tamara tried to love me, i think. maybe.

i’m getting pretty close to being finished “processing” all of the large amount of stuff that tamara left behind when she had the affair and shed her life with me. unfortunately, i continue to find new things she wrote. going through this sh!t by myself is difficult. but i don’t really have much of a choice. this latest round was writing and verse from the time period covering our dating to our first year or so of marriage.
i guess it shouldn’t matter this many years removed, but it’s like peeling back the layers of something that had a decent (if flawed) facade…that’s what i was shown…but was rotten and decayed at the core from the beginning…from before the beginning. meaning both her and her relationship with me. she was never really honest with me. i was a poor substitute, a shadow, a stand-in, and her feeble attempts at trying to view me as a competent spouse — her attempts to love me, trust me, be fair with me — were undermined by her own problems and issues. she imagined herself strong and independent before me, but weak and soft with me. she created all kinds of obsessive fantasies about the goings on between myself and cynthia before and because she entered the picture. she hated her own failings, she hated my failings, her imaginings about me ate at her and made her loathe me — she couldn’t give herself to me, she couldn’t tell me the truth. all of this was hidden from me, all i ever saw were the tell-tale signs of the darkness she kept hidden inside. i never had a chance.
there was so much fscked-up goings on in her head, it’s scary. it’s not surprising with what i know now, that she was physically and emotionally unable to have a good relationship with me. no wonder in later years she pitched that we’d compromised/settled — she always believed she did. i was “good enough”, i was there. who knows if she really believed i compromised/settled from my side or not. it doesn’t really matter, i guess. i don’t think there was much about my perspective or thoughts going on in her head. my actual role in things was much smaller than the role she played out for me in her head.
ironically, while her fantastical imaginings about me “cheating” gave her reason to loathe me, her relationship with alistair actually was built on cheating. (and lying.) in the story of our relationship, i was the one who was true. i was the one who was honest. i was the one who didn’t give up. i was the one who didn’t leave. yet she has gone on to idealize alistair. and she cast herself in her own cheater’s role as well, cheating on someone who remained true (just like her “true” love did to her, before me). funny how that works. (and could help explain a lot of her life after me…my weight is a product of my self-loathing, eh? project much?)
someone at work suggested that perhaps i should look at this as a positive, that at least i’ve been given a window into things that gives me an understanding that a lot of people never get into what underlying causes helped destroy a relationship they were in. it really does kind of show that i was set up to fail, that my efforts and work were very unlikely to have a chance of fostering a good relationship. on the other hand, it also sucks to know even though i’ve had very few relationships in my life, most of them fall into the category of being pre-wired for messy destruction. it’s not like i want to be a magnet for such things. i really would like a good relationship. really. i’ve been ready to move on for a long time now, hopefully to something good and meaningful. so, that’d be really nice. so, just…you know…let that happen. yep, anytime now.
as an odd bonus, after going through this last stuff, my hands now smell like pot. not sure why. i didn’t find any.