Life Update (take three)

I'm not very good at this.

I’ve already written this post twice and then realized it was too long, too detailed and just . . . too much. I realized that after the first time but my second take was still too long and onerous.

So.

My girlfriend and I split up. We were married in all ways except the legal part. Seven and a half years together. We owned a home together and traveled the world together and did just about everything together, for better or worse. She was the one person I ever truly fell head over heels over, and for a while there I was the happiest I’ve ever been in my whole life.

But life is life and it comes at you fast and things hadn’t been great for a while now. Something had to give, and something did, and we decided around New Year’s Eve to call it splits.

It’s taken until this past Thursday morning to disentangle our lives, a nine-week process that has left me emotionally drained and something of a basket case, even though I know what we did was for the best and even though we did it in a way that was very amicable and compassionate and loving. I’m proud of us, but it’s all very sad and shitty and hard and I’ve barely been able to focus for weeks. Writing has been almost impossible.

All of this, I should add, comes after 2021—a year so packed with horribleness I wouldn’t even know where to begin and won’t bore you with the details. Things have been hard for some time and I often wonder how I haven’t had a total mental breakdown yet or, contrarily, whether I’m just in the middle of one and can’t see the forest for the trees.

All of which is to say, I’m sorry that the content has been so sparse. Life has been really hard and I’m trying to dig myself back out from under the rubble, and I’m trying not to wallow in self-pity. But sometimes trying isn’t enough.

Do or do not, as the little green man says. When life kicks you in the balls, kick that bastard back.

I’m grateful for your ongoing support. It means the world. I’ve been hiding out in Elden Ring lately, and that’s an okay place to be if you ask me. Soon I’ll have more to say about the game, including a review. And I know I’ve dropped the ball on some other stuff like Raised By Wolves, but I will have more to say about that as well.

Peace.

P.S. This post should give context to the poem I posted here a little while back. That poem was written during the breakup, hence the phrasing: soon, even the boxes will be gone. It’s very, very strange for me to read this poem now that the boxes are all gone, etc. I was talking about what was to come, and now that thing has come to pass. It’s weird.