2022-02-25 ------------------------------------------------------------------ It's been several months since I wrote here last. I do acknowledge that people are dying as I write this. Working for a charity has sobered me to the revelation that no matter what, people are always dying. I wish it wasn't like that. Somebody please kill Putin, if you can. Having that out of the way, my life keeps moving forward. I don't mean that in any positive sense whatsoever. Forward =/= better. I left my spouse this week. We had been together for eight years. This is the only serious relationship I had. At this moment I am in some type of an uncanny valley, I think. She has not been very hard on me, nor I towards her, but I am not sure it will stay that calm. I find it very hard to find any concrete handle on the whole affair. I just know that something started going wrong about four years ago and then it just kept escalating. It's like we diverged as people. One thing was that she told me she had thought about killing herself. After telling me that four years ago, she always downplayed it, like it was not that serious, but it left a serious mark on my mind. Not long after that I had a burnout which I blamed on work stress and other things. During that time it started to dawn on me that my lady was not very good at empathising. I remember one time during my burnout, when I was struck by anxiety, curled up and sobbing, and she was just unable to function at all. Almost like this was outside her programming or something. This is a person I thought was the only one I could be understood by. How things change. Even at that time, it was already becoming obvious that she was eating and drinking in a way that was not sustainable. A mutual friend told me they are thinking of confronting her about the eating. I told them to reconsider since there was this suicide threat. No one confronted her. At the same time, her mom seems to be doing very well in the stock market and keeps sponsoring her daughter. It would have been very hard for me to find anything wrong with that in my past life. I thought that the old folk should just give up their money instead of clinging on to it. Why not, right? But what happens when you have a person who is somehow chronically "hungry" for something new, is you get a situation where money loses it's value and also.. somehow I as her partner lost my value. It's not anymore us against the world. Now it's more like she and her mom against something.. Ok, a few steps back. When I was living alone ten or so years ago, I was genuinely in a desperate situation. I was living in a house that was actually smelling like mold, although I am not sure if it was because of the house or because of my housemate who I think was seriously weird and had very strange ideas about hygiene and so on. (Not joking!) In any case, I am going somewhere with all this. I was a loser, safe to say. Now, I find this girl living in another country. After less than a year of dating her, she moves to my country. We get a dog, it all seems to go towards greater heights. Sure, there are some "issues" like the time we are actually kicked out of our apartment for not paying rent for several months. But at the same time, I get a full time job, and we have quite enough money to get by. We are finally starting to get on our feet, but then her mom has all this so called luck on the stock market and then it starts. What seems to me like unlimited amount of material starts rolling our way. Now, many people would probably welcome this, and I did for some time, even though I think I always had some skeptisism towards it, for vaguely green past of mine with the related anti-capitalism. So, it goes on, her mom buys us a cabin on the countryside, she buys stuff like the water system, a toilet, some porches, a dock by the lake, a kitchen. It just keeps going. What's wrong with that? Free stuff! It's not free. You have to actually work to keep it all going. The covid hits and we move to this country house to live full time. In some ways it is the best time of my life. I really feel like I am free of the constant buzz of the city. In other ways, I am working to keep this place running. The normal routine of washing the laundry involves stuff like thawing the water pipe, warming up the water, pouring the water, carrying the clothes, unjamming the washing machine, pulling the clothesline inside the cabin, etc. Similar stuff about the composting toilet, keeping the snow off the property, splitting logs. Now, all of this stuff is making me into this machine I never really thought I was. I am in very good shape physically compared to before. At the same time, my spouse is sitting inside watching netflix. Now, I am not exactly blaming her. What I want to point out is that there is a very strange dynamic here: I used to be a loser. When put into a situation where we are in the middle of nowhere, I find it in me, pretty much automatically, that I need to work to keep this shit running, for her. What she finds in her is to let go and just focus on buying more stuff and watching tv, drinking and eating. I find this baffling. I even blame myself for somehow "enabling" her to regress like this. She used to be a real person. Now she's basically an addict. It's exremely strange. Now, back to the present time: After a week of us being separated she is being all productive, finally driving that driver's license that she wouldn't do for the past years, even learning my language to get an EU passport, also something she kept putting off. All the while I am just trying to scramble to even have an apartment. I am now living at the summer house. The snow is up to my hip and I feel no inspiration to keep it off the property. The thing that really eats me is this question: If I was a good person only for her, what am I alone? I just feel like screaming. ------------------------------------------------------------------