions of a person who can only think of himself. That my ability to find peace will never be honored if I stay. That I accept that my needs and emotions aren’t as valuable as another’s if I stay. That my future will be a lifetime of policing someone and worrying constantly when the next shoe will drop if I stay. My truth is that despite how gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, and utterly miserable it is to leave a marriage that I built with love and plenty of tears, everything I have is not enough to save him, to save us.

My only option is to walk away…