To Hell and Back

If you have any negative comments please keep them to yourself, I'm not sharing this with you to be judged, I'm sharing it because I hope that this will help people understand why I'm not the same person I was when I moved.  Now I'm not the best person with words, but this is the best I could do.

On a completely different note it was brought to my attention today that I am not the same person that I was before I moved.  Wow, didn’t take a genius to figure that one out!!  Well there are very few people who actually know what happened while I was in Hydro.  I guess this is my chance to set the story straight and put everything out there so people know why I have changed and why I’m not the same person I was when I moved.

I had completely given up hope that I would ever find someone to marry so when Chris came into my life I was completely shocked.  Yes things happened fast but one thing is for sure, I don’t regret a single minute that I spent with him.  I know some people may ask why I feel that way and the only answer I can give them is, when you love someone completely and the way that I loved him, you do things that you may not do in any normal situation.

I fell madly in love with a man that I seriously thought would be my forever.  I gave up everything I knew and worked for to be with him and I didn’t bat an eye in my decision.  Chris and I had a connection that I had never felt before and when we were apart I literally ached to be around him again.  We would chat all day every day, between snapchats, text messages, phone calls and skyping, we were in constant communication with each other from day one.  I honestly can say that it was love at first sight.  We had talked for a bit before we actually meet and I never believed people when they would say you will just know till I meet him.  I had thought I had been in love before with my first love, but the love I had for Chris was completely different.  I would have gone to hell and back for him and eventually that is what it felt like.

When I first moved to Hydro to be with Chris, things were really good.  I was trying to get the house all put together and get settled into my new job.  It was an adjustment not really knowing anyone and being alone for the majority of the time.  I think I spent a lot of my alone time on the phone with friends and my grandparents so I wouldn’t feel so isolated out there!  Yes I had one friend out there that I worked with but she had a son and a life so we didn’t see each other much.  I spent some time with his family when he was home and I can honestly say that I was super excited about spending holidays with them.  Him and his sister were super close, which is something I have never had, and he was very close with his parents.  The first couple weekends I was there we spend time out at the lake with his family and I really felt like I hit the jackpot with what was supposed to be my in-laws!  They were amazing!

This is where my happily ever after when to hell in a hand basket.  Our world was turned upside down when his ex-wife passed away just 3 weeks after me being there.  There are things that I’m going to say that some people aren’t aware of yet and I honestly think its going to be easier to say it here than to repeat the story a million times.

When the ex first passed away things seemed to turn.  It wasn’t all of sudden, it took time for things to get bad and I fought till the bitter end to make things better.  It was little things at first.  Text messages weren’t nearly as long as they had been, snapchats seemed to slow down but we were still in communication with each other so I had hope.  He was still telling me he loved me and we were still planning on getting married, just not at the time we had originally planned. 

Chris worked away for days at a time and the longer he spent away the worse he got.  Originally we had said that we wouldn’t go more than 2 weeks without seeing someone.  When you are with someone who works in the oil fields, you get used to the schedule of them being gone for long periods of time.  The first complete 2 weeks was coming up and I was planning on going out to where he was finally given some time off.  That’s when things went south and were never the same again.  We had an argument over the fact that he wanted to pay for the funeral and refused to talk to me about it.  I’m sorry but when we got engaged I was under the impression that decisions such as that would be made together, I mean we were planning a wedding and planning on spending the rest of our lives together, this was not the best way to start.  I finally stopped the debate because I knew that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere.  I figured I’d let him work this out within himself and then things would get back to the way they were.  Boy was I ever wrong.

The silence started slow at first, the phone calls still came but they were more spread out than they were originally and the text messages took longer to get answered.  I waited patiently for him to figure things out because he repeatedly told me over and over that he still loved me and wanted me to be there.  Over the course of a month, things went from absolutely amazing to complete hell.  He had completely stopped talking to me on the phone and then when  I had a friend come out and help me paint the house he got way bent out of shape because he thought I had done it to erase the memories he had made before, that was so not my intention.  We had discussed at great lengths as to what needed to be done at his place and had agreed that I would paint and get new carpet while he was gone, well that was before we entered hell!  After things went bad he just completely forgot everything that we had discussed and things went south very quickly.  After he blew up about me painting the house, things were never the same.

Now some people were already telling me that I needed to leave and go back home but I couldn’t.  I couldn’t walk away knowing that there were things unfinished.  I wasn’t ready to give up, not yet.  I had it in my head that if I was patient and waited that he would come back to me, well that never happened.  I asked him numerous times if he still loved me and wanted me there and for awhile the answer was always yes, he didn’t want me to leave.  So I waited as best I could, although patience isn’t my strongest virtue!  I would sit at home waiting for him to call, waiting for the text messages, waiting for anything, I just patiently waited because in my mind, God had put me there for a reason and he wasn’t ready for me to leave, so I waited and waited.  The days turned into weeks and the weeks eventually turned into 3 months of me just sitting there never knowing what was going to happen.  I never knew what he would be like when he was able to come home, I never knew when he was coming home and I never knew what was around the next corner.

The night that he finally told me he didn’t love me anymore was probably the worst night of those long months.  My world shattered.  Now some people asked me then why I didn’t get up and leave but I still knew that God had me there for a reason and I wasn’t ready to throw the towel in.  I really thought that after time, things would settle down and that we would go back to what we were.  Sadly he proved me wrong and that was never meant to be.  

The last few weeks were by far the absolute worst.  Things had turned really bad at that point and I knew the end was near.  I spent Christmas Eve over at his parents house and was able to talk to his mother for 3 hours.  I learned a lot in those 3 hours and I really thought that things might work out.  His mom told me exactly how he felt about me from the beginning and she could see that he still loved me deep inside.  So I left his parents house knowing that things were going to get better over time, boy was I wrong, really really wrong.

The breaking point was when he came home 2 days before New Years Eve.  Things were bad and I knew at that point things would never get any better.  The part that hurt the most was the fact that he didn’t even think enough of me to put any thought into my Christmas present.  I’m not big on getting presents and I absolutely love giving gifts, to me its not a big deal if I don’t receive presents, to me its not about presents but its about spending time with the people you love, your friends and family.  I wanted so desperately to spend just 20 minutes with him, that’s all I wanted.  Instead, he decided that he would throw some cash into a blank card and leave it on the counter, the card said absolutely nothing, it was completely blank on the inside and he barely scribbled my name on the envelope.  I was completely broken at that point, I couldn’t take anymore.  I finally told him he had to make a decision, either let me stay and work things out or we needed to go our separate ways, he chose to go his own way.  He agreed to give me some time to get my notice in and find a new place or get moved back to Tulsa, I just needed time to figure things out. Unfortunately, I didn’t get that time.

Now let me say, after sitting there alone for the majority of 4 months and having the one man that I would do anything for and give up anything for completely shut me out, I was completely lost.  I had lost the person that I had fallen madly in love with and had planned on building my life with.  I had given up a career, a home, the life I had built, everything, I had given up everything to be with him.  Even when he was home from work he wasn’t actually home.  I spent night after night sitting there crying.  I have never cried so much and hope that I don’t ever go through that again.  I was broken.  My “friend” that was down there had just about completely shut me out of her life, looking back on the situation, I think she knew what he wanted and just didn’t know how to tell me.  I was 3 hours from my grandparents and an hour and half away from my best friends.  I literally had no one there, it was just me and my dogs.  So for the majority of 4 months, I sat there crying day after day.  I dreaded the times when he came home because I never knew if he was going to ask me to leave or tell me that things were going to start getting better.  He had broken me, I had never felt so horrible in my life.  I can’t explain how horrible I felt, I was lost, alone, hurt and confused.  There were days that I would just close myself off and not talk to anyone.  There were days that it took everything I had to get out of bed and go to work just so I wouldn’t have to sit in the house all day alone.  Yes there were times that I wanted to leave and that I really thought about leaving, but I still wasn’t convinced that God wanted me to leave, so I stayed and cried being miserable the entire time. 

I had felt like I had worked so hard to overcome the life I left behind in OKC and I had lost every part of me after I moved out to Hydro.  I had finally found peace in my life before and after everything that I went through when I was there had broken me and pushed me further away from the old me that I had worked so hard to overcome.  I was completely miserable and depressed.  I had never felt so defeated and worthless.  Chris never hit me and was never verbally abusive but he was emotionally abusive without even realizing what he was doing.  He was in a complete fog over his ex-wife that he literally had no other focus in his life than trying to fix things that couldn’t be fixed.

My weakest moment came on January 5^th.  I had completely given up all hope and I had literally thought that I was the reason things were so bad between us.  I thought there was something I had done to completely push him to the point he was at and I couldn’t handle it and I made a huge mistake.  If you have any negative opinions on what I am getting ready to share then you can just keep them to yourself, because I don’t need or want to hear them.

I was in the process of packing up everything to move it all back or somewhere else when I reached my breaking point.  I had stayed in bed a lot longer than I normally did and when I got out of bed, my foot had fallen asleep and I actually fell into the door and then to the floor, I had hurt myself and he was sitting just on the other side of the door and couldn’t even bother to ask if I was ok, he just ignored me.  So I spent a few minutes packing up that day and then I just couldn’t take it.  I had been crying non stop for days, hadn’t slept well in weeks, and hadn’t eaten very much and had lost 7 pounds in 4 days.  When I say I was lost and broken, I was literally lost and broken and at the point that I couldn’t take it anymore.  I wanted relief and I wanted out.  My answer to this problem, take a handful of pills and cry till it stopped.  Yes, thats what I said, I took a handful of pills and went to lay day and wait for it all to end.  I called my grandmother to talk to her again and after she realized something was wrong she got off the phone and called my “friend” to come help me.  Well that “friend” was way to busy taking a bath to even be bothered with dealing with me.  So the next few hours were a nightmare.  My “friend” called Chris and he called the cops because he couldn’t be bothered to help me either.  The cops came over, I was loopy and they took me to the hospital.  Up until this point, very few people actually know what I did and even fewer know the real reason why I did it.  I am completely ashamed and embarrassed over what I did and didn’t want people to know.  I learned a lot that day about Chris and my “friend”.  I learned that there are very few people that you can turn to in your darkest hour and know that they will be there.  When they hauled me off to the hospital I went alone.  My best friend Christina and her husband got there as quickly as they could and didn’t leave myside the rest of the evening.  They were my rocks during the worst time of my life.  I don’t know how I would have handled things had they not been there.  After I was hauled to the hospital in town, they sent me to Norman to be evaluated, luckily they let me go that night and I spent the rest of the time crying on Christinas shoulder because I was lost and broken.  I still can’t get through the story without crying and as I type this I’m sitting here trying to fight the tears back. 

When I got back to Tulsa I threw myself into my job, I pushed everything aside and didn’t want to deal with it.  I cried every day and didn’t understand why things were the way they were.  I didn’t know how to face what I had done, how I felt and still haven’t really spoken about it to anyone.  There are times that I still cry about everything that happened and its not so much over him, but over me.  I lost the person that I was, the person that I fought so hard to become.  The person that I never thought I would be.  At some point in those 4 months of me being gone, I lost the person that I loved, I lost me.  I know I am not the same person I was when I left, and honestly I don’t know if I will ever get back to that person.  I know what I went through isn’t nearly as bad as what some other people are going through but at the time, it was my own personal hell, and sadly I’m still living with some of the consequences today.  I have yet to forgive myself for the decision that I made that day, I’m still embarrassed over my actions and feel extremely guilty for the pain I put my loved ones through, because at the time, the thought of what they would have to go through never crossed my mind.  One day after I come to terms with what I did, I hope to be able to help people who are in that same situation.  Pay it forward in a way.  I had an amazing family that took me under their wings and never let me go.  Without the Fosters stepping up that day, I honestly don’t know what I would have done.  God saw to it that there was someone there for me when I hit my rock bottom and I will be forever grateful for them and I don’t know if they will ever know what it truly meant to me to have them by myside.

I hope that with me explaining as best as I can what my life was like for those few months that people can understand why I am the way I am now.  4 months can completely change a person, for better or worse, and sadly mine was for the worse.