Ups and downs

Ive posted about my journey dealing with the abuse from my ex husband a few times in this thread so I figured I might as well bring the good news to you and a kinda..good..kinda bad? News as well.

This week my divorce will officially be finalized. I will no longer be attached to him and can continue on with my life. Downside. I have to send him his copy of the divorce paperwork. For my own mental health I decided against texting him to get his new address. But I still had to get it to him some how, perfect because I can send it to his dad (or get the new address from him). Bad news I deleted his dad's number, I only kept my exs because I knew i would need to contact him for this. I never expected him to actually get up and go to work to get an apartment on his own (I begged him constantly to do just that for us).

So I ended up going through our old text to find the number. And god..rereading the text and seeing just how unhappy I was. How much I despised being home and took any available opportunity to not be there. I came across one where I texted him I was having a horrible day at work and was litterally begging for him to save any hard conversations or arguments for tomorrow...

Plenty of him non stop texting me while I was busy. Forcing my plans short so he can do what he wants to do. Text of me trying desperately to defend myself from situations I shouldn't be defending in the first place. You can see the progress. The fear, the isolation. Me slowly pulling away from the relationship as i realized there was no fixing it.

The worst was in the upper text how painfully hard I was trying to hold it all together. How I tried everything to appease him, to make the relationship a little easier on us, like if I can make myself small enough I could fit into the 'perfect wife' box he tried to shove me in. I gave him my everything. And the further down you go painting grows. The Rollercoaster i felt daily so plainly shown in text, things that I struggled so hard to come to terms with so obviously laid out. It hurts. In a way I never thought it would. It didnt feel real at first. That these were OUR texts. That I was in that. It wasn't how I remembered it at all.

In a weird way it..validated so much. Ive talked to a few people in my life about it but none of them have been able to get that level of validation. That I wasn't crazy, that this was real. That everything i felt during that time wasnt just a dramatization, I could read it, see it all over again. How horribly obvious it was on the outside but knowing how incredibly normal it felt in the moment. So many nights of 'you should of known, they all knew why didnt you??' flew out the window. Of course you didnt know. It didnt start like this. It grew to this. Piece by piece, knock down after knock down. He made it normal. Stretching the boundaries slowly until they were so thin they might as well of not existed.

So for anyone else out there who isnt out yet, or those who are and are feeling crazy for not knowing. How could you have? They made you blind, its not a fault on you, its on them. No one can understand that until they've been through it. I used to think it before all this. Why dont they just leave? How dont they see what im seeing? Because they didnt blind everyone else, they just needed to blind you. Its easy to say from the outside, but as someone whose been in that position I want to say what I wish someone told me. Youre not crazy. And im glad you've finally realized it. It doesnt matter how long it took. You did it. And im proud of you.