You can’t wake up – this is not a dream

I recently learned about attachment styles and their effect of relationships. Nothing in life has ever made more sense. I’m avoidantly attached through and through. I’m a cliche of child abuse and neglect who has grown up to have trust issues, be averse to conflict, and never ever ask for help for fear of both being a burden and feeling like someone will be able to hold something over me. Call me Leonid Ivanovich Rogozov, because imma bout to remove my own appendix.

Lately my spouse and I have been fighting a lot. Not even really fighting, but like, them being upset with me 24/7 about everything I do or don’t do. It’s like my existence is troublesome. I can’t seem to do anything right and furthermore make them feel the same even though I feel like I’m constantly saying “hey, chill, it’s okay, we all make mistakes”

I’ve been making concerted efforts to make changes and keep to my commitments. If they go unnoticed they may have well not happened. If I draw attention to it it’s like “okay…whatcha want a cookie?” There’s no way to win situations like this. Then I’m told that I have made ZERO improvement, (which I know in my heart is not true) so I get mad. I try not to. I try to stifle my emotions and focus on my hurting partner, but when someone is shitting in your face for 10 minutes straight it’s hard to not defensively block the fecal storm.

Also I can somehow never bring up the things THEY do that bother ME even in the gentlest way or they flip their lid and make it about how I’m “deflecting” from my own shortcomings even if it’s a completely separate conversation…

My spouse doesn’t respect my career. I’m disabled and have persevered and overcome a lot to be a freelance artist. I’m making 50-60k a year, but it’s not good enough. They however, have not had a job in years due to their own health struggles. But they have the nerve to tell me I’m not earning enough and that I might need to get a “real job”. They constantly ask me to put my work commitments on the back-burner and endlessly reschedule my life to accommodate them since they think I can work wherever, whenever. It’s sort of true, but they don’t get the disrespect they are showing me. If I worked in an office they wouldn’t be able to interrupt me mid-day to have me run an errand. I would get fired so fucking fast. I’ve talked to them about this. They agree they’ll try to respect my work boundaries. They don’t. I guess it’s my fault at this point. Like everything else in life. Always my fault.

I seem to bring my spouse nothing but misery and wonder why they stay with me. Am I just a security blanket? I’ve expressed how I feel unloved … hated … and they feel offended that I feel that way? I’ve been in enough therapy to say that’s not how this works…

If I died in an accident would they be better off? How long would it take for them to recover?

I have a confession: I’ve been on mood-stabilizers and SNRIs for years and got to a point where I realized they definitely weren’t helping. I titrated myself off without anyone’s knowledge and I feel considerably less depressed, more mentally stable, less anxious, and more capable of handling the turbulence. What’s up with that? I’m not going to disclose this to anyone for a while. It’s an experiment and if anyone knew then the next time a fight/breakdown/spiral occurs it would be blamed on the lack of meds despite the fact that I was having even more of these unfortunate things while consistently on them.

There’s no winning. Ever. Life is a shitshow. I feel so done. 💩😓💤