Toxic Stress,  Karma, and (re) Building a New Life

I’ve reached the endgame with my soon-to-be-ex wife.  She has been steadfast in her refusal to engage in any way in a settlement discussion, so we will go to trial.  By the end of January, I will be divorced.

I will also be broke.  In fact, I am so broke that I can no longer afford a lawyer.  So I will be naked in court.  Makes me wonder if it is even worth turning up.  Given that she has plead poverty throughout these proceedings, I wonder how it is that she is able to pay her legal fees, which will be in the region of $300,000 for the trial…or really how she has paid any of it up until now.

It is my birthday.  I found myself feeling guilty about treating myself to something.  I will have a quiet day at home with my children, surrounded by the people I love most.   We will be joined by a dear friend who I have come to love in a way, but who is not a love interest.

Such is the way of things with most women in my life.  They come in, are insatiably curious, and I think they may be “interested”, but find that in the end, they are not.  The significant difference is that when they discover that I have romantic feelings for them, things don’t get awkward or end as they did when I was male-bodied.

It amazes me how toxic stress steals away from me the muse to write.  I am normally prolific, especially on my non-blog projects.  But I cannot face writing them.  The absence of whimsy is the first thing which rushes in when I am this stressed.

Stress is largely an alien feeling to me.  When it comes, I don’t feel equipped to deal with it.  I don’t have the coping mechanisms.  My only thought is to exercise.  This at least as the convenience of giving me an emotional release.  I nearly always cry when I run.

In general, I am crying a lot.  I know my children will ask me to read them a Christmas story.  They always do this even though they are grown up.  I will cry.  I always have.  Always will.  Only this time I see myself reacting like a 1950’s damsel in distress, throwing myself onto the bed and sobbing.  Somebody slap me!

When my kids went to the basement to bring up the boxes of Christmas decorations, we discovered that my former partner also helped herself to all of the decorations, taking 2out 3 boxes and select items from the remaining boxes.  Let’s not kid ourselves, the ones she left are not the nice ones.  

For some reason I was very calm about it.  My children were very upset.  The decorations are languishing in a storage unit, not to be enjoyed by anyone.  I took a perverse joy in the self-harm she is committing vis a vis the children, but rational me doesn’t wish this for them.  Only it is good to see that they can see what I have been dealing with without telling them.  I am also calm though because to do such a thing, the perpetrator must be really going through it.  First, she must really miss a life that the tree and the decorations symbolize.  Never mind that she took it from herself.  Second, to behave in this way speaks volumes of the depth of her despair.

Indeed, she has become ugly.  That is how hate transforms your features.  I have a constant struggle to fend off hate. Anger is what I feel, and this has come to dominate my therapy sessions.  Its okay to be angry, but not ok to let it linger.  It is hard not to wish ill of someone who is so awful to you.  And for me, the hardest part of this process is this emotion.  It is toxic, and I don’t want it in me.  It is hard not to resent it, impossible not to own it.

In the meantime, this morning whilst checking into my flight in the first-class enclave which is British Airways’s way of maintaining the class system, the steward kindly offered me an upgrade from the First Lounge to the Concorde lounge. In decades, this has not happened.

My interpretation was the energy is flowing.  We can allow ourselves to be destroyed by life, to be bitter.  And I am not saying that it does not take its toll.  It does.  Or that I am perfect or even good of letting go of stress, anger, for I am not.  I am barely sleeping.

But once we give in to the feelings of ill, we become ill, we become consumed by hate.  We become ugly.  I don’t want that, so even when it is hard, I am able to let go to a degree.  To laugh.