Pretending to Be Happy Takes a Lot of Energy
Jumping into the pain head-on.
It’s eye-opening when people comment on older posts.
My writing on Medium represents a snippet of time. They’re how I felt at that moment or something I was experiencing. When I read comments from an older article, with my feelings on something already passed, it gives me a new perspective and a chance to see the past with a different lens.
Staci Mitchell wrote the following comment on my article, “Divorce Me. Please”:
I don’t have a solution on how to move forward in the situation but it’s really not worth being unhappy. As strong of a front you may be putting on now, it is not sustainable. It takes a lot of energy to pretend to be happy when your not and no matter what has happened in the past between you, everyone still deserves a chance to be happy.
It’s fascinating when someone else points out the obvious that you never saw: it takes a lot of energy to pretend to be happy.
No wonder why I was so tired.
Since telling my husband that I was done with our marriage, a weight of misery fell off my shoulders. I didn’t know the extent of it until it was gone. Not to say that everything was smooth sailing from that point onwards but life seemed easier knowing no more energy would be spent on faking happiness. For the first time, despite being stuck living together with him during coronavirus, I was optimistic and felt good about life.
Then yesterday crashed down on that parade. While I didn’t expect to forever live a life of zen, I didn’t anticipate feeling anytime soon like a bag of bricks smashed my entire body. Anxiety and dread took over me.
Any moment alone yesterday (which is few and far between, in a world trapped by the COVID cage my house has become) was spent curled up in a ball crying in agony. It’s a familiar feeling that I became accustomed to throughout my life, heightened in the last few years with the uncertainty of choosing myself over the welfare of my children.
Typically I would bear the pain and eventually shove it back down until it resurfaced hours or a week later.
I can’t do that again. That leads down a slippery slope of accepting depression and misery as the norm. Not today, Satan.
Instead of playing a whirlwind of doomsday thoughts on loop, I told myself to go balls-in with the pain. I’m done being a wimpy bitch to these anxiety attacks. Time to figure out the why of it so that I’m not spending the rest of my life curled up on the bathroom floor crying again. Fuck that noise.
With swollen, red eyes and a nose dribbling goo faster than a Kleenex could catch it, I took a deep breath and asked, “why does this hurt?” Not in a pie-in-the-sky hippie kind of way. What exactly was causing this feeling of panic and self-loathing?
It wasn’t because I thought I was a horrible person. I wasn’t because I thought I would end up alone. It wasn’t because I was worried about finances. It wasn’t because I was worried about what others would think. It certainly wasn’t work-related; I was singled out in a department meeting on Friday for doing a great job during an initiative last month.
It was because I wasn’t happy…and I no longer saw a path to achieving it.
The past few months I was able to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I had broken free of my marriage and could start building a new future without shackles. Sure, there were ups and downs but I felt better equipped to plow forward with a better mindset. Eye of the Tiger, bitches.
This past week was different. Everything felt more difficult. It was the second week of 100% virtual homeschooling which consumes a solid chunk of time, causes friction with the kids, and puts the blame of my children’s shitty academic development onto me as a parent. I struggled to keep up with my job, which is telling since I rarely have much to do each week.
Losing hours out of my day with school and homework meant less time to de-stress with exercise or even write on Medium. Self-care activities dropped to zero. Keeping up with home administrative tasks and chores was impossible with no way to catch up.
Plus, I should have been stoked about building a relationship with an amazingly fantastic guy but it’s becoming clear to me that we’re sexually mismatched; I vowed to not settle for that in another relationship.
The cherry on top: feeling like I’m back to having a shitty marriage to a guy with whom I am utterly incompatible and still controls me.
I’m not happy. Which, on its own, is manageable. The problem lies in feeling like I’ll never be happy. I’m cockblocked by life in every direction when I think of ways to solve this problem. Feeling helpless to change things, I’m like a fly trapped in a spiderweb.
While feeling this way was my emotional norm in the past, I fucking refuse to fall back into this line of thinking. If I have to take a bomb to this spiderweb to shake free, so be it.
I took Monday off work.
Granted, I originally took Monday off work because I had accrued too much vacation time and I’m getting a laser peel. (I may feel like garbage but I sure as fuck am not going to look like garbage.) I’m making an appointment with my lawyer to discuss post-nuptial agreements, options to offering future equity so I can buy this house from the quasi-ex-husband, and whether it’s beneficial to start the formal divorce papers now while we still live together.
Next, I’m contacting our tax guy to find out how it works to be divorced but write off the mortgage interest when filing separately.
I’ll hit up my home loan chick to find out if getting an average of $1,000 more per month with freelance work from Medium and Etsy will make a significant impact on my future home buying options if my quasi-ex-husband won’t let me buy out his half of the house.
And finally…Tuesday is the next session with the divorce counselor. I’m a chicken when it comes to bringing up what I want during these sessions because I look like the asshole who is carelessly crushing my quasi-ex-husband’s heart. But if I want to avoid panic-driven moments like yesterday, I need to man up and express my dissatisfaction with our situation.
I don’t doubt that I’ll have a crushing anxiety attack again in the near future. In the past, I treated angst by smearing blue paint on my face and screaming, “they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” which was highly ineffective. It pushed the issues and pain down, but it didn’t address the source.
That’s because I felt the source of the pain was something I couldn’t change. I had the strength to push everything back down temporarily but I didn’t think I could turn it upside down and tackle it.
My perspective is different now. It’s not a flaw to admit that a rough patch has emotionally clubbed me behind the knees and I can’t walk. I’m admitting that I’m human and it’s okay to be fucking terrified of an unknown future. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It doesn’t mean I need to avoid it.
It doesn’t mean I have to fake being happy. That’s not something I’m doing anymore.
This morning I woke up to an emotional hangover. While mentally telling myself “just keep moving onward”, I wrote this article and planned my week as a step back to happiness. I can’t revert to a default of helplessness and feeling stuck.
Fuck staying trapped in a spider web of emotional agony. I’m busting out of it like the Kool-Aid man through a wall.
