I am really a mess

[completelyscrewedup]

First post and let me say I am feeling a little wierd even reading a forum like this not to mention spilling my guts to strangers on the net.

 

Long story, seems tragic from my point of view, epic and sad and such, but I am willing to be that if I read a lot on here I would find it is pretty common, perhaps even mundane.

 

I have an ex that I was with for 15 years. We had quite a turbulent relationship. Actually, we had quite a turbulent life and the relationship was just part of it. When we met I was in my early 20's playing in a band full time for a living and she was one of those chics who liked band guys. But we hit it off instantly, I moved in with her the day after we met. For a couple of years we had an awesome whirlwind romance, something they make movies about.

 

A few years in, a lot of the realities of life started pressing upon us. I was not really able to support us in the way we wanted to live playing music, but had no job skills. She had medical training but a poor work ethic and simply would not keep a job more than a month or so. I made some bad, bad mistakes along the way including cheating, we een broke up twice, completely seperating for a couple of months at a time.

 

But we would eunite, and when we did for a time everything we really loved about each other would be in sharp ficus and all of our problems would seem to disappear.

 

To complicate things, I started making really good money selling drugs, and we were living it up for years. This is it's own bag of crap and I have since left all of that behind me. But, the real decline in our relationship, the time when things started really looking bleak for us, came after I quit selling drugs and we had to work to pay bills and support a family (my son came to live with us about 5 years before we split up). Her and I have no children together.

 

She got hooked on perscription drugs really bad and it was a constant struggle to try and get her to even want to get off of them. Xanax. Taking enough daily to kill an elephant. I got sick and tired of watching her destroy her mind with this stuff, and it wasn't simply that she was hooked, she enjoyed it. She is perfectly content to float through life with no goals or ambitions, just taking her drugs, smoking dope, painting and sitting around doing nothing.

 

When I was selling dope, playing music and especially before my son came to live with us, life was like we were on permanent vacation. When it came to an end, I saw friends and family passing us by, buying homes, building careers, building lives together, while her and I were doing nothing. By this time, she stopped even putting up a pretense of wanting to work or do anything to step forward in life.

 

If you are still with me, I appreciate your patience. I will say that I have not been the greatest man ever. I did cheat when I was younger, I had an inflated ego fueled by my musical endeavors and my drug money. But years before we split up we had agreed to leave any and all past transgressions in the past. Since then, I was loving, loyal and devoted. But the problems with drugs, when I stopped even smoking pot, and she would smoke with my kids in the house, not to mention her Xanac addiction; the problems with lack of ambition, we just really grew apart.

 

Two years ago I broke it off. It was very bad. There were weeks of late night suicide threats from her, terrible crap talking that I had the pleasure of hearing from many mutual friends. Within a month or two of breaking up we both jumped into what I guess would be rebound relationships. That was two years ago, and today we are both living with those rebound people.

 

This is where things for me get really messed up. I was over her I thought. But about 6 months ago thoughts of her have really been haunting me. Dreams, passing thoughts during the day, etc... I dream about just walking down the street in the hippie neighborhood we used to live in and holding hands. I seriously feel like she is literally haunting me. Even as I type this the feeling I am experiencing is like a crushing weight. I am not trying to entertain these thoughts at all. I do not want to feel what I am feeling. Suddenly I am really hating myself for letting her go, even though I know she was poison.

 

To make matters worse we both seem happy as hell with our current relatonships. My cuurrent girl deserves nothing but the best from me, nobody has ever treated me the way she does, but I am realizing now what I should have known two years ago, hat she was a rebound. I cannot make myself love her the way I should. The more time I spend with her, the more I miss my ex. to make matters worse, we all came up in the same group of friends, same music scene, etc... So every friend I have, reminds me of her. I cannot go anywhere in this city that my ex and I have not gone.

 

Is it normal this long after the fact to feel this way. I feel I made the worse mistake of my life letting her go, and even worse, she hates me because she feels I abandoned her (even though I paid many of her bills for months after we split up, got her car fixed, moved her into her new place, etc...). I have not seen or talked to her in almost two years. I have thrown away any object that she has ever given me or that had any attachment to her. I have cut off a great many of our mutual friends because I don't want to hear about her or her new lie, and yet there is always word of her being "leaked" to me. Just last night I had to tell a good friend to just shut up about her, you know, one of those friends that thinks she is a shrink and has some kind of wisdom to impart when in fact all she was doing is slashing open the wound.

 

This is not good for me. I feel it is mentally unhealthy to suddenly not be able to control these emotions. i can't stop thinking about her and it is really effecting my life. i feel hollow. I feel like a jerk because although I have not acted on any of these feelings, I feel just feeling this was I am betraying my current girlfriend, who deserves so much better. To top it off, my current girl is someone I dated 15 years ago before my ex and I met. I had not seen her until the ex and I split up, and she was the one my ex was running to to whine about how badly I was treating her. WE never even thought about hooking up until a couple of months after the ex and I split, but, now, here we are.

 

I just don' know how to cope. I don't see this feeling ever going away, but I know my reasons for leaving her were valid. I know that if the things people tell me about her are true, and she is indeed very happy with her new love, that it is for the best. But, I can't help but think that she might be in the same place I am. I do know that her apartment is still decorated with tons of things I bought her over the years. Well, kinda hard to avoid since everything she has owned for 15 years I bought her.

 

I just don't know how to cope. I admit, I am a moron. The one friend I have that I trust enough to discuss this with told me I am being a baby about it and that I need to just suck it up and move on. Easy for him to say. I hink I am feeling things now that I should have felt at the time. It was hard letting her go, but I knew it was best for my son and I to be free of her. Now I feel I should have stayed, that even all her problems and the complications they brought me were much easier to deal with than what I have been feeling for this last six months. Everything to me seems meaningless. Like it just does not matter anymore.

 

I know, I am sick, not right at all. I don't know if anyone here has any advice, just typing this all out has been a little cathartic for me.

[Nikki Sahagin]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, this is such a complicated story. I don't know I am really capable of saying anything that helpful. I mean to me it is words on a computor screen, to you it is your life.

 

Was this woman the love of your life? We never truly forget them....but maybe you never truly got over her, because you jumped straight into a rebound and didn't face the problems. Now they are resurfacing and now you risk hurting your current girlfriend who i'm assuming you do not truly love or, do not truly wish to be with. I don't know if i'd suggest leaving your girlfriend...if you love her then maybe you can work this out. But do you also love the last girlfriend too? Would you actually BE with her if you could? Or is it kind of a fantasy you look back on? You know that relationship was very unhealthy but those kinds of relationships usually are very addictive (in some ways literally if there were drugs involved) or maybe you are kind of having a midlife crisis and looking back at how good things seemingly were? But you know in reality, you stopped seeing each other for a reason...the relationship was going nowhere.

[2sure]

I am older than you, married , affluent (said laughingly) and fairly conservative.

 

I also have had what I like to refer to as a "colorful" life.

 

You have moved on from the things that were toxic in your life. Doesnt mean you dont still miss them -

The Drugs, the parties, the band, the lifestyle

But you dont go back because that way lies danger, it didnt work for you, you have a good life.

 

Like being an alcoholic...you can quit, never drink again - but you are still an alcoholic. You dare not have one drink.

 

She is part of that toxic life.

You're thinking maybe you can drink, just a little, and it might all be OK.

Dont do it.

[completelyscrewedup]

Thanx for your replies. I am thinking that of course I cannot go back. Aside from the fact that we are both in new relationships, the past is the past and going back just would not work out. I suspect I am romanticizing the good memories and burying the bad. But can't help but feel as though, and this sounds contradictory to what I just wrote, that I really derailed our lives by giving up on her. Like I stepped into some "wrong" parallel universe or something. The entire world to me seems ugly, not right. I don't know how to explain it. If you would have ever said i would feel this way after leaving her I would have laughed.

 

The worse part is the dreams, which occur almost nightly and have drivin me to insomnia. I wake from them with a terrible sense of loss, emptiness. She had a youthful exuberance at times that I sorely miss. i feel i have aged decades in the last two years, and, actually, within two months of parting with her gery hairs started appearing in my beard and hair, and this was before I even felt like i missed her. I remember the awesome feeling of a huge dark cloud being lifted he first day she was gone. god I wish I could feel that again instead of what I am feeling now.

 

I remember her threatening to kill herself and me wishing she would. God that sounds terrible, but at the time it is how I felt. I offered to pay for her to move out of town when we split so she could be close to old friends and her family. At the time her sole reason for staying was so she could be here, so that, in her words "when you get over this we can be together again". Then, two months later, we are both in committed relationships again.

 

That is my problem. I did jump right into the next thing, not even wanting to but it just sort of happened. She was there and i think subconciously I used her to bury any residual feelings I had for my ex, and now like toxic waste they have resurfaced.

 

The dreams are the problem, how do you control what you dream about? How do you control the things like the smell of incense bringing back a flood of memories?

 

And, irony of ironies, I find myself doing more of the things that she always wanted to do. Not deliberately, but it seems that my taste in music has gotten more like hers was, things like that.

 

I feel cursed. I guess I have to accept that this is life now, it won't change, it won't go away, and every day I live with my current girl I am living a lie.

 

Why does this have to be so complicated? Why can't I just shut it off like I did before? One of her worst complaints about me was that I was jsut an unfeeling uncaring bastard at times, cold. Why can't I be that bastard now?