What's Been Happening? Instagram Hate & A Broken Marriage

What a couple years it's been. I have had so much going on, yet nothing at all it seems. I'm not even sure where I left off. I know I was sharing some poetry and things like that but with everything happening in my life and all the emotions and frustrations, ups and downs, I just thought maybe this is the outlet I need.

I've been sharing things on my Instagram account, which has been my only emotional outlet for a few years now. I have some really amazing followers who support me and appreciate my "realness" which is seriously lacking on social media. It also confuses people who are used to seeing more positive type posts from people. People share how wonderful and happy their lives are and leave out all the not so positive aspects and it makes for a very 1 dimensional account. I like to share my pain. I don't know why because it kills me when people don't understand and judge me for my openness. 

I definitely am someone who vents more of my frustrations, no matter what they are and when I am feeling happy about something, I keep it to myself because I feel like I always jinx myself. If I share how great my sales on eBay are, my sales immediately plummet. If my relationship is going well and I share that, we immediately start fighting again. I don't know why that is. So I protect my happy side. I guess I'm 1 dimensional in a way too, only opposite of the way most people are. I don't mean that to sound like shade either. I share the rougher aspects of life, that surely people can relate to, but I think maybe I trigger them and they don't want to face their own darkness. It's easier to judge and hate me and criticize me for sharing my shadows. 

Don't get me wrong, I do share more positive moments, I just do it in a very different way than the people who criticize me. I share my sense of humor but it is normally misinterpreted or it doesn't always come across in writing the way I intend it, because my style is more of a tone of voice or sarcasm or dryness. It doesn't always come across well in writing, unless you know me personally and how I speak. So people think I'm being rude or hateful or negative when really, I'm being sarcastic or satirical in some way. I guess that happens in real life too. I definitely can have a tone, due to many things, but I don't mean it to be harsh or mean or insensitive.

But anyway, I have been sharing my marriage issues and the complete breakdown of it. It's something that happens in life but most people don't face it publically like I've chosen to. We've had multiple separations and just battle after battle. He moved out at the end of January of this year but I got scared and let him come back, after he made countless promises. I wanted so much to believe him and work things out but deep down, I knew it was all lies...lies that I've heard counteless times. I let my fear of doing everything completely alone take over. All those promises went out the window within a month. It's caused a lot of frustrations. 

All I want is for him to listen to me and not fly into psychotic rages when he's feeling insecure about something. But he can't stop himself from acting completely unhinged. He gets certain ideas in his head and he will stew on them for days and I sense it so I try to prevent a blow up but it puts me on edge and I become defensive because I know what's coming. And sure enough, he blows the hell up. He will say things that just aren't true, he makes up stories in his head and then takes them out on me even though he has no evidence to back up his feelings. He says the worst most hurtful things that no husband should say to his wife. It's been this way since about 2 weeks into our relationship so it's my own fault for trying to make it work for so long. I loved him. I really believed that. 

He hasn't changed at all. He's the same as he's always been. But I have changed. I've become more secure within myself and I've grown and I'm more demanding of respect. Me feeling good about myself makes him feel insecure and bad about himself. I don't understand him at all. He expects me to devote my every thought and wish on him and his happiness while he has neglected all of my needs and he doesn't listen. Just like refusing to listen when I say we are done. I can't go through this anymore and I'm so angry at him for putting me in this situation when I have tried for so long to get him to understand how I'm feeling. 

I know I sound like I'm blaming it all on him. I know I'm not perfect. I know if we were completely separated from each other and he accepted it was over he would start complaining about me and telling everyone how bad I treated him. He has always had this victim mentality. He's always the victim and it leaves no space for me to feel hurt or express my feelings because it always come back to how my feelings make HIM feel. 

When we got together, he had me believing his ex was abusive to him and treated him so bad but I started to question that pretty early on just based on how he was treating me. God, I could tell stories of actual conversations and fights that you wouldn't believe. You would not believe it because it sounds completely insane. He had me feeling so crazy, so fucking crazy that I sort of broke back down mentally and emotionally and relapsed. It's mentally exhausting and confusing dealing with someone like him.

I tried so hard from day one to be good to him. I was good to him. I did absolutely everything for him. I basically ended up being like his mom, that's how much I took care of him. I was completely neglected. I believed he was treated badly in his first marriage and I wanted to give him what he needed to feel loved and valued. But I wasn't recieving any of that in return. I was getting accused of cheating on him constantly, even though we were together 24/7. We worked together, we drove together, we did every single thing together but somehow I was cheating on him. I've never cheated on anyone. I've never been accused so much of cheating either. 

He tried to control everything I did or didn't do, but tried to do it in a very covert way but I caught on pretty quick because I grew up with an abusive, narcissistic father and spent 9 years with a narcissist...I attract narcissistic personalities. Broken men. Men who are so broken they want to break me. If you research the empath-narcissist dynamic, you will see that it's very common for empath's to attract narcissists and vice-versa. Somehow we are drawn together. The healer in me (I'm also a Cancer zodiac) wants to fix this broken person with my love but they just abuse me and my love and nothing is ever good enough, leading to my pain and destruction and inevitable anger and disappointment and rage towards the situation. 

This entire situation has hurt me for so long but my pain does tend to come out as anger. That's something my dad passed on to me, I guess. He rarely expressed any emotion other than anger. I was very shy and quiet and introverted, which is what he wanted me to be - quiet - yet he couldn't understand my softness or relate to it so something must have been wrong with me. I see now how few people can relate to me. I don't like to play the victim card and I don't think of myself as a victim. I'm a strong woman. I've had to be. But I have been in abusive relationships, starting with my dad. If you can't understand my hard exterior or why I respond to pain the way I do, then I don't know what to tell you. All I've ever wanted in my life is to be understood and accepted the way I am and for my love and everything I try to give to someone will be accepted and valued like it's a fucking prize and honor for them to have, just like I would value someone elses unconditional love and acceptance as if it were the greatest prize and honor to be given. I don't why I can't get that. 

I did one very wrong thing that hurt people 10 years ago. That's all people want to see to this day. They don't try to understand the pain I was in that caused me to drown in alcohol for a brief, destructive period. They don't offer me any sympathy or understanding because they view it as unforgivable. Yet my kids have all long forgiven me and they are the ones who were most hurt and affected. They live with me, they want to be with me. I am the one who gives them the unconditional love children need. There are no conditions on my love. They forgive and they accept me and they need me. Yet nobody else, people who weren't involved, can offer me the same. I've spent 10 years proving my devotion to the people I love. Staying strong and sober. Tryng to be loved and understood and not manipulated or gaslit. My sadness and depression and burden comes from knowing that I will offer my genuine love and acceptance to a person but they will not give the same to me, especially once they know about my past. I had a rough 3 years. I'm 39. So the rest of my life, I have been tried to be a good, respectable person. People love a comeback and giving 2nd chances to men who struggled with drugs or alcohol, men who have destroyed lives. But as a woman? Women don't get 2nd chances. Not women like me who don't have friends because I let a man control my entire life so nobody really knows me.

I've done nothing on Instagram but be myself, express myself, be honest with my followers and try to be understood but it's apparently backfired because if you have a small following, you are bound to attract people who see you as the opposite of what you are. They want to hate you. They see you as disingenuious. They see what they want to see. My heart is too soft I guess to handle it, as strong as I try to be. My outer shell isn't strong enough to withstand the criticism of a handful of people. I'm too fucking sensitive for this world.

I don't even know what to do anymore. I'm just feeling so lost right now. So alone. So attacked. Almost hopeless. I question every single decision. I doubt myself constantly. I wonder if I'm just acting crazy or if I'm the actual problem. Am I the actual narcissist? Am I to blame for everything? I'm sure some people do think I'm a narcissist because I'm constantaly analizing my own personality in an attempt to know myself and be self aware but I know that also comes across as being self absorbed and that translates as narcissism. So everything I'm attempting to do grow as a person and to understand myself and how I relate to others is also coming across in exactly the way I don't want it to, the way I'm accusing other people of being. Ughhh, I can't win in this situation. 

Should I just suck it up and accept the life I've chosen and the man I chose, despite how unhappy, unheard and isolated I've been throughout our relationship? I'm so confused. I don't know how to stay even if I wanted to now. 

A woman putting herself first for once and refusing to put up with certain behaviors is apparently so wrong in peoples eyes. At least the way I do it. People like to judge the person who puts themselves out there - which is really hard for me to do btw. I naturally want to keep things to myself. But I have nobody to talk to or turn to so I do the only thing I can do to relate to people and that is talk about the uncomfortable things in my Instagram posts. There are only so many characters I can use so I can only express so much of my thoughts, it's quite limited for such a complicated situation. Not everything is black and white. 

If you are someone who hopes people will not judge you for just being yourself and putting yourself out there, maybe you could offer the same consideration, even if I'm not doing it the way you think I should and remember, this is my life, not yours. I have feelings. I know you might think it's wrong to put personal stuff out there about my husband but I wouldn't have done that if he asked me not to. He gave me permission to do so, not that I sought his permission. I would still express my feelings, I would just be a little more careful about what I say. He knows what I write about. He will see this post. Does it hurt him? I don't know. It might make him mad but sometimes when a person won't listen to what you have to say, having them read it, knowing other people have read it, makes them see things a little differently. He has specifically told me to write what I feel. It has been a huge fight because I write things he doesn't want to hear or deal with. He definitly gives me mixed messages and he knows this. So I am doing what I need to do for myself and that isn't selfish. I've given enough of myself and taken nothing for myself, until recently. 

I never want to hurt anyone and it sucks when I do. I feel a lot of guilt when I've hurt someone. But I have to take care of my heart the best way I can. Maybe in 5 or 10 years I will look back and wish I had handled this differently. I probably will because that's what I do. I look back on my choices and regret them, even if it was my only or best option at the time. That is part of growing as a person and taking accountability. I've done many things in my life that I wish I could do differently. So many. But I'm not a bad person and I know that. I am a different kind of person that most and I will always do things differently than most. I just wish I could be accepted for that.

Maybe marriage counceling is something we should do but I have felt like it's hopeless, what's the point. I've been unhappy for too damn long and he likes to live in blissful ignorance. We've each done individual counceling and I'm honestly not a fan. I just don't trust people. Everyone ends up turning on you at some point. I know I should be careful on Instagram because that might be what I'm feeling right now - people that I wanted to like me have turned on me. Maybe they never liked me. Maybe I'm simply entertainment. I'm that person people hate watch. I'm that trainwreck in their eyes. Not a person going through some rough moments.

Maybe in my next post I will dive into my Spiritual Awakening and what has really sent me down this path. Spiritual Awakenings aren't everything one would assume. It isn't all love and light. There is a lot of darkness you have to walk through first to get to the light. I see glimpses of light. But I'm stuck in my pain and a lot of that is probably due to my current situation. Everything in my life, my entire vision for my life has been completely uprooted by this awakening and what I believed it to be. I have a lot of hard decisions to make before I can move forward. I'm definitely at a crossroads and I have hard decisions to make. That's something that is difficult for me because I have such a fear of making the wrong decision and regretting it.

Follow me on Instagram for a wide variety of insanity @tonya_thrifts