Dodging wet noodles: Love Life '09 Review

I figured it out.

This site is about generalised anxiety disorder, clinical depression, co-morbid syndrome and what's like to experience them and live with them in society. Ergo, the only reason to mention any women who - hypothetically - I fall in love with, start looking forward to spending the rest of my life with, and then have to dump after a year of sacrificing my own mental health...is...if she or they relate to what the site is about. This is how I can better define what is or isn't relevant content. Thanks, Anon, for the prod. :o)

And now I feel sad. Why? Because aside from a few months at the start of our correspondence, anxiety has been the only link between this site and Sarah.

I never got to write about getting the first date confirmed in the diary. I never got to write about practically crushing the chrome handle on the back of the streetcar seat between my white-knuckled fingers, as the 5-0-whatever lolled and limped across town. By the time I'd have arrived at the date venue, my heart would've been pounding in my chest with apprehension, but sheer excitement would've made it feel like...like...well...I guess I'll never know what it would've felt like with 'Sarah'.

Equally I can't write about joy, about contentment, about security, about family. About she and I working together to support each other with combating our demons. About how she was everything I hoped for, and more.

Our first kiss? Jeez. I'd have written a fuckin' trilogy about that LOL.

And don't even get me started on the entire new blog I'd have to write about becoming a Dad. Maybe I should have just stuck with it anyway - just as a source of creative inspiration for topics to write about. Sheeeeeeeeeeeet - I could've turned the whole thing into a screenplay and become an overnight millionaire.

I still could.

But I have better things to apply my writing talents to in the meantime. It does piss me off though, that - because of her actions - all I can ever write about her is how she has disappointed, hurt, and endangered me. It would have been nice to write something positive...just once.

However, this train of thought led me to an interesting and ironic conclusion. As I muted the world and relived my way through 2009, shedding any emotional baggage I had about the divorce from the previous year, I was thinking about Sarah's intermittent dislike for my blog. And here's the irony.

Where love is concerned, leaving my wife enabled me to eliminate all the anxieties from my life that she was causing through her ignorance and/or disbelief of mental illness. Plus, not being in any kind of physical relationship meant that there was no potential new source of anxieties. Attempting a relationship with Sarah was thus a big step, a significant investment, a risk. By the time 2009 had finished emotionally beating and raping me every week up to December I'd eliminated most or all the major sources of anxiety from my life, except for Sarah. In fact, as I said to her in an e-mail towards the end of last year, "Please don't paint me into a corner - don't make me choose between you and my mental health."

Even that didn't get me the response I was hoping for.

The irony though, is that Sarah and her inexplicable behaviour WAS the last source of anxiety for me. If we'd have actually got together, then that last source of anxiety would have dissipated in a single moment. Thus, the last reason for me to write this blog would have dissipated with it. I'd probably have continued the blog until I'd come off medication but then that'd have been it.

What a shame eh?

What a waste, a farce. And that's without getting into all the unanswered questions I still have. But, the only conclusions I can make about the year-long quasi-relationship where GAD is concerned are:

1. I never really got the response(s) from her I needed - even when I was blogging about how the situation she had created was so difficult for me to cope with, and despite the fact that she was reading the blog at the time!
2. If she can't tell me the truth then either she has something to hide, or she just doesn't trust me with the truth. Either way, this ensures that there is doubt, and - hey presto - instant anxiety;
3. At the end of the day, I have no power. I can't do anything to fix or improve the situation until she decides she's ready to meet. As Aesop would say, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."

Sadly, a meeting would dissolve all my anxiety about the situation, and probably hers too. But for whatever reason, whether altruistic or not, she refuses to meet. And unfortunately that is really all I need to know about her. Its been my crutch, the fact that whenever I feel like I'm dwelling on her and all the 'what if's of the situation then I just remind myself that there is nothing I can do even if I wanted to.

My only regret is one of my parting comments. I think I told her that I felt the relationship was dead in the water and had been for months. It would have been more accurate, from my point of view, to say that the relationship had died a little each day that passed after 2nd January '09 or whenever it was that I got back to Toronto from the UK. Honestly, I'd date her tomorrow if she could give me what I need.

But she couldn't and cannot, or wouldn't and will not. And so for the entire 365 days of 2009 where love and anxiety is concerned, that was it.

Next up, home and work life.