My project for course: Book Writing for Beginners: Develop Your Ideas on Paper

Synopsis: When love is not enough
In a misguided attempt to save the life of the “bad boy” she never dared to date in her sheltered youth, she finds herself embroiled in the midst of a fight with addiction.

They fall in love after chatting on social media. He moves in. Life is going to be great. They have each other - what more could they possibly need? But what starts off as a dream come true, quickly descends into the stuff nightmares can only hope to grow up to be.

Battling addiction, anxiety, mental illness and depression for two is exhausting. Add to that the relentless guilt and unanswered questions of: “How did we end up here?” and “What was I thinking?” life turns into a daily struggle to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

When she tells him she has nothing left to give, not financially, emotionally or otherwise, she gets accused of letting him down and breaking her promises. She finds herself turning into the monster he tells her she is. She starts doubting her own sanity. There is no way out. She lies awake in bed at night, praying that one of them won’t wake up the next morning – it no longer matters which one. The only way to get him out of her life, would be to end it.

Chapter 7: Self-betrayal
There is a line in a prose poem by Oriah Mountain Dreamer that reads: “I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.” ...Faithless and therefore trustworthy....In a subsequent book she writes that when people reproduce this poem of hers, the change they make most often is to substitute the word “faithless” for “faithful”. How can you be trustworthy if you are faithless, after all?

I must admit, I myself did not truly understand the full meaning until I had reached a point where my own self-betrayal had reached such levels that I didn't recognise myself anymore. It turns out self-betrayal is a lot easier than one would think. It is a very common ailment indeed among people these days. Or perhaps, it has always been that way? I can't speak for everyone else but I can speak for myself when I say that betraying my own soul, and with it everyone I loved, came a lot easier than I thought it would.

At first, you don't notice it. You let someone else's opinion of you bother you, just a tiny bit. You stop humming and whistling because he says it makes you sound like a “psychopath”. Later, your stomach turns into knots when you change the toilet roll in case you put it the “wrong way round” and he has a passive-aggressive fit the next time he uses the loo. You start doing things differently —the way he likes it— because you just desperately want to keep the peace at any and all costs. And then one day, a dear friend says: “I don't like you like this. When did you turn into such a bitch?” And you realise, you have not only betrayed yourself, but also your children who had absolutely no choice in this matter. They arrived home from school one day and there was a strange new man living in their house demanding more and more of their mother’s attention with every passing day.

In the beginning he was such fun to be around. It was frightening just how quickly and yet subtly the whole situation soured. He is unnecessarily irritable and instead of taking him on, you tell them to be quieter, to be less boisterous, to be less themselves. So now, not am I betraying myself and them, I am asking them to betray themselves and thereby teaching them that it's okay to betray oneself. All because I have betrayed myself and let myself down. I just can't handle another tantrum from the 40-odd-year old man. I am too tired for yet another fight.

As this churns in my mind, the guilt starts welling up. Up and up, until it has me in a strangle-hold by the throat. Yet, I cannot tell anyone about the situation because I lack the words with which to describe it. If you cannot form the words for a thing, you cannot talk about it. If you cannot talk about it, it remains buried within your psyche for you alone to deal with.

This ends up making me incredibly vulnerable. When I am being accused of betrayal of someone else, while I have been bending over backwards to prove my loyalty and the only person I have in fact betrayed is myself, it hits me all the harder. Only I don't comprehend what is happening until it is almost too late. By this time I truly am not trustworthy any more. If I can't trust myself, how can I trust my own judgement of others?

It doesn't end there either. Like a pebble thrown into a pond, the waves circle out and reaches further and further. After two years you realise you are actively avoiding people. You no longer know who you are, what you believe or where you are headed in life. You feel as if you have nothing to offer anyone by ways of conversation, so it's just easier not to speak to anyone at all. Besides, you feel such a fool about the poor choices you've made that it's just simpler to hide away from the world.

In the beginning of our relationship I was eager to introduce D to anyone who even remotely claimed to be my friend. I was quick to tell them how in love I was and how wonderful he was. And this is probably as it should be. Yet, even when the cracks started showing and the red flags were waving all over the place, I continued to insist that things were going “just great”. Not because I was trying to lie to them, but because I was already lying to myself.

The first nine or ten months were very confusing for me. I didn't know why this man was being so mercurial. I know now and can pinpoint almost to the day every single time he relapsed and then tried to get clean again. He tried his best to hide this from me. Looking back, I am really not entirely sure whether I was just incredibly naïve. Some part of me must have known that something was not quite right.

In every relationship you have to compromise. As you get older, you get more set in your ways. Compromise gets harder and harder and fitting in with another person gets more strained. You can't bend any more, so you break instead. You get so wrapped up in the relationship as you try to make space for another in your life that in the process you lose yourself completely. And once you've lost yourself, you are lost to everyone else as well. People instinctively know when you are not being true to yourself and therefore untrustworthy. They know it even before you yourself realise it. In fact it takes a whole lot of self-awareness to realise that you have indeed been betraying yourself.

The sad thing is, just before I let him into my life, I was just getting to a point where I thought I knew who I was. I had only just recovered from getting divorced and was only just beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin again, when this mad man waltzed into my life.

Sometimes you can feel it in your stomach. That heavy sinking feeling of dread. You know you have chosen wrong. But the decision has been made and now there is no going back.