So I thought that I should start posting again, but this time, I am going to try and sort out some of my thoughts, and maybe tell some stories.

Many people wonder what caused the end of my marriage. I was married for 15 years, and although, for the majority of it, I was not happy in the marriage, people have asked me what caused me to finally terminate the marriage.

At the beginning of 2018, my wife and I made the decision for me to return to school. We had the time and money available to us for me to have the time off and finally pursue my dream of studying my dream of game development and programming. In February, I temporarily moved out of the family home, and got a condo downtown so that I could start attending school. I was still home on weekends, and would call and FaceTime every day with the family. I did a ten week bootcamp on web development, before starting a one year program in May on game development and programming. The boot camp was very challenging, but I enjoyed it. The courses I was taking at VFS were also challenging, but I found that the support and culture at the school was not something that I was enjoying. VFS seemed to function much more as a business rather than a school. The instructors seemed far less interested in actually helping the students learn, versus trying to prepare the student for life in industry. Keep in mind, I was paying a lot of money to this school to be taught the coding skills I would need, but instead I found myself getting increasingly frustrated at the instructors’ unwillingness to actually teach. One key instructor was very vocal about the fact that he would only teach us 80% of what we needed to do an assignment, and would leave us to figure out the remaining 20%. Another instructor, was so incredibly incompetent, that of the seven class we had in the term, a full three classes were spent with no instruction whatsoever. My complaints to administration got me labeled as a troublemaker and disrupter, and the person to whom we were supposed to be able to talk to, told me that I was just being an “asshole”. I will dive into all of this in a future post.

After 2 semesters at VFS, I suffered a nervous breakdown. My stress level completely overwhelmed me to the point where I could no longer function. I lay in bed for three days, getting up only to use the bathroom, and get minimal food. Eventually I got out of bed, and proceeded to inform my wife and the school that I was going to have to withdraw from the school. I was told by my wife that I had failed the family, and my failure had financially devastated the family. She went on to say that the family was doomed and it was entirely my fault. That night, I attempted suicide. I am a diabetic, and I injected myself with a month’s worth of insulin, and went to bed. My hope was that I would fall into a diabetic coma and die. When I awoke the next day, I was surprised and disappointed. I told nobody what I had done, but tried to continue to function. I am not exactly certain when my second suicide attempt occurred, but it within a week of my first attempt. Same method, I injected myself with another month’s worth of insulin and went to bed. Again, I woke up in the morning, knowing my blood sugar was extremely low, but that sadly, I was still alive.

Over the course of the next week, I packed up my condo, and arranged with my wife to move back into the family home. Every day, my wife would remind me of what a miserable failure I was. I had told her about my suicide attempts, and she was shocked that I had done it, but offered no support or suggestions. Instead she continued to, multiple times daily, remind me that my failure had devastated the family, and that the family was completely doomed, and it was all my fault. She would regularly tell me to stop being depressed, but continued to remind me that I was a miserable failure, with no hope of redemption. I asked her if she could back off with the continuous stream of blame, and she agreed to stop for a week. She did not even last a day before the next reminder of my failure came. I started talking to my sister, who lives too far away to directly help, and she offered what advice she could, and offered her place for me to run to, if my situation became too severe. As a fellow diabetic, she told me to stop trying to kill myself with insulin, as her doctor had advised her years prior that it is so unlikely to work, as to be considered not possible. Instead, I would more likely just cause my body some permanent damage, which I would then have to live with. I took her advice to heart, and in my mind realized that the next attempt would have to be to take an entire bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol and an entire bottle of Extra Strength Advil. I have chronic migraines, so I always have extra bottles of pain killers around. And since I always buy the biggest bottles available, I knew that 100+ of each pill would do the job. I mentioned this to my sister, who agreed that should do the job, but begged me repeatedly to never do it. I could feel how much she cared through the phone. In the meantime, my wife continued to remind me daily that I was a failure as a man, as a husband, as a father, and as a provider. Every day, I got lower and lower. Every day I fought myself to not try again. My sister suggested that I move myself out of the shared master bedroom, and into my 2 year old daughter’s room, and move the 2 year old into the master bedroom. I told her it was an interesting idea, but there was no way that I would be able to find the energy or motivation to do that. Another week went by, during which I spoke with my sister every day, and every day my wife reminded me that every problem the family was facing was entirely my fault, because I was a complete failure of a man. On Saturday evening, my sister informed me that she had made all the arrangements, and that a group of friends were arriving on the Sunday, and they would be moving me out of the master bedroom and into my daughter’s room, and moving my daughter out of her room and into the master bedroom with my wife. They had even arranged, by completely tricking her, to get my wife out of the house for the day, so that she would not be around to interfere with the process. All she wanted was my agreement, and everything would happen. I looked at my options, and reluctantly agreed. In my mind, I knew that I was agreeing to end my marriage, but I also knew that if I did not agree, I likely did not have the strength to endure another week of the treatment my wife was giving me. It was end my marriage, or end my life. Either way, there was no future in my marriage.