How did you meet someone else?
It’s been a year. I’ve done my healing as best I can. I hardly want to be alive but I’m going to update for anyone out there who may care.
After my ex left, in his wake I had to figure out everything. I felt paralyzed. I still can’t get a date and I’ve realized I can’t have casual sex. My home life is suffocating often, I don’t have privacy or space to myself. I quietly hope I don’t get ra/ped when I do go out and try to meet people. Meanwhile, I accidentally found out that my ex went home to our home city and started a business in the kink scene there. He took aspects of my identity that he used to demean in front of friends (gender identity stuff), and now is using those same terms to describe himself. After years of telling me how exhausting I was for liking certain types of kink, and that he either was too excited to have consensual discussions or that he was too tired to talk about it after he’d do things like randomly start engaging in new kinks that we hadn’t discussed, he’s posed himself as a safe person and is claiming to be solo polyamorous. I don’t think he’s being safe but I can’t stop it. It’s firetrucking gross. He left me saying he wanted no obligations to anyone, only to employ the lowest accountability language possible to dovetail his way into a scene where people are often pushed to give the benefit of the doubt. For what it’s worth, in the end when he was spinning out at my expense, I actually remained open to changing our relationship to poly, and being gender fluid myself, had always encouraged exploration in that subject. I don’t think I deserved to be the learning ground he used and abused in order to get to whatever his current track is, and quite frankly, he doesn’t sound like he’ll ever do the healing work.
However, I’m left with both the physical and emotional scars he left on me, and he’d play it for an ‘oopsie well I had to find my truth’ (aka I needed socially acceptable language to destroy a long term relationship and firetruck whoever I can). Nice. I do deserve a kind partner who I don’t need to teach empathy to at this stage, but…
I’m struggling. I’m about to move again and the situation is tenuous. I’m still vulnerable in the sense that I don’t have much money. The housing contract I’m in is with a friend but it’s rather complicated. I’m hoping it will all work out because if things go as we hope, I’ll finally be living alone and then maybe I can find anyone to date me and actually show me kindness so I can embark on healing from my sexual trauma, which has been near impossible. I pay over 1k a month for a room where I keep my desk, my cat furnitire, my bed and paper thin walls. I’d like to think this is a symbol of my survival but who the firetruck would want me in this mess? At least if things work out with my next place I won’t need to keep literally all my possessions in one room, but there’s a lot of details that are out of my hands.
I’m tired. I’ve gone to therapy, I’ve done the work, I have sorted through my regrets. I have a mountain to cross with career stuff, I am extremely keen on staying in the country I was abandoned in, because if it fails I end up back in the United States and I simply can’t stomach it. I’d love to get sterilized. I want enough to pay my bills and renew my visa and feed my cats. I have begun to realize there were abuses committed to me at the end of the relationship, in the midst of the MLC, that I or no one could possibly deserve, no matter what mistakes I regret on my own part. I want to receive the love I deserve (and no I don’t believe that one has to reach some arbitrary goal post of life to fully deserve such things, I am actively working on what I need regardless and I am ready to be loved and actually cared for for once in my life).
I want to die in the sense that I have only experienced existence as survival for a very long time; I want to live in the sense that I would just like things to be vaguely okay.
Has anyone else had a spouse or partner leave and then disingenuously use the language of polyamory to excuse their actions? I find it ethically disgusting. I will never seek out my ex again and I leave him to the spiral of his MLC, knowing he won’t get what he deserves, but with any luck I will.