Day 108 - Taking Chances

 TAKING CHANCES

Prompt - Taking Chances : Everyone takes a risk at some point in their life.  Write about a time when you took a chance and what the result was.

Now, almost three decades later, it's fascinating to look back and recall what led up to it.  In rereading old diaries I amaze myself not that it happened at all, but that it took so long for me to make the decision.  Except that low self esteem and lack of confidence ooze from those same pages.  I couldn't make the choice because I didn't believe in myself.

And yet the evidence is there that my life was very unhappy.  I write a lot about death, and how it might come about, how it would be a preferable state to the one I was in.  There were times when i dreaded going home.  Not all the time, not by any means, but often enough to make me wonder now how I stuck it out for so long.  The silent treatment for days on end.  Being made to feel uncomfortable for doing things that made me happy, like watching Scotland play rugby.  feeling resentful that I was doing most of the work while she sat and read trashy novels.  The total lack of any sexual contact.  With a year of the wedding she'd threatened to leave me at least twice.  I wish she had.

Yes, there were times that were fun.  We had holidays, we had outings.  But so many of them seem to have been marred by rows, or just a general sense of not wanting to be there.  It couldn't have been all bad, nothing ever is.  But it was bad enough for it always to have some element of tension, of worry that the good bits couldn't last, and would inevitably break down into shouting then silence.

It took someone else to provide the catalyst - and even then it would be three years of turmoil before the final end point could be reached.  It took someone else in my life to make me feel worthwhile again, that I could be better off away from the toxicity of that relationship.  To realise that it wasn't all my fault, that I was more adequate than I had thought, and that I could make a better life for myself.  (And that she too might be better off without me in the long run.)  That someone else lit up my life, then left me in despair, and I flirted with the ultimate end, unsure of how serious I was about ending my own life.  Going that low was the best thing I could have done, for then there's only one way to go.  It was a slow process, an uneven one, but it brought me belief in myself, and an optimism I hadn't known for many, many years.

Of course divorce entailed some risk, but I took so long to reach the point of decision, and to enact it, that it felt like the only chance I had.  And look how it turned out - I am happier now than I've ever been.