The Collapse – ooglykraken

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.

The Collapse Pt Two – Getting Married

My memory is fuzzy on some of the details, especially concerning time, so I will do my best to represent it all accurately. But somewhere in here my girlfriend and I had driven her car and a bunch of stuff from my native Indiana all the way to California. We turned this into a road trip passing through the northern tip of Texas on historic Route 66. This meant stopping in St. Louis, Missouri then Amarillo, Texas through Los Angeles, California ending somewhere just south of San Francisco, California. I hope I’m getting these details correct as she and I traveled a lot. It was here, close to San Francisco, where we stayed in another place with another couple and her mom who had come from China to visit. Obviously by this time her parents were aware of our relationship. This was a difficult summer for both of us, as I was unsuccessfully trying to break into the video game industry as a developer/engineer and she was saving up to buy a home. In the end this took too long for me. The games industry isn’t a very lucrative trade especially for those starting out and is not easy to break into. Money and timing pushed me to career pivot. She was already established and was ready to buy a home. I still hadn’t landed my first post-college job.

We moved into the home she bought and I prepared to instead become a Software Engineer, an option I kept in my pocket as a Plan B since college. Becoming a SWE (software engineer) is not easier than building games but it is certainly more lucrative. After many months I was able to land my first job at a company pretty close to where we lived, now in the East Bay close to Oakland. This interlude of no income made her and I both pretty unhappy and landing that first job meant a lot for both of us. This would’ve been sometime in 2017.

It was around 2017 but before my first job that she began asking about marriage. I didn’t want to propose yet as I didn’t feel comfortable doing so without more job stability and I wanted to do something grand and romantic. However she has a habit of ignoring what I say I want and pressuring for the answer she wants continuously. I don’t know how long it took but every night in bed she would ask when I’m going to propose and every night I would say when I have a stable career. Until one night I didn’t. I was so tired of hearing the question that one night out of frustration I said something like “You want to get married? Fine, let’s get married”. And that was my “grand romantic” proposal. So idiotic right? If I could’ve kept my cool it would’ve been a nice moment, instead now I regret proposing so foolishly. So one day we went to our local county clerk’s office and exchanged vows in front of a judge. This was also another moment I lost my cool as I was worried about my job security, as a co-worker was recently let go, but the whole process took much longer than expected and I grew irritated. It was unpleasant.

Later that year we had a formal ceremony at my parents which was a lot of fun and my first time back home in at least a year. Then later that year we had another formal ceremony in China with her family which was also great as my parents were able to visit China for the first time.

Finally we both had jobs, a home, and weren’t crushed by the stresses of post-graduation. This was a really good time with the inevitable hiccup here and there. It was also around this time I started collecting games, one of my main hobbies for a while and a focal point of this blog early on. Life seemed great and great things seemed to be coming our way. My job was close enough I could bike there, so I was exercising everyday, had hobbies, and disposable income. However there was a large gap in our incomes and this constant pressure to make as much as she did weighed heavily on me. This was one of the greatest stresses for me at the time, meaning I didn’t like taking unpaid time off and felt uncomfortable with large expenses. She loves to travel and not only do I not enjoy it as much as her, it ate into my savings and income after I ran out of PTO. So much so I stopped any of my own traveling, like visiting family back in Indiana, because I felt so pressured to make more money. Again the cracks in our foundation should be obvious here.

After roughly two years at my job I was let go as a part of restructuring. This would’ve been in October of 2019. We had moved into several successive rentals closer to her work at this time so her house could be rented full-time. Which meant while I was still at that job I would be commuting roughly an hour north in the mornings, something she had done going south previously. I lost my job and wouldn’t get another one for another eight months. These gaps of unemployment affected her greatly and continued to be a sore point for her, understandably. There is some blame to be levied at me but it’s not easy to change jobs as I’m sure many know.

All of the stress that I was experiencing, no job, no income, living with other renters (something that stresses me quite a bit), and pressure from her put me into a heavy depression. We had planned a trip to the northwest during this time but I backed out at the last minute feeling guilt over not being employed. This really pissed her off and I spent the two days she was gone crying alone in our bedroom. I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped, unable to land a new position and provide for my wife.

Fortunately I was approached for a contract position at Google that I interviewed for and was accepted into, though it took a couple of months before I started in early 2020. After getting this job we hit our sweet spot of marriage. We were both doing well at work and had a healthy work-life balance. This all occurred before the Covid-19 lockdowns, which changed everything for everyone.

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.