I don’t share every post that I write. It depends upon my mood while I am writing, and how I am feeling about life. My emotions are all over the place. Every minute of every day I struggle to maintain control. Nobody realizes how much I struggle. Nobody knows, because I never tell anyone. I have sometimes tried to express how I feel about myself, and I typically receive platitudes from people telling me to feel better about myself.

After being emotionally and mentally abused, for 15 years, by the person whom I loved and trusted the most in the world, I am no longer able to trust myself. I suffer from constant anxiety, to the point where I am now having seizures. As an added bonus, because I am having seizures, I am no longer allowed to drive. Anytime, I get even the slightest amount of criticism, my self hatred goes into overload. Every single day I contemplate committing suicide, and I have to convince myself not to. A good day is when I only think about suicide once. Most days the idea of killing myself pops into my head at least five times. I see myself as a useless failure. I genuinely believe that I cannot do anything correctly, and that the world would be better off without me. I have to constantly remind myself that if I was gone, my kids would be forced to live with their mother 100% of the time.

The last time that my kids lived with their mother 100%, after two and a half weeks, my older daughter ran away from mother to come live with me 100%, and after three and a half months, I got a call from the elementary school letting me know that my older son was in the counsellor’s office. What they told me in the phone call was that my son had come into the office saying that if he ever had to live with his mother again, he would kill himself. The part that still haunts me was their final statement on that subject, “and we believe him”. He had just turned ten years old, and was seriously contemplating suicide. Since Her house was already being investigated by MCFD (Ministry of Children and Family Development), it was easy to get the social worker to back up my emergency claim for 100% custody of my son. As I tried to push for greater access to my younger two children, their mother insisted that she would need greater access to our older boy, before she would allow me greater access to our younger children. I then got to make the wonderful choice between seeing my younger children and putting my older son at serious risk of self-harm.

For those of you thinking that I need to see a therapist, I have been talking to one for two and a half years now, and yes, she has helped me immensely. I used to have a voice in my head, that sounded exactly like my ex-wife, whom my therapist and I named Lilith. Lilith criticized everything I did, said, or thought, and constantly reminded me what a worthless piece of shit I am. In two and a half years, Lilith’s voice has gone from a non-stop deafening roar, to a voice that is normally barely louder than a whisper. Sadly, Lilith’s voice has mostly been replaced by my own internal dialogue telling me that I am a worthless waste of space, I cannot keep my house tidy enough, I do not do enough chores around the house, I do not cook the food well enough, I am lousy at my job, and I have no friends. It was exceptionally hard to actually talk to and trust a therapist, after my previous one told me that I am an asshole.

When people that you trust turn on you and tell you that you are a terrible person, it can be incredibly difficult to get over it. My therapist told me that I am an asshole, and the following day, the counsellor at the school I was attending told me that I am an asshole. I was making the mistake of standing up for myself, and people in positions of authority do not like to be disagreed with. It was around this time that my wife told me that she’d had an affair, and I realized that I was going to have to get one of my children DNA tested. The marriage counsellor sided with her. Apparently it was my fault that my wife was not faithful. In my severe depression, which became so severe it lead to suicide attempts, I fell victim to a scammer, and I still hate myself for being so gullible. When I told my wife that we were separating, she proceeded to reach out to my friends and tell them all of the terrible things that I had done. She made up quite a few things, and the majority of my friends believed her. People tell me today how ‘if those people could turn on you so easily, they were never truly your friends’, but that does not help with the emotional damage the betrayals caused. Multiple people with whom I had been friends for over 30 years, turned away from me, without even asking for my version of the story. They simply believed that I had been cheating on and beating my wife. While I agree that I do not need friends like that, it makes it virtually impossible to trust anyone new. There was exactly one person who came to me, to find out my side of the story, and that was my neighbour. Several other neighbours simply stopped talking to me. Four years later, and the secretary at the kids’ elementary school will still not talk to me. There was one friend whom, at the time, I thought was reaching out to hear my side, but I discovered later that she was repeating what I was saying, back to my wife, to aid my wife in honing her story to more effectively paint me as a villain.

My therapist has started telling me about Depressive Personality Disorder as a possible answer to some of the struggles that I am having. She is also trying to convince me that it is okay for me to ask for time to myself. The current system is having severely negative effects on my physical, emotional, and mental health, so perhaps it is worth considering. It is times like this where my logical side and my emotional side get into conflict, which in turn triggers more anxiety and stress. Logically I know that taking time for myself makes sense, but emotionally I feel that taking time for myself makes me a selfish asshole.