When you’ve been involved with a person for a good enough amount of time and have made many decisions together (from the major to the mundane), you develop the habit of telling this person things. Telling, of course, isn’t the same as talking with the person. It’s just telling them things. Some times they turn into conversations but it’s just, to me, another form of chatter. Interestingly, this habit seems to be a bit more ingrained than I’d imagined. There are some real changes developing in my life at the moment. Things are brewing if you will. They are very positive and exciting and I’ve shared some of it with my closest friends and family. I have not, however, divulged any of it to ExMutant. And I don’t plan to until everything is done and the new chapter begins. However, I have had to make a conscious effort to shut my trap and that is one of those quirks that come up with divorce and separation that drive me batty.
There is still a part of me that wants to pick up the phone and just tell him things, ramble for a few minutes. It’s not at all a fulfilling or productive exercise and in fact can possibly have some upsetting or harmful outcomes but it was just such a habit of mine to talk at him that it’s been tough to clam up. It is a learning process, the whole “this is my life not our life” concept. Usually the best method I’ve come up with to sort through what to share and what not to share is asking myself, “Does this affect our children and if so at one point and to what extent?”. In the current situation, when everything falls into place the way I want it to, it will indeed affect our children; however, it’s not going to have any type of effect immediately and the timeline is still hazy. So, that puts it under the Don’t Tell column.
When we separated lives, it was startling to me how much “I” became “We” and “My” became “Our”. For my personal situation, I feel it was too much. I think I sacrificed way too much of the me to make the we work. It, too, becomes a habit. At least, it did for me. I sacrificed careers, friendships, and to a very large extent my own concepts of right and wrong as well as my personal standards. When the we evaporates, the me is not the most natural thing to pick up with again. It is exciting though. There’s been a huge process of self re-discovery that I could never anticipate the scale of. Sometimes it’s chilling. I like to compare it to a waking limb– feeling it tingle and prick as it wakes up from being asleep. It feels good, in an uncomfortable way, to regain feeling in parts of you that had become numb.
What’d You Say?