Coping out

Yeah, my first blog here in ages, and it’s a pun.  What else do you expect?

Anyway, I’ve been spending most of my blogging time over on my other site, Taking Care of Tiny Tien.  It’s been my primary focus since becoming a parent.  However, since not everything I think of lately has to do with being a dad, I thought I’d come here and deal with the non-daddy things.

This time, it has to do with how do you cope with your negative feelings?  I don’t know about you, but I go through bouts of depression.  It’s not clinically diagnosed or anything, though I’ve been checked.  It’s just being down about things.  Mainly, it’s about feeling lonely, and apart from everything.  Now you may ask “But… aren’t you married… and have a kid?  Why would you feel lonely?” 

I think that’s a common misconception about feelings of loneliness.  Just because you have people around you, even loved ones, it doesn’t mean you always feel like you aren’t alone.  The primary example I’ve been experiencing, and really the reason I’m writing this entry, is that you just feel that you don’t have someone to talk to about the issues you’re going through.  “What about your wife?” you may ask.  Well, how do you talk to someone about a problem you’re having if they are potentially part of the problem?

Here’s the thing.  For quite some time now (I was about to say the majority of my life, but when I thought about it, it really wasn’t true) I’ve tried to talk out my feelings and any thoughts I might have.  I felt it was healthy, because I’ve been through the alternative.  Where you feel that you have to bottle everything up inside, and just suck it up and move on.  When I was back in the States, getting every out wasn’t too hard, because I had quite a few friends I could talk to about things like this.  Whether it was just some nagging thought in the back of my mind, some complaint I had about something in particular, or some random idea that I felt I needed to expand on, I felt that the people in my life were varied enough that I could always find someone to speak to about it.

Now that I’m no longer in the US, I’ve more or less been cut off from my friends.  Gone are the days where I would have a conversation into the wee hours of the morning, just letting my mind free associate.  Lost are the times where jokes would be flying back and forth among a few of us who gathered together just for that purpose.  Now, I am a stay at home dad who only really has his daughter to talk at.  Yes, talk at, not talk to, since she hasn’t mastered that little thing called language yet. 

Also, to be honest, the conversation with my wife has been a bit… problematic lately, as I feel as though there are a lot of things I can’t express to her without upsetting her.  I still try to bring up issues that need to be worked out with her, so that our marriage is at least strong, but it’s getting harder, because there is no outlet for the times where I feel I need to talk to an outside party about things that may pertain to our relationship.  Lately, it just feels like my wife and I aren’t really friends anymore.  Some of it, I’m sure, has to do with the strain of taking care of a new child, but there are other elements at play here that I don’t think I can properly address without having someone to bounce ideas off of. 

There is a community of people here that I do associate/socialize with, but I’m not sure if I can really call them friends… at least not in the sense of how it felt when I was around my friends at home.  With friends that you’ve had for a long time, you build up a catalog of personality quirks that you can only really share with each other.  It requires a lot of shared experience, good times and bad, and just generally being around each other for a long enough time where you learn these things about each other.  That’s why a lot of people have close friends that really come from an earlier stage in their life, because it’s hard to make new friends after a certain point.  It’s not impossible, but it is hard. 

That being said, there are things that you just don’t feel comfortable telling newer people in your life, because they don’t quite fall into that comfort zone.  Since that is currently the situation I’m in, I honestly feel as though I just can’t tell people what I need to say in order to clear my mind and function normally again.  I feel myself falling back into old patterns that I thought long lost, where I just grit my teeth and bear it because I don’t want to disturb the peace.  I had built up such a good system to cope when I was home, and now, it’s gone.  Sure, I could contact my friends through all the social media sites, and things like that, but there’s something lacking when there isn’t a face-to-face conversation.  I feel as though I’m suddenly that awkward teenager again from high school who doesn’t know where he fits in or how he fits in. 

Basically, what I’m saying is that I’m holding in a lot of stuff, and the pressure is starting to build.  I vent from time to time, but it’s always directed at the wrong people, or person I should say, and normally in the wrong way.  I’ve lost the ability to be clear with my words because I don’t have any practice anymore with saying things the way I need them to be said.  Having friends around with whom I can clarify my thoughts beforehand helps a lot, and not having them has caused me to lose my voice in a way.  I have to come up with a whole new way to cope that isn’t full of self-destructive behavior, because right now, that’s what I’m knee deep in.  I’ve come to loathe myself in recent weeks, because I just feel like an idiot who doesn’t know what to say.  In order to move on with my life, I’m going to have to figure something new out… but where to start?  I guess that’ll be my new job…