Making note

I'm not sure if I'm looking for someone to blame or just revealing those deeper truths I wrote about in my last post, but I've realized something I think I should make note of and explore further.

After my husband and I moved from my home state to the northeast, I developed a strong friendship with one of his friends. We became very close. Slowly I began to see my husband become more and more resentful of the friendship and eventually he told me that if I continued to talk to this person he was going to continue to be angry and irritable. I cried a lot of tears over this, but I followed my husband's lead and stopped talking to his friend. One weekend when my husband went out of town, I called the friend and told him what had happened -- crying all through the conversation. Since that time, I never initiate conversations with that friend or talk to him very long or in depth, when we do speak. There is a wall of silence and understanding.

Knowing what I know now, I realize in many ways I was intriguing with this friend, I was obsessed with him at some level. I simply appreciated the fact that he would talk to me, and laugh with me, and was not so self-absorbed in his work that he didn't have time for me. I don't believe I was sexually attracted to him, but I do see signs of my sex and love addiction -- as I'm sure my husband did, without understanding what it was all about.

My realization today is that it was just a few months after I ended this friendship at my husband's insistence, that I began to seek out other men via the Internet, and eventually began to meet them for offline affairs.

The layers of truth keep coming.

Where am I?

In response to my sister's question, "How are you doing today?" I responded:

"I'm doing fine."

In response to a blog reader who wrote to check in and note my absent silence, I wrote:

"I'm not sure where I am to be honest -- somewhere between here and there, feeling shifts, as I have been for years, but uncertain at times if I'm capable of dealing with them. Like you, I've uncovered new things ... they relate to ... my own fundamental fears and faulty thinking. The truth is deeper than I realized.

The fear of what lies beneath these shifts takes me back to a familiar place ... a place where I feel pleasure and pain, freedom and imprisonment."

In response to EC about why I was not writing to him, I wrote:

"I really just feel like I've backed myself in a corner in every relationship I have. I've done it to myself, I'm not whining, nor seeking reassurance -- I just feel that there is no where to turn anymore. There's no where to turn, because my need to be perfect blocks my willingness to be honest. My need to be perfect is based on a fear of judgement, thus rejection. It's flawed thinking. I know. I can hardly even write these words because this fear grips me so completely. The irony is, that in the process of running away from rejection, I have closed myself off completely from acceptance.

I sat in (my therapist's) office yesterday and started crying at the thought of how very scared I am to be an honest human being, to give up that alter ego of disease, to not have dishonesty to hide behind. The idea of being whole, though I want it -know that it is God's will for me, scares me to death. I fear I cannot function. Is that a cop-out? Maybe. I don't know. I just know I felt that fear completely sitting there with her."

Where am I? That's a deep, dark secret that even I don't know.