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Ryn. Sorry not to reply earlier, but thanks so much for asking. I seem to be in such a painful haze at the moment, that I'm finding it hard to gather my thoughts. I realise I'm doing a huge amount of deliberately not thinking and feeling, because I'm in such emotional pain. I think my biggest problem is that with all the awful shocks of the last two years, I am in deep grief and mourning many losses. I've just returned from the small supermarket I sometimes visit, having cried all the way there, quite forgetting that my mascara is not waterproof. So I must have looked quite a sight at the checkout with stripes of black warpaint down my face! Oh well, the times I can cry are probably good, since so often, I'm just blank on the surface.
I think this grief is making me feel even more the need for
human comfort, above all. I just need to be around someone who loves me. And I need some hugs. Pretty basic, I guess. The fact that I seem to be in a wide-ranging process of setting boundaries with people, boundaries that should have always been in our relationships, but were not, feels like it is making it worse. So there is a real seismic shift going on in my life en route to my healing (I hope). It is like the ground is being razed in preparation for a new life, but before I can see any new life sprouting anywhere, and without any assurances that it will sprout.
And I am still in real shock after the sequence of events last Wednesday. As part of the fall-out, I've had to deal with one of my ex-boyfriends yesterday and today. He was the first man I loved but did treat me appallingly in a number of ways in the end. It took me a long time to get over it all, and it was really damaging for my self-esteem; for many years I had nothing to do with him. But there was great value alongside the rubbish in our relationship - a major parallel in our senses of humour; we could always play like seven-year olds together, despite our age differences; and since he had once been my tutor, we have a lot of academic interests in common.
Eventually, we were separately invited to an event and got talking again, and, of course, our lives had moved on. So we kept in touch as friends/colleagues, and it seemed as if it was going to be fine.
But, he tends to drink rather a lot and phone calls with him might start off fine and fun, but descend into him becoming increasingly sleazy with me. I haven't handled it very well, and have tended to ignore it or change the subject, which I think he reads as permission to continue.
Our last call, though, was just prior to the onset of my PTSD and we spoke about his refusal to sleep with me once I had confided in him that I'd been raped (the first person I told ten years after being attacked). I don't remember how the subject even came up, and I certainly wasn't accusatory. He responded really badly (for me) to this, minimising and deflecting it, and linking it with tacitly asking for my permission to have yet another new girlfriend. I am really years beyond caring about his sexual pursuits with ever younger women, but this conversation hit me like a ton of bricks again. And all the deeply-felt rejection of my femininity due to my rape came back with a vengeance, and yet again, I took it inside and beat myself up about it.
So telling him yesterday of my diagnosis was like bringing it all back up again. I did so by e-mail, and he is evidently very shocked and has only found a very few words so far. I guess it is another test of his maturity (or lack of it), even at his great age (;)), to see whether he'll depart from my life again, deal with it sensitively or what. So it is rather too important to me, I realise, how he will respond. Ridiculous, ridiculous and highly irritating, but, even though I've long since stopped being in love with him, I do love him and I know he loves me, in a sort of almost family-like way now. He is an idiot in so many ways, but I have great compassion for him, due to how much he was also hurt as a child. I don't think I can stand to lose yet another person who has been so important in my life. I can't though allow any of the rubbish aspects of our relationship to continue, so it is a case of "You can be in my life if you respect and support me in the way I respect and support you. Any taking for granted or being sleazy, particularly when I've got PTSD, and you're out." I wish it wasn't so hard. But I guess it is a valuable life lesson....
