Day 7: What a weakend (pun intended)

So the weekend didn’t go so well. I have to journal every day to keep me on track I think. I had a later night than usual on Friday as “a treat” but only around 11:30pm, so opted to wake up latest by 8.30am the following day. I was awake by 8am the next day, it was fine, and my sleep score was 96/100.

[Whay are treats always something that’s essentially damaging to us?]

Rather than sticking to the morning pattern I had in place, I opted to laze around in bed instead. I was treating the Saturday as If I had a day off from work, as though the self-work I was doing I required rest from. To be honest it felt like I did need a rest. Most of what I am putting in place probably sounds very simple to most people but it is mentally taxing, but maybe that’s because I was viewing it through a lens of something I didn’t “want” to do, and something I’m forcing myself to do because I need to.

Right now my head is very tired and full of things it doesn’t understand, so lets deal with that. Full transparency, is that I can’t give you full transparency. Some of the the things in my life aren’t just my thing to share, some of the the things that affect me aren’t my things to share at all. Such is the life of choosing to be committed to one person, you have to take the bad days along with the good, in whatever ratio those are metered out.

But this weekend was hard and good too.

The good. I’d organised to go bowling and minigolf with a friend and had invited my wife along too, which she had been very energised about. That sounds like I don’t want her to come to things like this. It’s not that, it’s that if I tell her we are doing something she won’t want to, and if I told her I was doing something without her, she’d feel left out and have feelings of FOMO. So I state that I am making plans, what those plans are, and then offer her to come should she want to.

Come Saturday, and her mental health kicked in along with the pre-event issues of not feeling like she wanted to do the thing she’d been so excited about. That’s hard to deal with every time we do something, to have the same “I don’t want to go” conversations. It does rob me of the momentum I had tried so hard to build up for myself. Once we made it to Bowling she did start to have a a great time, and we were very affectionate with each other. But then because she was having fun, her mental health stepped in and wanted to talk about the most horrific thing she is going through right now. It’s not something I can share here. I will always try and support her when she needs to talk about stuff, I just wish it could come out at times when we aren’t trying to have a nice time. I know that’s selfish of me, but there were 167 different hours that week that we could have spoken about it, and it’s exhausting to have it spoken about at a time I had tried so hard to elevate my mood to participate in life. It was even more exhausting to then switch back into to fun mode after the conversation was brought to a close.

Apart from that, bowling and minigolf were lots of fun.

Because I struggle to self-regulate emotions, or even experience emotions at all, the only way I’ve found to handle things like that is to isolate myself and be self-destructive. It must be a form of taking control. At least if I feel bad then I’m the one making me feel bad, and not anyone else. I wonder if that stems from the time my mum was dying of cancer and I couldn’t control or influence the outcome, it was something that life forced on me, perhaps I don’t ever want to feel like I’m in that position again. I don’t know.

Saturday night ended up being a slightly later bedtime at 12:30 pm, and although it was a later night I stuck to the hugely reduced mobile phone use, and played video games instead. But again, I slept Ok and Sunday morning I had a sleep score of 88/100.

But I hadn’t journaled, I hadn’t walked the dog, I hadn’t taken any vitamins and so on, and Sunday was even worse.

I woke up this morning to a sleep score of 46 after going to sleep past 4am.

Yikes.

Lets not try that coping mechanism again.

What went wrong yesterday. I had planned a date night for us around a fire, and watching an episode of a series we are currently working through. Watching an episode each night is something we do to have a point during the day to connect, however this had been absent the previous week and I think that has made me feel unwanted. So as a treat I got us something nice to eat and a bottle of white malbec to share (I know right??!! you don’t usually see white malbec)and we agreed to meet at 6:30pm for fire and tv time.

6:30pm came round and she had not come downstairs. 6:45pm and still nothing. I had to go upstairs to chase her. This again, made me feel unwanted, and that’s a hard thing for me to feel, despite the fact I always tell people I don’t want or need anything from anyone.

Rather than hold it in like usual, I was given an opportunity to share, as my wife asked me if there was anything she could do to help me with my mental health. I said the things she could help with would to be on time if we’ve agreed to do something together, rather than for me to need to chase her. Though I didn’t go into the emotions surrounding that. She asked what else she can help with, and I said nothing because I honestly didn’t have something else on my mind.

She said there must be something else, because I said things. I tried to assure her there wasn’t. She told me to tell her. That she will be worried sick if I don’t, because there must be something else, because I said things.

So I said do you want me to just make something up, because you’re not accepting what I am saying? Then I remembered a thing that is something that’s ongoing our lives so I flippantly raised that. We had spoken about this topic several months prior and the conversation had been productive and open. I was expecting that to be the same here, but instead I was met with pain and resistance, an upset wife, and her leaving the space I had created for us both.

In that moment I felt like I was being emotionally punished for saying the wrong thing. My wife left the space and I was left alone with a full bottle of malbec, which I then drank. I attempted to take ownership later that evening, for the way in which I had spoken about the topic, and although my apology was accepted it was from a frosty demeanour.

My attempts to connect us had backfired most spectacularly and I was left feeling very alone and sorry for myself. Hence why I had three more beers and stayed up until 4am as a way to punish myself harder than the emotional punishment I felt I had received.

The reality of the situation is that she was just feeling her emotions about a topic and seeking her own method of self soothing. I doubt there was any intention on her part to emotionally wound me in that moment, or in the hours that followed.

So here I am today. back on this horse of self care. I’m not off to a great start, but it is a start. I have to remind myself that all I ever have is this moment, and what has gone before is irrelevant, and what is to come is never set. My future is made from the small choices I make in each present moment.

I have had a shower. I have drank my vitamin soup. I have fed my animals. I’m not a bad person. I’m just a person that doesn’t understand how he feels, and trying to understand those feelings, is fucking exhausting. I’m scared.

I’m scared of who I am if I’m not depressed.