day 2 - fat tuesday

finding it harder to be back here today than i thought it would... not sure where to go, but maybe the FAT in tuesday is a good start. i hate that word. it gives me great shame. i noticed the picture that i had as my profile here on the site and wished greatly to have that body back. i feel so very far from that person - standing on the beach, rejoicing in the beauty of the day and the wholeness i felt... the wheels fell off very soon after.

we were vacationing with another family and the relationship between the husband (her husband) and i was becoming more intimate than i was comfortable with. 2 weeks prior i would not have noticed, he seemed so safe and "sexless" to me - like a brother, i had a bit of a crush on him because he was so affirming to me - but it always seemed weird because he was so awkward and nerdy - 2 weeks prior i asked him to look at my computer while our two families were dining together at our house between 2 events.

his wife had shamed him earlier that day by screaming at him publicly during the picnic we were at. it was always so difficult for all of us to navigate the after affects of her outbursts. he had done the talk at church that morning and somehow she always seemed to need to humiliate him after any success - it was such a strange dynamic. we returned to our house after the picnic for supper. that was when i asked him to take a look at my computer.

after we ate dinner together we all walked down the hill to the river to watch the fireworks. all feeling a bit shell shocked and on eggshells, trying to pretend it never happened. things just weren't like they used to be, we used to be so carefree and fun together - now it was strained and awkward, always trying to regain the easy way we used to have.

upon returning home i noticed that something was left on my computer that looked fishy. i investigated and found that he had logged into websites that upon looking i found that he had created a new personality, purposefully created for cheating on his wife. ick... this changed everything. up until that point i had thought that it was just my broken that was making things between he and i weird, i hadn't realized that he was looking for intimacy outside of his marriage. this truly changed everything.

i couldn't pretend any more. i couldn't dabble in the attention. i realized very quickly how close i had come to really stepping into a full-blown affair.

i called liam to my office to show him what i had found. he knew all about the weird high i got from our friends attention and he told me repeatedly that he thought our friend had a crush on me too - i felt so open and honest, but really i was in great denial of how very powerful this attention was for me. i never wanted to admit that it was becoming a full blown addiction.

we looked at the sites together. we saw that he had been corresponding with other women, pictures, emails, chats... not sure if he was setting things up for business travel or just dabbling - but we knew we needed to address this somehow...

i emailed him at the fake email address and said "i know"... he panicked and denied for a few emails and then finally admitted it and i found them all the next morning in my inbox - he said he trashed the email address by changing his password to something unmemorable and said he'd never do it again. i wrote and said that liam and i needed to meet with him to discuss our upcoming vacation together. i was determined not to go, i was determined to change our plans.

the three of us met at our house and both liam and he felt that proceeding with the vacation was a good idea (for very different reasons) - he committed to tell his wife and i said i would only go if we could all clear the air and that the four of us could spend our time together making our own marriages stronger. this showed liam and i some major areas of improvement necessary for our own marriage too. he said yes and i reluctantly agreed. biggest mistake ever. i should have trusted myself. i should have known that his wife would have never agreed to deal with any of this.

it started us on a hellish camping trip, filled with them screaming at each other, and especially their son, beloved friend of my two kids. it was like camping in a war zone. when he started to yell at me i was out of there. we packed up and went home early... never knowing if he truly told her anything... it created a huge elephant between all of us that we had NO idea how to remove...

the profile picture was taken the day before the explosion began... after that everything changed... i think that i was so ashamed of my body being sexual again that it triggered a spiral that needed fat to make it safe again... it is only my program that has kept me from skyrocketing back to where i was before my recovery started...

so, maybe this connection - that body and this body - that one that was so free one day, and so unsafe the next... i never really understood how very close i came to an full-blown affair... the dabbling gave me so much energy, i felt so alive, so powerful... it was a drug of sorts, it was my sexual addiction morphing into something new and unidentifiable somehow (until after) maybe somehow i won't need this fat to keep me safe anymore once i digest all of this tangle...

ashes tomorrow...