I really think my reluctance is bc I am just not at all sure yet what I want my life to look like in the next few years. Perhaps as EMDR is helping me come out of my own 'fog'. There really is almost nothing left of the life I used to have. The 'gift' of that is an almost clean slate and very few obligations to anyone or anything but myself. So I'm really not sure. And tbh, I associate cats with a feeling of 'home' and I don't know what home is anymore. Or even if I want one. I have a house but no feeling of home. Well, other than my allotment strangely which has become my new safe place I think. I will let time and instinct do its job...
Quite a while ago, to manage the boundaries of my own sanity, I had a mental trick called the 'No F'ing Idea' Box. It let me throw things in that either I just couldn't know yet or when I didn't have enough info. A way to train myself to stop mind-reading the incomprehensible or trying to fix the unfixable or stuff I didn't own. The box got quite full after a while lol. I suspect I am just beginning to unpack that box for myself now in planning what next.
As I am farther away from the truly WTF times and also my connection to the h I used to know (or think I did), part of working out my own story is chewing lightly on alternatives. Balancing facts and bits that don't add up. Probably hunting a simpler story to pack away maybe. I truly don't know what happened mostly. My h had a depressive breakdown - I saw that and it was professionally documented - and then he stopped behaving like the person I knew and stopped behaving like a sane decent adult. Or at least towards me. He chose to shrug off his old life and to make a new one without me. And behaved consistently as if my thoughts, feelings and even my life were now completely irrelevant to him. As Acorn says, I was a chair...perhaps less, a memory of an old chair lol. If I play devil's advocate, could all that have just come from wanting to be with another woman and not liking the practical consequences of it much? Maybe. I only know that he didn't behave like a reasonable decent person, that he was under psychiatric care and that I could not have treated him as he treated me after almost 20 years and that none who knew him before could recognise the new him either. So, with regard to my xh, there is still quite a lot in the box and bc he refused to talk to me and has burned every bridge that might allow that in the future, I shall probably never know. The simple fact is that my h decided to change his life and that I deserved no voice, vote or concern. Brutal way to treat another human being imho, and I have no idea what caused him to do so or how that choice will work out for him.
But, with time, it has got easier to accept the presence of the NFI Box and to just pull out the bits that matter to me and my choices and my solo recovery from what was an almost unbearable season of my life. Which feels like a pretty good sane constructive place to be.