18 - Comfortably Numb

This story contains characters over the age of 18

Chapter 18 Comfortably Numb

There are so many things that made me who I am, and I recognize that I have so much further to go and so many more lessons to learn. I believe that if I can learn some things now and develop better habits, it will be easier to be happy as I grow older. Unfortunately, I have very little personal motivation to change, but I know I shouldn't go on this way. So why am I this way? And what do I do about it?

Maybe I didn't give myself enough time to grow up and experience life. If I could do it over again, I would spare my husband and not get married, not have children. Life would be difficult in other ways. I wouldn't be able to live as comfortably, but I would be able to live as the person I am. On the other hand, maybe I never would have had the opportunity to take this journey of self-discovery and realize these things about myself if I had never married my husband and been comfortable with myself. Had circumstances been different, who is to say where I would be now?

Either way, we've come full circle. I've explored my life, my personality, and my sexuality. I've learned to open myself up and be honest about my needs. I satisfy those needs, but feel guilty about the way I go about it. I knew now that I would never have a picture-perfect life. I couldn't be happy that way, nor could I have it all.

On a typical day, I got up early in the morning and worked all day. Then I'd pick my daughter up from school and go home to make dinner. I would give her a bath and put her to bed. When my husband was home, we would spend time together, take a shower and go to bed. Usually we'd have sex, almost like part of our routine. Occasionally I would meet someone after work for an hour of heated pleasure before returning to my real life.

In my sex life, I enjoyed two very different elements. I constantly warred between the two, sensuality and debauchery, never finding a way to walk a comfortable median between them. This, then, was the problem, something my life was missing: balance. I think this is a very common problem that many people have, and it's a life problem. For me, it seemed to be a problem centered around identity, but for someone else, it may be a problem with prioritizing, or goal-setting, or anything else you can think of. When you open your mind honestly to yourself, you will know exactly what it is you're missing.

Tyler Glenn, of the Neon Trees, says, "Being a teenager, you're so emotional and trying to find yourself, and I still feel like most of my life has been me trying to find myself." Having always been incredibly mature for my age, I sometimes forget that I am still very young, and my teenage years literally make up one-third of my life. It weighs heavy on me sometimes. I am still very much stuck in that stage of trying to find myself, trying to reconcile who I am with who I thought I was, and sometimes reeling from the angst of it all. It makes it that much more difficult that I'm still very much "in the closet" about who I am; I am terrified to let people know.

Ash Beckham made a speech including a segment about everyone being in their own closet; things they're hiding from, things they are afraid to let anyone else know about themselves, or things they're dealing with. "All a closet is is a hard conversation... Inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. So really, my closet is no different from yours." That said, let he who is without blame cast the first stone; no one is perfect. Take time to understand how difficult it is when someone tries to have this hard conversation with you. They have built it up in their mind and they have avoided it for a reason. They must love you very much to face their fear and put aside self-preservation in the interest of being forward with you. I was never going to have this conversation with my husband voluntarily. I wasn't coming out of the "cheating closet." But I had other closets to come out of, specifically those other two aspects of myself that I'd been hiding from everyone.

For now, I was solving the problem by "having my cake and eating it too." I didn't have to have the hard conversation with him; I was just fulfilling that need with someone who mattered less. I was exercising the same misconception as my friends, believing that I could improve my life by seeking pleasure wherever I could find it. I was trying to split myself into two halves. I couldn't see any one way to get the most out of life, doomed to maintain two incompatible lives. If I reverted to my old life, I would be unhappy unless I found some way to have peace and contentment with what I had. I was restless and impatient, afraid of getting old before I had a chance to enjoy being young. Unfortunately, if I kept on the way I was going, by the time I got old and was ready for a lifetime of contentment, I might have destroyed the one relationship I wanted for life.

My husband was blissfully ignorant, happy that we're happy, when so many of his friends hated their wives or were getting divorced. I was happy we had a good relationship, but I always wanted more. My cheating aside, I didn't want to slide backward just because we were not growing together. Although I realized my behavior would harm rather than help, I couldn't see any other way. Satisfying my restlessness on my own was the only way to make myself more patient during the difficult, lonely times. I wanted us both to be fulfilled. He believed he was. Was it so wrong to want to let him be happy?

I knew that I wanted my husband for life, but I also knew if he found out about everything, he would leave; cheating was a hard line for him, drawn in the concrete of our relationship a long time ago, even before we were married. I had tried putting myself in his place, but the truth was I wouldn't feel betrayed if he wanted to have sex with someone else. It was merely that I had the ability to compartmentalize my beliefs from my feelings in a way that other people cannot. I know the life we have runs deeper than physical enjoyment, and I wouldn't want to deprive him of pleasure in any way. Neither one is more important than the other. Ordinary life and pleasure are equally necessary and I am able to keep them completely separate of each other. But knowing he felt differently, even if I didn't understand it, I needed to respect that. If I wanted the long-term, I needed to put these things in the past before my luck ran out. I wasn't going to lose him. I knew what I wanted, both short-term and long-term. How could I justify continuing on in this way?

I hadn't tried doing it the "right" way; the way my husband would accept, meeting a girl who could be part of our life. That was too damn hard. It's difficult to meet someone and find out if they are open to your particular brand of kink. It's hard enough in a heterosexual relationship, but even harder when people know you as a heterosexual, never considering you might possess a dual sexuality. I didn't know where to go or what to do. Another roadblock was not having any opportunity to meet new people. Being an introvert, it's not the easiest thing to do, and I couldn't go to any of the usual places one would go to meet people without my husband, effectively defeating the purpose. Something like this would either happen unexpectedly, or it wouldn't, and I would just have to be patient.

I had tried to stop. I had broken off all my relationships, only to start new ones time and again. The truth was, even though I knew it was wrong, I was having fun too. I wasn't even sure it was wrong. I knew it was socially unacceptable, and I knew my husband would hate me for it, but did these things make it wrong? I guess for me, it did. The fact was that I was married, and I wanted to stay married, and I did need to take others into consideration.

Knowing this and still not being able to stop, I began to wonder if I had an addiction. Was it sex? Adrenaline? The risk? I did love sex, but I loved it almost all the time, in every way, with just about any person. I'm not an adrenaline junkie in any other way. It was the same with risk. I'm not averse to risk-taking with a goal in mind, but I calculate my risks to an extreme degree, leaving little to chance. I get no high from the risk, or from the lie. I was smart. I knew the risks.

If I did have an addiction, was there anything I could do? I frequently considered therapy. Would that even work? I doubted it. I didn't think there was anything wrong with me. I simply was who I was, and I didn't want to change my personality. Still, I was a slave to this compulsion, and I had to deal with it somehow.

I worried that this magnitude of self-realization in such a short time could send me sliding into madness. What little I had shared with my husband had him thinking I was mentally unstable. I realized that it wasn't the kind of thing he could understand; he was wired differently. I did recognize that living this kind of double life had the dangerous potential of splitting my persona, one possible way for the mind to deal with the stress. It had certainly happened to others, but I didn't feel stressed. I thought enough of my personas leaked into each other to keep me together. But I felt that only a crazy person could behave this way and feel fine about it. And the things I'd done were nothing in comparison to the things I'd imagined.

Above all, there was the knowledge that if I had only known, I would never have gotten married. I would have handled my life so much differently.