Making The Best of Things...

Got in to a fight with the wife just now. Good times. I know, I should not being having a good time fighting with my wife. I do assure you that fighting with my wife is not a good time.

Its like trying to argue astrophysics with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. You're just not going to win. For many reasons, I mean she's smart so she makes a lot of good points, but she's also persistent so if you get into it with her you are going to keep talking about whatever it is until such time as you see things her way. She is what she is.

Then she drops a fun one on me. She went with me to PA to hunt for a house. She found some places that she liked and a place or two that she'd actually consider living. So I might have been on my way to getting this whole separation from my family thing off my plate. Then we got into a big blow out on the drive home and I went and said some dumb shit about why don't we just get a divorce or some shit like that, and with that I kiboshed any chance I had of getting her to come with.

So at least to a point, I fucked myself here. Not totally, I'm not a complete moron. The majority of this shit is her deal. She doesn't want to go, so she's not going. Sure there's more to it than that, but we don't have that kind of time and I don't think that you've got that kind of attention span.

Suffice it to say, on July 11, 2019 our house will no longer belong to us. By which time, we will have moved her and all her and the kids shit to a three bedroom apartment about 5 minutes from where we live now, so I should be thankful for that, not a real haul to move her. And after that I will hop in my truck and drive the 8 to 9 hours it takes to get to my new home in Scranton, PA. At which point we will begin the indeterminate amount of time that we will spend separated from one another. She will learn what its like to be a single mom for 98% of every month for the next year or two. And I will learn the pain of being separated from my wife and children.

First things first, don't hate on my wife. I'm venting here. I'm not giving you her side of the story at all. I'm not going to tell you all of the horrible things I've done and said and been since we've been married. Again, suffice it to say, she may have a point.

Now on to the title of this post. Making the best of things. I'm going to have to. There really is no other choice. Okay, there's always another choice but as of right now, the other choices aren't as good as making the best of this shit. It is shit, but at least its our shit. Viktor Frankl once said something profound, and I'm paraphrasing here because I don't feel like looking the shit up, "There's a place between stimulus and reaction where we get to choose our attitude and what we will do, that place is where all of life is."

That phrase, more than anything else, in my humble opinion is the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy which to date, is the only thing that has even remotely helped with my PTSD. There's a split second between input and output that you can catch yourself and force your thoughts to go to a good place instead of hell. That's the place I am going to need to spend the vast majority of my time for the foreseeable future. I am going to make the best of this...anything else would be hell on earth.