Glenn Bosshard: A row of trucks

Glenn Bosshard: A row of trucks

So...ten years + later...

So ten years and some months after I discovered my "wife's" infidelitys I am still haunted by the trauma. I'm pretty sure some people get over these things and move on. In many ways I have but deep down in my marrow I still feel the betrayal as though it were yesterday. Dawn doesn't understand it. She's never been through anything like my experience so she honestly can't get it. Unless I were to catalog every single loving thing, laugh enjoyed, promise made, secret shared, illness nursed, pets loved and buried, life experienced and cherished and expectations for our future together that I had with Betsy in our 14 (?) 12 (?) years together and then show the way the betrayals manifested and were discovered, assumed, conjectured, proved beyond question, or questionably proved, I don't think anyone could actually "get" it. (that sentence is long enough to be Russian) I've thought about doing just that many times and have always been overwhelmed at the effort it would require. I could put it down on paper and still never come close to emparting to someone else the sense of safety and integrity I felt with her as my partner.

I don't want to make it sound like our relationship was without it's problems, ups and downs, anger and resentment. We both had all of those wrapped up in the fabric of a lifetime shared. However I felt safe in certain assumptions and I believe she did too. So...where do I go from here? There's no doubt that I have PTSD in some form or another from the experience. I believe that a great deal of my physical pain is based in this. It goes almost without saying that the depth of my depression is increased by these memories. I am very aware that there are a lot of people suffering from much worse mental pain and emotional scars than mine. Hundreds of thousands on this benighted planet I'm sure are so acute in their anguish as to make mine seem very minor by comparison. And yet that doesn't relieve me. I don't feel better because others have it worse.

I live so well it's ridiculous. My home, my partner, my "job", my everything is wonderful. I'm never hungry, never cold, never lonely, never without health care or a vehicle or a bed to lie down on. I have a life that is the envy of 90% of the population of this planet. I am aware of that fact almost all the time. I live in concious gratitude for my blessings most always. So why am I still so angry? I don't know. I can't think my way out of it. I can't pray my way out of it. I can't act as if my way out of it. I've tried all of that. Really tried. Worked it. The pain hasn't lifted.