The guilt is still too much.  You could send me to therapy for months and I still don’t think I could ever be convinced that I am good for anyone to have as a partner.  I love loving people, but at the same time, I just want to save them from me. Where’s my sign that says, “For god’s sake, run for your life!!”?  I honestly don’t want to hurt anyone, but then again, I didn’t want to hurt Asher.  And yet if there is one thing I succeeded in accomplishing in our marriage, it was just that.

And I’m still hurt. I’m terrified of the one thing that I want more than anything in my life.  Like Dwayne says about himself, I want to be truly known by someone else.  But the intimacy that it involves, the vulnerability that it requires, seems to me too much to risk right now. 

I want love and laughter and security and sex…my vagina LOVES sex. lol. But I haven’t had any of those things since my marriage went to shit.  And I can’t convince myself that I deserve any of those things right now.  It just feels like, at this point in my life, I should still be going through a mourning period.  I really jacked up what God blessed me with. I don’t deserve to be happy with someone else yet.  I honestly don’t think I even know how to be. 

He is inspiring. He makes me laugh and feel comfortable.  He’s what I want but not what I can have. He’s not what I deserve and I have no right to him.  God knows I don’t have a clue what to do with blessings in my life…

February 19, 2008 at 5:05 p.m.
Alright, Dwayne asked me an interesting question that I've been thinking about for a day now...don't know why, just can't come up with my answers very quickly on these damn "intimate" topics.   He asked:

"When was the last time your cried?  You know, a really good cry.   What was it about? Is it a resolved issue?"


Hmmm, the last time I cried.  Last Thursday night actually.  The first cry I had had in a LONG time (and let me tell you, I love being able to say that).

I cried because I was stressed, and tired…but mostly because I was having a mild anxiety attack.  It had finally hit me that I had put myself out on the line and for once, I had not secured back up plans.  In other words, I hadn’t worked on any alternative plans of getting myself out of what I had committed to doing.  Not only had I committed myself to literally standing in the spotlight, I had talked other people into doing the same thing.

Letting myself down wasn’t even the problem. I’ve had years of experience doing that, and had gotten quite good at ignoring that fact and making up excuses for myself.  But letting other people down…and letting the cause down…that was something I knew I couldn’t do.  For once I made it about a bigger issue than myself.  And Thursday night, I was pissed at myself for it. I wanted to go hide in bed, drown in self-pity, and let my anxiety control my life one more time.  I was scared to death.

But ironically, I wasn’t scared to “death”.  Like my mom had been telling me for years, I was putting myself through anything that could actually kill me.  Even in the worse case scenario, I would live and get through it.  So I did.

There are so many things I want to tell the man of my dreams...that I want him to understand.

I left my husband for God's sake! I couldn't be a good wife. I wanted to be, more than anything, but I completely failed at it.  I know it wasn't for lack of loving him or caring about him.  But part of me was so selfish. I wanted to come to school...to prove to myself that I can graduate and make something of myself. And I felt cheated that Asher wouldn't support me through this desire for myself. 

I want an affectionate husband; one that is excited to come home to me after a day of work and always shows me with a hug before anything else and says, "i'm so glad to see you" in my ear.  I want a smart and respectful son who I can adore...who I can sit down with after dinner and help with homework, or help get ready for his next day of school.  I want to spend my evenings and weekends sitting in the stands watching him play soccer and my adorable husband coach him.  I want to be proud that they are mine and that I am apart of a healthy and strong-knit family.  I want to know that I am both needed and appreciated.

The problem is that, while I want all of that now, I can't stand the thought of me having all of that without also having a degree...of being proud of the fact that I am a college graduate.  And THAT is where I am now....what I am here working on.  So while I have the above dreams for my future, I also have big dreams for the remainder of my time at Tech.

I want to be organized and responsible and study my ass off and make As in all of my classes. I want to spend evenings in the library, knowing that I am taking care of business while others are out wasting their lives drinking and partying and sleeping around.  I want to be an ACTIVE feminist; to be devoting myself to awareness campaigns that pull at my heart-strings.  I want The Vagina Monologues and Operation FreeFall to be huge successes, because I worked my ass off to make them so.  I want the feminist organization that I built to have a recognizable name on campus and in the community. 

But more than anything....I want both.  I want to prove to myself and to others that a woman can have both.  I can be a damn good wife, and mother, and still be able to raise awareness on issues of sexual assault and violence.  I picture myself standing back in the foyer on the last night of the Vagina Monologues performances and feel a great sense of accomplishment in the amazing job that was done and the money that was raised for the rape crisis center...and be doing it with my love’s arms around me and me knowing that he was proud of me too.

Asher and I never wanted the same things...we never had a drive for the same things. I have always wanted to be in school, he has never had an interest.  I have always wanted to be active in the community and working my ass off for the benefit of a huge group of people in need.  He has always been content to be alone and do things to benefit his individual self.  I really and truly thought this would work well for us. I think subconsciously I thought it would enable us to support each other very well.  But because of Asher's decision to work a job that took up all of his time and energy, and my decision to return to school 400 miles away from him and devote myself to so many different projects, we both ended up completely unable to support each other.  I still don't doubt for a second that we could have made it work and been very successful at it even. But at the end of the day, I think we both didn't put the time and energy in to that we should have, and we allowed ourselves to resent each other for our different choices and desires, and we ruined the marriage God gave us.

But...if I learned only one thing in my marriage, it is that love is by no means all that a relationship needs...