Hey Marysue.
Your question has been at the front of my mind all week, and I should revise my response. I'm writing this gently, but honestly. This might be hard to read, and I understand it's likely to land as criticism, but I'm not trying to assign blame. I'm trying to tell you the truth as I've come to understand it, and I'm asking you to sit with it before you respond, if you choose to do so.
I think I did both of us a disservice when I rushed to accept the brunt of wrongdoing. I wasn't wrong for writing about my feelings in a place you'd already been warned might contain raw emotions you wouldn't want to read. You weren't required to read those words. You chose to, and then you brought your reaction back to me without opening or accepting an opportunity to talk about our perceptions together.
More importantly, you rhetorically blamed me for holding you back from moving on with your life. I was cruel to myself and overprotective of you in offering you validation without offering a conversation.
I think that you truly moved on with your life the moment you decided that your promise to stop talking to keith had become less important to you than your desire to engage him. The only direction I've seen you travel since then is away from me. The concessions you've made for me have been real, they've been so incredibly precious to me. But they've all only been as significant as could fit within the shape of a life you've already chosen, bound by the imperative of your decision and determination to move on.
If you genuinely feel you haven't been allowed to move on with your life, I want to hear that, and I'm willing to talk about it. But I ask you to think about how often I've asked you to consider therapy over the last few years, and why I've spent more than a year asking you to come with me.
I feel that you've bought yourself a life of fun and validation and freedom and excitement and rewards, and that a great deal of what paid for it was my investment in the foundation of what I believed was going to belong to us together, and my misery as an effect of being discarded. It feels like a future I had committed everything to was stolen from me. Not all at once, but quietly over time. I'm allowed to grieve that. The horror, the rage, the confusion, the pain, the loss I'm carrying aren't a performance, but they also aren't an attack on you. They're what I've been left to hold, and I don't deserve to live under the threat of losing the breadcrumbs you've left for me if I don't hold it silently and hidden away.
I think I've given more than was fair, and received less than I needed. I'm not saying that to keep score. I'm saying it because being quiet about it isn't honest, and if the situation was reversed, I would always want to know.
I have one place to write raw feelings where you will have the opportunity to choose to read them if something were to happen to me before I had the chance to process and refine and deliver them to you. I know you want it to not exist. But I don't know if you will always want it to not exist, and I'm going to leave that door closed but unlocked, rather than board it up and seal it off forever.
It isn't an attack. Your feelings aren't an objective reality. Feel what you feel, but be the pond and not the fish.
I love you.