sex addicts and fiestaware

I attended my first meeting today. I have never been a part of a 12 step program before and it wasn't like i envisioned. 

I laughed, I cried, I cried some more. It was helpful to be able to tell total strangers how I feel like I have been living a lie not just the past two years of my life but the last four. How I am afraid that I am going to not recognize the signs of a co-dependent relationship and fall back into the same patterns. These are valid fears and something I will be working on for a long time to come. I can hope and pray that this is just one of those life lessons that I finally needed to have. I was angry on the drive home: "Why the fuck should I have to deal with this on top of everything that has occurred in the last four years, how come this is my life? How come this is warranted; if everything happens for a reason then what is the reasoning for this!?"
This is a lesson I have not yet learned. I can pretend and dance around the issues all I want but in the end, they always come back to haunt me. Maybe this broken relationship hurts more now because my clock is ticking and I thought we were moving forward in our all-american dream: house, car, mommy, daddy, baby. I never properly dealt with the issues of my other broken relationships; trust, communication, geography, needs and wants etc. These things are true about my last relationship: I was verbally abused; I was afraid of the red flags but stayed in because I wanted the companionship. I allowed him to manipulate me. I have no sense of proportion...he is incredible at compartmentalization, we were both screwed from the start.


I was told that "If I want to feel sad I should live in the past, if I want to feel anxious I should focus on the future, but if I want to feel happiness I should live in the now."
All I can think of is Garth in Wayne's World saying "Live in the NOW!"

I have been reading She's Come Undone. This is one of those books that I have carried with me through the years; I first read it when I was thirteen. I appreciate the fact that this book was written by a man and yet is probably the closest thing to the "female experience" as far as fiction books are concerned. This is one of the cathartic activities I have been trying to reintroduce back into my life. Other cathartic activities that need to come back: writing in my journal (this blog is pretty much that but you don't get to know everything), pastels, yoga... there are others but I haven't done them in so long I cannot remember.

After my meeting, I made my way to Ellicott City for some shopping. I had forgotten it was a Saturday and that meant other people who were there for the same thing I was: antiques, live music and atmosphere. I was really there to shop for some Fiestaware. Now that I am going to be living on my own again, I decided I would do something I always wanted to do: collect Fiestaware! I have always loved the art deco shapes and bright colors and moving in to my new apt next month makes me want to have Fiesta. So I wandered around and poked and prodded and saw a few things but nothing mind blowing. I settled for four yellow dessert plates and a soup plate for $25.

a vintage red carafe with intact cork.

I just want to live. Alone or with someone else, i just want a life.

It's been years

Literally, years. 


I have been in Maryland for four years now. In that four years I:


* Quit my job at Starbucks that i thought would last FOREVER
* Started seeing my Ex D for a year or so and then found out through his mother that on a trip to Florida a few months before he had cheated on me with a girl and now they have a baby together, but they are not together. 
* Began working in what I think is my true professional calling: Recreation Therapy
* Re-connected with the man I thought was to be my husband, my true love B. And then two years later (now) I come to find out that he had been having online web cam girl relationships "with 100's of girls" on the internet and was/is financially supporting one of them. If you see Barebonebacon on your screen, run the fuck away. 
* Lived in a huge, expensive two bedroom, two bath, two living room, laundry room, kitchen, back porch, blah blah blah apartment and am now in the process of moving in to a one bedroom one bathroom third floor walkup; and i couldnt be happier.




I am ready to leave this place. I want to just throw it all down and say "Ok, Maryland. You WIN!" My heart feels like it cannot get any more dramatic and pathetic for me. You walk around trying to be a good person and do the "right" things. I listen to Neil Young "Heart of Gold" and i think "exactly." 

You put all your eggs in one basket and the basket keeps getting knocked out of your hand. With B, I didn't even WANT a relationship. He treated me so well in the beginning and I just felt so connected to him because we had met when we were younger (15,16) and had never had the chance to be together because dun dun DUN I had to leave Texas and move back to Maryland. I thought "Ok he is nothing like D, I am allowed to be happy and feel love and I'm worth it." and now fast forward all the way to today and what i would GIVE to whisper in my own ear "Don't go see him, just because fate brought him to Maryland it does not mean shit." The world is such a funny place now, with the internet. I feel empty inside. Not bad, like barren, but empty, like someone just took the trash out of my trash can. 


I am going to give her another year. Maryland can have one more year of my life. If the world doesn't end and I wake up on May 28th 2013, I will be packing a uhaul and heading back west to my life I left in Utah. A life in the mountains, with no car, with fresh air, with creeks and rattlesnakes. With old, good friends and Burts and Blue Plate and State Street. I feel healed and safe next to the Great Salt Lake. I feel alive with my toes warm in the springs in Meadow. I want to buy a home there and be a Rec Therapist and have my cat and dog and not work on the weekends and spend time with Oma. 


I get so angry when I think about how duped I feel. He is the one with the problem, I am the one driving over an hour every Saturday morning to Clarksburg to attend COSA meetings. It makes me furious that he let me believe his lie for so long. I should be grateful that it didn't last that long in the grand scheme of things; and i should know better that just because something looks good on paper and to everyone else around me, DOES NOT mean that it it bullshit proof. Nothing in this life is bullshit proof. 

So I guess I get to be angry for awhile. Angry but getting therapy. I just hope that when Chris Hansen asks B why he felt the need to visit an underage girls house for sex, that B remembers me saying "You are going to be on TV one day and then you are going to go to jail and I will be somewhere warm and comfortable with my children watching you throw your life away."