All Over But the Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

 Oh my, this has no shortage of applications today, no?  Where does one start?

We'll whistle past the graveyard of past being prologue. Stuff I feared four years ago is coming to fruition, but aren't our worst fears the things that have already happened?

I'm in the process of reorganizing the inside of my head. It's been a lifelong process, but unlearning what you have been taught often is. I keep weighing reality as I know it against reality as I perceive it. This is the work of living with depression, constantly working against one's perceptions. No matter how astute they might be, they are also mightily subjective.

Life goes on, whether or not you choose to participate. People live and die, and all this is in the background. Until it becomes present, urgent, needs to be fixed right now. 

Except:  after a certain point, one needs to accept that not everything can be repaired. And just because you can, does it mean you should?

Thinking about a former friend and his wife. Every time hubby and I got together with them, we had to win over the wife. Literally. Every freaking time. It was like rolling that boulder up the mountain. If she allowed us to get to the end of the evening, she was relaxed, and hubby and I would look at one another and say "Oh, good.  Next time should be better."

Except next time, we were back to square one. And some days she decided we didn't get a whole evening. Or if we did, she'd be squirreled away in a corner where she didn't have to deal with us. 

This is analogous to the stuff I am working through. All the phone calls where I was put on the defensive, because a certain someone "needed to address" whatever the fuck was on her mind at the moment, and all the time I was expected to apologize for hurting her feelings, breaking some unwritten rule or some other vague wrongdoing.

If I were keeping score, same person hurt me, intentionally, time and time again over decades. I let the transgressions pass, because I was expected to, for the sake of everyone's peace and comfort, regardless of what it cost me. 

And good Lord, if I looked askance at anyone, I would be summarily banished until I came cowering, quivering and apologetic to the door. If I questioned, I was admonished for questioning. Or, there would be the blaming of the victim. I was so often asked "So what did YOU do?" As if I deserved whatever abuse came my way. 

It took telling my therapist all this to make me see, through someone else's eyes, that this is bullshit. 

This last time, I apologized one last time, and was still in the wrong.

So? I'm done. 

I still have my moments of grieving, but at least I know peace now.