love – ooglykraken

Moving On

This past 27th of September was my birthday. I don’t really care about the ceremony of it as I’m no longer a child who receives gifts. To me, yesterday, tomorrow, and today are just days. Turning 33 doesn’t change anything for me, it’s just another day. However because of the cultural expectations I wanted to spend this day with my daughter. I have fleeting glimpses of hope for what my life can be and I’m still figuring it out, but what I want above all else is to be a good father.

I promised my daughter I would take her to the zoo and eat berry dessert with her. Since my divorce I can hardly eat or sleep but I couldn’t betray my promise to Zelda. For several weeks I only slept four to five hours at most and I thought about not being there. Instead I woke up around four, drove two and a half hours north, picked up my daughter and spent the next four-and-a-half hours at the zoo with her, her friend, and her friend’s mom.

Afterwards she slept for a bit, but woke up with maybe only 30 minutes of sleep. I had asked my Ex to pick up some berry-tarts from a local bakery, which she did. Thank you X. Afterwards Zelda and I shared one, though Zelda ate most of it. I don’t like sweets but I promised we’d eat it together.

Afterwards I spent some time playing with Zelda and just doing anything to spend time with her. When she wanted to sit on my lap and replicate my pose I felt really happy.

Later her mom came home from what I can only assume was a date, we prepared a dinner for Zelda. I helped as best as I could as I don’t spend enough time with Zelda to know what she likes now (writing that line makes my heart bleed, I wish I knew but her mom makes it difficult to spend time with her). While she did like the broccoli I made her, she really was invested in eating it when I promised to read to her. People are always amused when I say I can keep a toddler’s attention for an hour with books, but I use onomatopoeia, different voices, and engage her with questions.

In the end Zelda went off to do her own thing and my Ex and I spent some time talking. It was the most civil conversation we’ve had since she declared she’d started a divorce. It still hurts but I realized something recently.

I’m better off without her. She is selfish, non-empathetic, hyper-focused and apathetic to my plight. If I criticize her she gets angry. If I tell her she hurt me she plays UNO-Reverse and says its my fault. When I expose my vulnerabilities she just gets angry with me. So I just drank my pain.

She’s not a bad person inherently just selfish. As I’ve come to understand this, the love I’d held for her for over decade has started to fade.

I’d known she was like this the entire time, I just hoped she would change. It was during a trip in China to visit her family for Zelda’s first birthday I realized I didn’t mean much to her. I felt so alone and ignored. She didn’t understand when I said wanted more time with my daughter as everything was following Chinese traditions. I don’t know those, I’m not a part of them, I just felt like an outsider. It was just months of pain being an outsider, and she didn’t try to help. I even told her but she didn’t understand or care.

It’s this accumulation of apathy towards me I’ve realized she’s just not worth loving. I hate this. I hate that I feel I have to write this, but she ignored me and I loved her with everything I had. In the end it’s just a sad story.

More Useful Than I Think

My last post, Less Useful Than a Paperclip, has been deleted as it goes against the ethos of my intentions. I do suffer from depression and nihilism but I do not want to spread it, when I write I just want to spread understanding and hopefully good will. While finding my divorce was finalized has hurt me deeply I do not want negativity to pervade. It really sucks and I miss my ex-wife and daughter but that’s life, as Mr. Sinatra said. Life is not an easy undertaking but we all have our own cards to play and recently I’ve been misplaying mine and blaming the game. There is so much happiness and good to find, for most of us. It’d be disingenuous to constantly be so negative. For all of the pain and misery one finds in life there certainly is joy and happiness. I know not all people are as lucky as I am, I was born to a middle-class american family but striving for something better can avail something to everyone Srinivasa for example.

I’m choosing to write today because my last post is the least of what I want. I hope when you read my writing you connect to me in some small way and I do not want you to connect to my negativity. What I want is for all the world to be a good place, full of life and happiness. I’m naive so it is my nature. To not-so-subtly get to the point I apologize for giving in to my despair. Instead I started a Youtube Channel where I will be posting all child-friendly content. Mostly reading books and when I finish those doing puzzles and other similar content. If you’ve read a lot of my blog you know I have a drinking problem and other related issues but I will not allow that to bleed out into anything related to children. I have my failings but children deserve the best of us, and that is only what I will give them.

I hope whoever reads this has a great rest of their day.

It’s Not All Bad

This is meant to be a follow-up to my previous post, The Next Chapter. I’m worried it came across as too defeatist or negative when it was just meant to be a frank look at my situation. It should also be noted that my situation has been rapidly changing over the last month or so, and where I was when I wrote that is quite different from where I am now, mentally at least.

For the first time in probably a year and a half I’m hopeful for myself. Not because I believe my wife and I will get back together, not because anything has improved in regards to my relationship with my in-laws, and not because I’ve finally landed a new job. In fact none of those things are true but because I’m able to start living on my own terms. My wife is even reluctant to let me spend time with my daughter which is both frustrating and painful. However I’m no longer stuck in a quagmire of hurt, struggle, disappointment, self-doubt, and hopelessness. I am still hurt and struggling and disappointed and so on but I’m not content to stay there. Tomorrow may not be a better day or the day after that but I’m determined to keep moving forward until I do get to be genuinely happy again. Without change I will just slip into an abyss of self-destruction and no one wants that, most of all I do not want that.

When I finally move into my own home, or apartment if you want to be technical, I plan to set aside a corner of things for my daughter. That way I’ll have a visual reminder of what I’m fighting for, why all this pain has been worth living through. The future is uncertain but I can’t let the natural chaos of life deter me from experiencing the beauty that can exist within it.

In short, life is difficult but if I don’t work at achieving something better for myself I’ll never have that and I believe I can do that work, I trust that I can do what needs to be done.

The Collapse Pt Four – Nadir and Terminus

I plan on this being my final post in The Collapse series and to avoid things I’ve already said, and to highlight happier moments there are a couple of earlier posts from in-the-moment I’d like to highlight. First is Life Comes at You Fast, where I go into more detail about what I was doing leading up to my daughter’s birth. Another from a month after her birth, A Liminal Space. And finally Tempus Fugit which focuses on the several months when I had parental leave from work. Again the topics below will probably be hard to read through. Anything I say about myself or others is only meant to draw out the points of how things can fall apart.

My daughter being born was and is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. Pardon the meme but her birth cured my depression, or at least my nihilistically driven existential dread. For the first time in my life I wasn’t afraid of how I ended. It also seemed like the best chance for me to prove to X how capable I could be. However my wife and I clashed on almost everything at this point. I didn’t need to put a lot of effort into my contract job and thought that we agreed I would take over day-to-day child care, at least to start. Except my wife wanted a live-in doula, which I was fine with as far as nursing her back to health following a 10-month pregnancy. But it was obvious she wanted to offload day-to-day care to other people, something I was and am strongly opposed to when it’s not necessary. Since we came home with Zelda, it was “let’s have a doula, let’s let my mom come out and help, let’s get this daycare, or this person to come babysit for a day.” She had no interest in being as hands on with our daughter as I did whereas I felt that was mandatory. Before I continue I will say, X put in a lot of time and effort in other areas like finding daycares, vetting them, and other more logistical tasks.

From hour one of Zelda’s birth I was there, I even cut the umbilical cord probably with the most worried look on my face I’ve ever had. For the next three days we spent in postnatal care I most likely only got about six hours of sleep while watching over X and Zelda. Then we had a live-in doula for about two months who took care of X’s recovery and took care of Zelda. After the doula left, I sleep-trained Zelda myself, which meant sleeping only a few hours every night for months, getting her adjusted to a regular sleeping schedule. Then getting her to sleep by herself. All while looking for new work and getting housework done (I was on parental leave from work). If you ask X I’m embellishing, but I don’t believe I am. For the majority of Zelda’s first two years outside of the doula and eventually daycare, I did nearly everything that required hands-on effort. Not to say X wasn’t present, she did spend time with her. It’s just that I was the primary caregiver for a long time. When I was in CA last and picked up Zelda from preschool with my wife, Zelda completely ignored her mom and ran towards me, I believe because I was always there. Playing with her, talking to her, reading to her, brushing her teeth, feeding her, taking her to the pediatrician, things X did just not as frequently as I did.

At a certain point I started drinking again. From my memory this was 8-9 months after Jekyll &Hyde. Longer than I’d ever gone sober before, not to blame her but she gave me an ultimatum, stop drinking or she would leave. I didn’t have the strength for either. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, no matter what it cost me, I just couldn’t afford it. So when I did start drinking again I didn’t want to tell her. She’d always been a taskmaster, if I was playing video games I felt the need to hide it because she would shame me for it. Drinking was worse, I couldn’t tell her or I felt my marriage would be over. I was not drinking a lot at this point. It was mostly beer, as I enjoy drinking it, and only a few at night after Zelda was asleep. Back at work I felt driftless as I was on a new team, learning several new services, but my team was struggling to keep up with stakeholder demands. I had very little time to learn from my seniors and worked over-time to keep up. Work alone was incredibly stressful but my wife was still pressuring me to find a new job. I still had to take care of my daughter. There’s just a lot to do at this point in one’s life. We still had our good times and things didn’t take a turn for the worse until well after Zelda’s first birthday.

Zelda turned one during a visit to her family in China and this was when I realized something I still haven’t found a solution to. When my wife is with her parents she doesn’t really spend a lot of time with me. Though we did putz around town on scooters together a couple times. When my daughter is with them she wants to be with the group. I was naturally excluded because of the language and cultural barrier so I spent most of this time in China working, studying, and playing games by myself except when I took Zelda out on my own. When I told my wife this she didn’t really seem to care. One could argue “Learn Chinese”. Sure, which I did. I even delivered a vow to my wife in front of her family and friends in China, in (imperfect) Chinese at our wedding ceremony there.

Fast forward to later that year when in late October I was laid off as a part of company-wide expense cutting. I think our marriage was over the moment my wife found out. Immediately she told me, if only I had gotten a job sooner this wouldn’t be an issue. I wasn’t completely hopeless at this point, I had a plan already laid out for the next 4-5 months to make sure I would get one, by the end of my first day unemployed. A week later I had a few beers for the first time in months and X and I argued. The next morning we separated. I moved out, into a nearby rental. We started couples therapy. The rental I stayed in was shared with several others but was affordable as a result. I stayed mostly to myself while I focused on job searching. After a couple weeks I noticed the house-mates all hung out on certain days on the back porch and started joining them. Problematically they all drank and/or smoked. So at first I started smoking here and there, then I started drinking again. X was ready for me to move back into the house until I showed up completely drunk one day. No fights, just obviously drunk. Now I moved back in, not because she was ready, but to keep me away from influence.

Things stayed relatively ok still, during this period, though our relationship had obviously very much cooled. We got into one argument since therapy and she immediately stopped the sessions. Zelda was in daycare and I focused on getting a job during the day. I was putting in at least 6, sometimes 10, hours every day studying and applying for work and attending interviews but nothing ever panned out. I did pretty well staying sober having the occasional drink every couple of weeks but it was still enough for her to know I wasn’t in a good place, especially with all the failed attempts at a new job. After several months of this, around April of 2024, her parents came to help with Zelda. It was after this I completely fell apart. Since X spent all of her time with her parents we didn’t do anything together anymore and X’s parents were always with Zelda so it was hard to be with her also. Again I was excluded by the nature of language and cultural barriers. I felt alienated, alone, and frustrated. With the only two people who had kept me going all this time seemingly taken from me or just avoiding me. So I kept to myself, worked on getting a job, and drank at night and sometimes during the day.

I still spent whatever time I could with Zelda but it was usually just her and I, intentionally avoiding my wife and her parents. This meant walking her to the park, taking her out to experience new things, letting her interact with things like keyboards and vinyl. To this day if you play the theme from Banjo-Kazooie she’ll want to dance or have me hold her and dance. My favorite day from 2024 was Father’s Day when I took her to another city nearby for the afternoon. We went to Michael’s where she could see all the pretty and colorful craft supplies. Then we walked around the main strip, got lunch nearby and had ice-cream together.

Eventually I came clean that I had been drinking again but with everything that had happened I could feel, any chance of respect, love or hope had died. Still I strived for it. This was the hardest part for me. I wanted to be close to her, but I had betrayed her trust too many times, and she had never respected me as an equal. I was fighting a losing battle, and stuffed those feelings into a bottle of Vodka. It became worse and worse over the months.

“Pray before the Altar of Needles
Worship in the Temple of Smoke
Whine at the feet of Surrender
Smile all the while as you choke
Because we are in love with the pain
That we keep coming back to
Again and again and again”

– Abuse Ritual by Black Tongue

It was after X told me she wanted a divorce that I hit my nadir and I had given up. I had become nothing more than a blubbering mass of alcoholic self-loathing, a miserable little pile of secrets. There were days where I’d just lay in bed, drinking, wanting to die. My wife was already irreparably hurt by me, but harming myself would just hurt my daughter too. I slipped further and further until my best friend started to come and check on me. My situation worried him so much he worked with my parents to have me leave. Something I should have done as soon as X’s parents arrived. This was a week before Zelda turned two. I still hate myself for that, but I’ll just have to live with that shame.

After moving back in with my parents I was served the divorce papers. It hurt, and still hurts, so much I took my frustration from that out on my wife when I was intoxicated. Blaming her for this and that from over the years. She went from being a friend to no longer wanting to talk to me. I understand now, after all this time, what I did to her, how I hurt her.

See this is not just the story of how my marriage collapsed but how I crumbled alongside it. Instead of showing strength I gave in to my weakness, instead of doing the right thing I gave up. Those moments where my determination was most required, I didn’t have it. I failed. I failed again, and again, and again. Because of that I lost my wife, my home, a friend, my sanity, the right to take my daughter to school everyday, and the right to live with her and watch her grow up. Above all I hurt everyone around me. I hate it, but it’s my fault so I just have to learn to deal with it and do the right thing going forward.

Getting this far has been because I had friends and family around me who loved me and still support me.

X if you read this and make it to the end, no amount of apologies will take back what I did but know from the bottom of my heart I’m sorry.

Take Me Back to Eden

Since my wife and I separated, the hardest part has been moving on. Unfortunately I still think about her frequently. Remembering all of the things we did, all the time we spent with each other. Cooking makes me think of her, hiking makes me think of her, certain TV shows and other activities, it’s the same. It’s all incredibly painful. I sometimes even see her in my dreams at the most random of times and places. As much as I want to be able to get past this, and find peace and give her peace, it’s been difficult. Part of it is that she’s the only person I’ve seriously dated and part of it is that we’ve been a part of each other’s lives for 12+ years. It’s probably even more complicated than that, but I don’t want to think about this any longer than I have to.

The last time I saw her, she seemed like an entirely different person than just six months ago and I’m glad she’s been able to change for the better. Walking through her house, all the signs that I used to live there are largely gone. I imagine it was painful for her to move on as well, and I didn’t do a good job of making it easier. All of those remembrances are of a person who doesn’t exist in the real world anymore, she only lives in my head. Maybe that’s the hard part, that image of her has to disappear for me to move on. I even asked her to make sure I know there’s no hope for us. Writing my “The Collapse” series made it clear that as we are, a healthy relationship between us is impossible. I know I can move on, I know I should but still I struggle with it. So I’m looking into healthy ways to move on.

There’s nothing great or profound that I want to say. I just had to get these thoughts out of my head. Yesterday and today were particularly difficult. I believed that together we would raise our daughter, see more of the world, eat delicious food, experience all of the good and bad of life and grow old as a pair. To share our love. That’s not going to happen. I have to accept that. It’s not a choice, it’s a requirement. I just wish I could take a magic pill that removes all of it without all the pain and depression. Eventually I’ll get there, I just hope it’s sooner rather than later.

“Some folks can lose the blues in their hearts
When I think of you, another shower starts
Into each life, some rain must fall
But too much is falling in mine

Into each and every life, the rain is bound to fall
But too much of that has started fallin’ on mine
Now into each and every heart, some tears are gonna fall
But I know and you know, someday the sun is gonna shine”

– Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall by Ella Fitzgerald and The Ink Spots

The Collapse Pt One – The Golden Age

If the title seems odd, it’s only because I think reading, no matter the subject, should be enjoyable. This dramatisation that persists in my writing is intentional, if it’s found to be in poor taste I apologize but i’m not going to change. My words are not hyperbolic, I am not stretching truths or making light of these topics. I would name it “Flowery”. I use flowery language because I like to use flowery language. Read How Fiction Works by James Wood if you feel the same or want to understand why. And yes flowery language is pretentious, but fun.

Tensions between my wife and I existed long before we were married. We met by chance when I found the only off-campus housing I could afford as a college student with my only job being a non-graduate teacher’s assistant. Don’t remember my pay otherwise it would be explicitly stated but I do know rent was about $600 a month + utilities. There were three (then eventually four with some ingenuity) roommates here to split the cost of our three bedroom, one bathroom apartment. One was an American-born white guy, myself (another American-born white guy), and then my Chinese-born soon-to-be-wife.

Her first impressions of me were of mild fear. I listened to death metal and didn’t talk much, but we met in the kitchen. I learned basic nutrition in high school for effective weight control in wrestling and have cooked my own food since. This means we both spent time in our 80’s patina kitchen. It was in those rare moments where we were both cooking that we connected. The conversations started small and became bigger over time. Then we started spending time with each other outside of the kitchen. This led me to ask her to accompany me on my family’s annual trip to Tennessee for the winter holidays which she complied to. One night we were all just sitting and talking and my father, recognizing our closeness, placed a blanket across her and my collective laps. We were sitting alone on a couch (actually a bench but hey) and this blanket combined us. Then later that night my parents took my younger sister to watch Frozen in theatre which had just come out. X (my wife) and I stayed behind. By the end of the night I was watching the film adaptation of Solomon Kayne and while she texted or scrolled social media. She was starting to come around to the romantic interest between us but it was uncomfortable for her because she kept calling me “white devil”. This is because of the cultural separation which very obviously distanced us while she dealt with her feelings of attraction.

From this point it would be honest to say we were “dating”. Nothing much changed but we both intended to spend more time with each other and eventually I started sleeping in her room (nothing happened, we were just physically and emotionally closer. Get rid of those dirty thoughts!). This meant conversationally sharing things, cooking together, bike rides together and all those other activities couples do. However my job didn’t provide a properly sustainable income combined with my first attempts at budgeting. She had to help with multiple months of my rent because I was a little short. I always paid her back but a certain seed was planted. One semester my family couldn’t afford tuition and I didn’t receive enough scholarship funds to compensate so I spent it just working and figuring out my life (which I obviously still haven’t done well enough). This agitated her to no end and she continued to pressure me into accepting a loan from her to resume schooling. I didn’t want to accept her money then, but eventually and begrudgingly I complied. I still think I made the wrong choice agreeing to it. I skipped one semester and had my following one subsidized by my girlfriend. This is where the cracks in our future foundation would become beyond obvious.

From here we would find another apartment together, the fact she and I continued to live with each other caused her father distress knowing we were now entangled despite not explicitly telling him as much. This was the time where our relationship was solidified. Thanks to her urging I started working in several varieties of game development, my then-at-the-time goal.

However she was a graduate student and I was an undergraduate. She already had a bachelor’s degree from China while pursuing her Master’s at IU while I was still an Undergraduate, she’s two years older than I am. Then came the dark times when after this year she graduated while I still had several semesters to finish. We were together for two years and for me she was the “one”, but she was also my first serious romantic partner. My inability to keep up with her (across multiple vertices) led to us separating for some time. This time lasted almost more than a year.

During that time she started dating someone else which absolutely broke me. I exercised so much I was probably in the best shape of my life but ran so much I fractured my fifth meta-tarsal bone (this has more to do with the type of shoe I ran in and less about my persistence; always run in good shoes). The upshot was I had a lot to talk to the ladies of the natural history building about since I’d fractured my 5th-meta-tarsal and my 5th-meta-carpal within a year which was unusual. It’s really because I don’t emote well and turn my frustrations upon myself resulting in real long-term physical damage. Exercise is good for you but we need more than that for healthy coping.

Eventually I was just three credits from graduating so I moved to California while I finished my degree online. Believe it or not I moved in with my ex and shortly after, we were together again. For fun, we met at a fancy Italian restaurant and exchanged feelings, deciding we could live together again. For more fun she bought me Fallout 4 on PC (just released recently in 2015) that night as a gift. If you’re starting to create a through-line, yeah she was better off than me for a variety of reasons. While she could offer a lot, all I had was me which is now obviously not enough.

After this our relationship accelerated as we both started our careers and began to live our adult lives together.

If the question of why I would post this arises, it’s because it’s much easier to look back now and see how things could’ve been different with the understanding of today.