Tag: Substance Abuse

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.

The Collapse Pt Three – Fractures and Faults

Upon reflection I realize it may be obvious I have a lot of privilege, growing up in a middle-class family, and as much as I want to be relatable I won’t always be. I will not tailor my words for the sake of relatability but I will acknowledge that I am incredibly lucky as far as what struggles I have to undertake. If any part of The Collapse series has been depressing to read or paints me as a pitiful person know that it only gets worse from here. My intention is not to lionize myself or indict anyone, this is just how I think my story is best presented. Also as a point of clarification, I refer to my wife in the present tense as “my wife” because we are still married but the divorce is guaranteed and it’s just a matter of time until a judge signs for the dissolution.

Shortly after the Covid lockdowns started my wife and I moved back into her house close to Oakland. She wanted to invest in more rental properties but out of state, so we started planning to achieve that. However she, thinking that I should also have my own rental property, insisted I buy a home in Arizona. My father is and has been a home builder for some time, so I grew up around old homes, new homes, expensive homes, and run-down homes. This imparted a different understanding of home ownership because I had an understanding of what went into their maintenance which to me is just a headache. Not that I didn’t want to own my own home, I just didn’t want to own a home in another state that I’d have to maintain. I told X that I didn’t want to invest in a rental property. She insisted. I said no. This pattern persisted every day over months, until in frustration I said show me the numbers to make this make sense. Fast forward several weeks and I was going to buy a house in Arizona. The passive income is nice, in the winter at least when it covers the mortgage and utilities, but I still really wish I had kept with no, it’s such a pain dealing with maintenance, HOA’s, lawn care, utilities, management companies, local taxes, licensing, negative reviews, and extraneous expenses (like a new AC unit) for a house I see once a year at most.

We planned to start from my native Indiana, staying with my parents before going to Colorado then to Arizona. Initially we were supposed to stay in Indiana for at least a month but my wife has never gotten along with my parents which is a can of worms I don’t even want to look at. It was while we were there I bought my first car which would become our chariot thenceforth. So we left after only two weeks for Tennessee where she had found a rental, something I also didn’t want to do but I understood it was difficult for her being in Indiana.

So we stayed at an in-law unit at a rental in Tennessee which was basically just an office, a bathroom, and a bedroom. We were both working remotely at the time so day-to-day we just focused on work. Except my work team was going through a shift in focus and I had basically nothing to do for several months. I still diagnosed and fixed bugs, improved our testing, and wrote documentation but I was just finding work to justify my paycheck. I again became depressed and started drinking beer to pass the time. I became so stressed from my lack of work and the disorganization of my team I asked to be let go from my contract but they offered a raise to keep me on, which I accepted. X would go on to fly from Tennessee to Colorado where the first of her new rental homes was. I drove. It was a great drive, I think I cleared the whole ~1,300 mile trip by day four. I started out listening to music but after a couple of hours switched to an audiobook of The Lord of the Rings. I think I got halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring throughout the whole trip.

Colorado started out fine. We stayed in a rental for the first several months through winter waiting for her first rental to be ready. I even remember picking up a large sushi platter for New Year’s and celebrating with her. We were still having fun together.

Months later we eventually moved into her new home, we got furniture and lawn care setup before the heavy winter came in, resulting in our garage actually being completely full of cardboard. I mean floor-to-ceiling almost-spilling-out-when-the-garage-door-was-opened full. But it was here I started drinking more heavily. Same issues with work and feeling like I didn’t have a lot to do. It wasn’t really bad at first but all bad habits can start small. I remember thinking “If she’s going to do whatever she wants then so am I”. Obviously not a healthy thought. Almost every night I’d head to the den and stay up drinking and playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. We even started sleeping in separate rooms because we didn’t do much together and our schedules were too different.

It was in the second rental property in Colorado where things took a hard turn for the worse. Between the constant travel, setting up the homes, doing most of the cooking and cleaning, working, studying, practicing coding, looking for new work, and saving up for a down payment I started to drink even more. I kept up with all my responsibilities but we were both busy and she didn’t seem to really care about what I was going through so I drowned my feelings in a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. We were in Colorado so we did all the fun Colorado things outdoors. We even attempted some 14’ers, but I was too out-of-shape and overweight to finish one. My drinking gave rise to arguments between my wife and I, prompting her to request I attend therapy for anger issues, which I did. I’m not with the same therapist but I am still in therapy.

When my mom, sister and her partner visited us we went white water rafting for the first time too. Again tensions between my wife and mom existed making some moments uncomfortable. By the time they visited I realized I needed to cut back on drinking and had done so tremendously. It was also while we were in Colorado that I correctly deduced my wife was pregnant when she got light-headed and fell after standing up.

It wasn’t long after this we bought my house in Arizona, which was a great deal of stress for me and completely depleted all of my savings. We moved in and started the whole “setting up the rental” process. However I felt incredibly pressured by my wife to find a new job, complete with a pay raise, while doing everything else too. Groceries, cooking, cleaning, property maintenance, working, studying, and applying for new work. My telling her that I only had so much time and energy to get things done just pissed her off. When after months of hard work and I still had no new job, I became depressed again and told her as much, but it just pissed her off. Whereupon she shamed me for having these feelings. This is in my mind where the true cracks in our relationship became obvious. We were both going through a lot, especially her at the beginning of her pregnancy, and we had a hard time supporting each other in the ways we felt we needed. Neither of us was getting our emotional needs met. I did everything I believed I could do but every misstep or sign of weakness upset her. She also became depressed and was in her own dark place. Things didn’t stay this way but it was a portentous period, indicating what would happen if we were put into a similar situation again. My not-drinking was much better but there was a night I drank way too much, leaving her feeling overwhelmed. Eventually we moved back to California so she could deliver our daughter somewhere more stable, somwhere close to her first house.

For the sake of levity (I hope) I will share that one day we came home to a crossbow bolt sticking into our front door. I’m not joking, someone had shot a crossbow through one of our windows, into the house, into the front door so that the head of the bolt was visible when approaching the door from outside with the shaft inside. This is funny because no one was hurt and we only had to replace a window and door. I have a suspect in mind but didn’t think either of us were in real danger so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I even told the police who I suspected but there’s not much they could’ve done.