Trauma is terrible. Multiple traumas in a short span of time is especially damaging, and that feels like an enormous understatement in my mind. I see it like this.
In 2015 my ex wife and I almost split. I went through one of the worst experiences of my life where she, just as she would later do when she ended the marriage, not only smeared my name to all of her friends and family through one-sided, partial truths, but also had an emotional affair with a married man. At that time I had also made a lot of mistakes in my marriage that added to the near-split. Neither of us were innocent, but nonetheless I was severely hurt to say the least. However, I felt vastly more capable of handling it back then. Though very wounded by her actions, I felt like I had more of a support group in my friends, and as far as my family goes, things were mostly the same as they’d always been. Our traditions —birthdays/holidays spent together, weekly lunches with my mom, dad, and brother—were still in place. I had not yet experienced true trauma, so was simply dealing with emotional pain of a complicated, hurtful relationship.
After this period passed and my ex and I attempted to mend the damage done (deciding we were indeed staying together) I was depressed, but still felt, at my core, a sense of normalcy. This is also when things began to change for the worse.
My brother decided to pursue a relationship in Seattle, and moved away. Weekly lunches with my father, which my brother and I went to every week since we were small children, slowly dissipated. First bi-weekly, then monthly, then rarely at all. This was my fault due to the driving distance, but also for fear of my dad driving to meet me, as he was aging rapidly. After my brother moved, family get-togethers seems to slow across the board, and when we did get together, there was a big part of us missing. Dedicated lunches with my mom and brother also stopped, and since I had moved quite a bit far to the south, I saw less and less of my family and friends.
This slow decay lead to my first true loss when my dog, Jackson, died in late 2018. I’ve written about this previously so I won’t go into details, but the event was the first where I felt true loss. He wasn’t just a dog, but one of the smartest, wisest, and caring creatures I’d ever encountered. Further, he was the first dog my ex and I had gotten at the beginning of our relationship, and his loss felt like an omen. Despite this loss, I still feel like I could return to what I considered normal, and for the most part that was true as I navigated the grief, and eventually came to terms. Not to minimize the effect, but he had died expectedly, of old age, so it was all part of life.
In 2019 I started to feel better. I was exercising, and felt a bit of a personal renaissance. My health was getting better, my work life was great, and I had begun to work on some exciting personal projects in regards to animal charities. I even sold my business for an amount of money I’d never imagine having, and spent a bit of Christmas season in New York City, joining my business broker in a high-rise that seemed to be carved from a single block of marble.
But, that’s when things turned south, for me, and for so many others, when Covid hit in 2020, which sent me into extreme isolation. My cousin, a person I’m close with and one whom lived in the same house for 20 years (a comfort I took for granted when visiting) left his wife. Friends of many years fell away for different circumstances, and relationships with 2 of my best friends were broken or compromised. All of these things were emotionally survivable I believe (meaning I feel as if I could have healed from them), and my ex and I were weathering the storm as best as we could.
Then, in October 2020, my father fell and broke his hip, his death coming about a week later, and though I’ll leave out the details for now, it was completely unexpected. This is where things really started to change for me. This death of a parent changed who I felt I was, and rooted in me a sense of doom that I haven’t begun to escape. The pain and trauma was starting to add up, and I began to feel fear, fear of living, fear of what’s going to happen next. As an agnostic, I plead to the ether, hoping something would listen, to please, just give me more time before something bad happens to me again. Emotionally I was the equivalent of a turtle without its shell, a fresh locust having just shed it’s carapace. I began to wonder how much more I could take.
In May 2021, my very special friend, dog and therapy animal, Ollie, passed away unexpectedly. This event hit me so hard that it felt just as bad as when my father had passed, and yet worse because of the accumulated trauma. I bawled like a baby after he passed, and was nearly inconsolable. I’ll leave that for a previous entry as well, but in short, the trauma took root even further, and it began to feel like it was taking up a permanent residence in my gut, and my chest, and my poor mind that looped an untethered red-alert, screaming at me: “Look out, protect yourself, DO NOT GET HURT AGAIN WE CANNOT TAKE ON MORE PAIN.” I was on a code red, and I had no idea how to handle it.
Fast forward 3 months form that point, and I discovered my wife was having an affair. As an individual who lacked empathy on so many occasions, one who was simply wired differently from me and could simply not understand the depths of my trauma, I’m sure she saw this as a way out. From my side however, I experienced such cruelties from her actions and treatment of me, that the affair itself was one of the lesser offenses. When I begged her to give me time to process my grief (before I knew of the affair) she yelled at me “I can’t help you with that!”. When I asked her to just understand where I was coming from, she once again scorned me, stating: “I’m no longer going to listen to me here you say you want me to tell you ‘I see what you’re saying.”. When I asked her of my suspicions of the affair, she berated me and made me feel foolish for even considering it. She turned her parents against me by lying to them about what happened. She went to incredible lengths to keep her affair as a secret as to not tarnish her image or accept accountability, and instead vilified me.
Compared to the issues we faced in 2015, where I gave plenty of reasons for her to be angry, this time I had done nothing but try my best to navigate extreme grief and depression. I stayed home and surely withdrew from her, but it was because she rarely provided a kind ear (as you might guess when she refused to “see what I’m saying”). I became frozen. During the collapse of my marriage, I posted lyrics of songs to try to capture my feelings, and on one posting about a song stating that the author can see nothing out the window (lyrics that spoke to my relation to my grief), my ex sent the post to a friend of hers, and they jointly made fun of me, stating that it made no sense, and “what is he trying to say, that he’s sad!?”. This is partially due to the extremely toxic nature in which men who are dealing with depression are treated, but primarily due to my ex’s insistence on bad-mouthing me and presenting me as an imbalanced individual to her friends and family. Rationalize and justify was her entire MO. She could only do wrong based on the image she projected to others, not her own actions, guilt, or sense of accountability.
In the end, this was the final blow that I feel has changed me forever. Combined with the collapse of my support group, and the dispersion and loss of my family structure, I don’t think I’ll ever return to the pre-covid version of myself. Since covid, I’ve lost my dog, Ollie, My dad, my wife and the dozens of people associated with her (specifically her mother and father, who I cared for deeply). This loss has put me in a place of constant fear, a permanent, sky-gazing glance constantly on the search for the other shoe falling.
Doom.