Only Now

After two years.

Only now do I realize how much I allowed my ex-wife to define me.

I'm surprised I managed to function as well as I did.

I still feel as though I'm in recovery from that life.

Surprisingly to me, a thunderbolt from the blue was a scene from the series "Sex and the City."

Carrie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Petrovsky have an uncomfortable dinner in NYC with Carrie's friends and their mates. Carrie cringes at what her friends say, knowing how Aleksandr will judge them or see them as lesser. And Aleksandr announces that Carrie is moving to Paris before Carrie had decided to do it, much less tell her friends about it.

I haven't seen most episodes from that series, I'm only now seeing them for the first time in syndication. But that scene was hard to watch. It had the frightening quality of a scene from my own life, in which I felt like a passenger, and not my own person.

I have resisted talking to my ex for months now and it has taken a long time for me to realize that I am simply very angry. I'm angry at the person I was. I'm angry that I allowed myself to be second-guessed and criticized and psycho-analyzed relentlessly. I was never on level footing.

Holy fuck was I 'whipped.

I don't know… I would like to think I know better now. And where I'm at now it is irrelevant, anyway. It's just so not an issue.

It's been embarrassing to realize I didn't have my own goals. The direction I had been fighting so hard to go in really wasn't where I wanted to be, anyway. But I finally feel like a man. And I feel ready to move in my own direction under my own volition.