There is one topic of conversation that I can’t speak of in this blog.  I use this blog as a cathartic release of my emotions and  to quiet the almost constant voices in my head.  I use this blog as a way to express emotions that bottle up in me, that are personal to the very health of my mental state, and I use this blog as a way to find my own center.  I am not overly concerned about the reception I receive, because just like in a diary, I don’t need acceptance.  I just need to write.

I actually started this blog to get rid of the hand cramping that came from trying to write as fast as my brain produces thoughts.  I am a much better typer than I will ever be hand writer; and not just because I have horrible tremors in my hands.  I never meant for people to really care what I wrote, although I love when I find someone who feels the same as I do that day.  There is freedom in understanding that perhaps I am not the only one out there who feels this way.

There is an amazing effect that happens when  I write something. Whatever I am writing about, whether it be a logical argument, an economic philosophy, or simply a character’s climatic understanding of something she never saw coming, once I write the words down they are out of my head forever.  Ever heard the old adage, “Let it out,”?  It describes my writing; a way to let out the truth of my life so that I can move on in either another direction or to the next scene.  It is a release, an honest expression of whatever I am thinking about so that I can rest.

I decided at this beginning of this blog journey that I wouldn’t give my friends and family access to this blog.  I would keep it safe, and use it as a place that I could tumble to when I desperately needed it.  When I had to quiet the voices screaming at me about some nebulous topic, or when the pressure to be something I am not got so great that I shut down rather than push through I would write exactly how I felt; I would be honest.  I have a horrible habit of shutting down rather than pushing through, but I acknowledge that truth.  This was a way to  possibly slow down the shutting down.

I gave my husband access to my blog.  Originally because I was so excited about responses that I received, and in my quest to share with my husband my life, I told him.   I do not believe that we need to share our lives with each other, not even spouse to spouse, but if there is something so basically important to me, I try to remember to share it.  And this blog, and its ability to give me peace is very important to me.  I don’t need the accolades or the comments, although I can on a certain level appreciate the kindness; but it isn’t my point and it isn’t the reason I can find dedication.  Honestly, I didn’t want to spend hours bent over pages in a book trying to write fast enough to keep my hands from hurting and my back from straining.  I simply wanted to write.

Because I gave my husband access to my blog, I can’t write about him. I can’t get off my chest the normal petty things that make up a real marriage; and I can’t work through the issues he brings to my table.  He is a vital part of my life, much more than even I will admit, but because I don’t want to hurt him and more importantly I don’t want to deal with the fallout, I don’t write about him much.

And there is a fallout with my husband; and whether I write about it or not, I am going to feel it.  He has the unique ability to lash out at me, and stab me at the places that count the most.  It is like he has patiently waited all these years to silently catalogue all the places that I am tender and when I am the most vulnerable he attacks.  And he does so maliciously and in a way I know he is not seeing, to the point that I don’t know how to react.

I don’t have any self-esteem; I have always had self-esteem issues that have caused additional problems in my life that I tried to understand.  I also hide the majority of my self-esteem issues because I hate that false kindness and compliments that come when you state what you believe to be a fact about yourself.  And yet, I have a husband who has the ability to continue the beating of my self-esteem.  And even now I can’t talk about it in detail. I can’t tell you what he did to make me want to write this blog in this way, because he will read it.  And when he reads it he will do one of two things: he will start a fight or he will hurt me on purpose to make it better.

Lashes from my husband are the most painful I have ever felt.  I think the fact that my daddy had to love me, kept his remarks as less powerful.  Maybe it was the fact that as a child I never truly thought my daddy could not love me, I thought it was an automatic thing; therefore, his words while powerful were backed by the illusion.  I know that my husband doesn’t have to love me, he doesn’t really even have to like me; and I truly don’t know if he does.  He may say it when he is sober, or when he wants something; but on a daily basis I often wonder.

I always thought a husband should find out your most basic needs and work to give those to you.  I have always thought a husband should go out of his way to protect you, not only from himself but from the very demons that you fight.  I always thought a husband should find his wife to be good, or sexy, or even worth his time. I always thought a husband should want to do everything he can to show his wife how happy he is just to be  married to her.  I have come to believe that this was an illusion started with romance novels and Hollywood, and the truth is that men simply are at their core selfish. And that breaks my heart; because I have cherished my dreams with the same devotion I have cherished my husband.

All marriages have fights, and all husbands are in a unique position to hurt their wives.  And I try to remember this, and not make a big deal out of how I am feeling.  I always wonder if the bi-polar I am experiencing makes the perception of my reality worse than it really is.  As if the very manic that causes me to take a handful of pills every day, also enlarges the moments of my marriage.  I never know if what I am feeling is in truth a congruent emotion to the situation; or if I am seeing things that aren’t really there.  If an impartial bystander could observe my true marriage, and not the one we put on for a crowd, what would they say?  Would they say it was all in my mind?

But I have also been in therapy long enough to know that you can’t ignore your own perceptions, that you have to believe in yourself enough to see that your definition of hurt is true to you.  And your needs or wants to have a husband that picks you up rather than throws you across the room is vitally important.  And what my husband will never understand, and there is no way to convince him of this, is that everything he faults with me would be so much better if I simply had a little bit of honest love.

I think that is one of the essential truths about myself.  With love I can literally move mountains of laundry, scale the heights of cleaning and lift the very lives of my children.  With complaints, insults, lashes of hurt I tend to do the exact opposite; which means I don’t do anything at all.  It is a truth my husband can not grasp, so instead he feels that by destroying the little bits of me that I protect will somehow help me.  Or maybe he just likes to hurt me.

He mostly does it when he is drinking, when he is tired or stressed; which translates into he does it a lot.  There is a story about this and my family meeting my husband the first time.  Their reaction to my husband was vastly different from what I ever expected; and their perception was vastly different from my own.  That has since gone away, since in my family when you love someone, every one else loves them too.  But it is there always in the back of my reality.

So now I have written a blog about my husband. He is going to read it and either hurt me further, hurt himself in a way that guarantees that I am affected, or he is going to bring it up in a week or two when he is drunk as normal.  And that destroys me because he won’t take any lesson, he won’t remember anything tomorrow, and in his mind he will eventually justify to himself that either I am not hearing him correctly or he didn’t really mean it.  But he did.

However, as it is my sixth month of writing this blog, one of the things I am figuring out about myself is that I have to write this. I have to get it off my chest and feel better.  I have to crumble the boulders in my mind so that I can move on.  I may have to be careful about what I write in regards to my husband, but I can still write.  Because otherwise, without the hope brought by the quieted voices, I may not stick around long enough to remember why it is this man is so vitally important to my very existence.  And if I don’t find my own personal freedom, I will eventually cut through the shackles that bound me to this earth.