The Me Project

How do you know if you need therapy after a miserable marriage? Asking for a friend…

My bank account says I’m not damaged, don’t need therapy, and to sit my butt down and live my life to the fullest. It’s also telling me to only buy avocados when they’re on sale. It’s one of the only things I tend to trust these days.

Sometimes I feel like I’m watching myself from the sidelines. Standing in cute heels (way thinner in my mind), with my Channel sunglasses, taking a long drag from a cigarette *cough*(I’m not even cool in my fantasy) judging the shit outta this girl who knows better but for some unknown reason is walking right into a pothole.

“WHY ARE YOU THE WAY YOU ARE?” I want to scream at myself and shake the crazy out.

Because I can’t afford therapy, I tend to come up with my own scientific reasons of why I am the way I am. Sometimes I’m a great philosopher, sometimes I’m a biologist, and sometimes I am a relationship expert.

So here’s what I’ve come up with (we’ll call this my hypotheses so it sounds more legit):

1. I want what I can’t have! Years of working at a daycare has taught me to change diapers like a fucking pro, but more importantly, that I can blame this trait on biology – we all want what we can’t have.

2. I’m looking for a fixer-upper: a project. Someone I can rescue.

Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?

I had my first serious boyfriend when I turned 18. He was a few years older than me. I was in university and he had no formal education passed high school. He worked in construction during the summers, and was a pizza maker during the colder months. I so desperately wanted him to have a great job and to be “successful”. I begged him for years to go to school. He finally did it for me. He took a program at a private college, went into debt for thousands of dollars, never found a job in that field and eventually declared bankruptcy.

Right out of that healthy relationship, I jumped into another one with the guy I eventually got married to. I had to find a person that lived thousands of miles away and was brought up in a different culture and spoke a different language daily. I wanted to be his hero. I wanted to help him out of a country he didn’t have a future in, and into the land of opportunity that had been so loving and welcoming to me and my family. At one point, I was so convinced I was being a rescue angel that I told myself “even if this marriage doesn’t work out, I know I’ve helped a young soul achieve his full potential”.

Well… that young soul had a great job, friends and family and a certain lifestyle back home that didn’t fit in here. That young soul had no interest in fitting in, learning the language, accepting the culture, finding friends, or accepting my family as his own.

So here we are … 10 years later, 2 failed relationships. 2 unfinished projects, and a girl who doesn’t seem to learn from her mistakes.

One thing I realized I do when I’m being shady, is that I don’t tell anyone about it – ESPECIALLY my mom. I’ts become the “Fucked-Up-ness Scale”: the more people that know about it, the more legit it is. If I’ve only told one close friend at a drunken event, and promised them to secrecy, then I’m most likely doing something I shouldn’t be doing… Like back in daycare where the kids got super quiet, and you just knew someone was wreaking havoc.

This is the longest time I’ve ever been single (it’s been less than a year).

I’ve always relied on a partner to fulfill my emotional needs. There’s always been someone to rescue, to fix, to want to change and to make “better”. I’ve always felt that my partners have been a reflection of my character and my choices. In my mind, they have been an extension of myself, rather than their own person.

When I finally gave up trying to be a superhero in my marriage, I started thinking about myself: I quit my dead-end, poopy-diaper-changing job, went back to school, got hired, and got 3 promotions within 2 years.

I don’t need to pay a therapist hundreds of dollars to tell me I need to focus on myself for a while – I’ve got Instagram inspirational memes for that.

Hell, I want someone to come along and want to rescue me (even though we’ve already established that I’m not damaged)!