The Feeding of my Dark Side OR Where was Yoda When I Needed Him?

Have I mentioned the fact that I had been spending way too much time on Jaymie's Facebook page?  I'm sure that doesn't surprise anyone.  Up until this point, which was March 2011, about 6 months post DDay, Jaymie was my hobby.
(hobby...a lovely euphemism for obsession)

I surfed all over the world wide web for any and all info/dirt on Jaymie that I could find. (Online for hours and it never occurred to me to search for  infidelity support forums for an entire year...Duh.) She had a MySpace page that dated back to her high school days.  Found something from a page called Xanga in 2005.  I learned about her participation in a debate team called Paradigm.  Don't know if she was any good or not.  She sure could spew some juicy rhetoric in emails.  Perhaps she was as adept verbally as well.  I find it difficult to comprehend that she honed her debating skills as a member of the "comedy team" at her church on the first Friday of every month, but the article I read, maybe dozens times, stated just that.

Hours of my life that I'll never get back were wasted.  What could be gained from squandering my time online looking at irrelevant factoids about this ridiculously young, morally bankrupt woman?

If only I had been privy to the wisdom of Yoda:
Fear is the path to the Dark Side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering. 

I had all that in spades!!
I sure had fear.  Fear of the very real possibility that my marriage was over.  Fear of my lack of self control!   Anger was my emotion of choice.  The majority of my time, I seethed!
Hatred oozed from my pores for Jaymie!
And that amount of animosity can only lead to suffering.  It damages your soul.
My dark side was wide awake.
I'd send Jaymie yet another email, demanding her attention, that would be ignored...then, born from that frustration and anger, I'd watch her Facebook page for any new post, regardless of how insignificant.  My heart beat faster when she posted pictures.  Each new comment fed my ravenous dark side.  It grew so much stronger, much more powerful than my rational side.
I'm starting to understand why.
There were two reasons I believe I couldn't Let the Bitch Whore Go.
1:  I was looking for a way to get her to send me the emails.  I was absolutely convinced that she held the key to why Richard cheated.  I wanted to know what she had that I didn't.  There had to be something huge!  Richard wouldn't risk 30 years with me for a scrawny, flat chested community college student unless she possessed a secret treasure that he coveted.  I'd never discover what that treasure was without the emails.

OK...you get it.  I was ALL ABOUT the emails.

2:  This one really makes me take a good, long look into my warped psyche, my dark side.
Every time I clicked on the bookmarked page that was Jaymie, I hoped to see she'd been thrown out of school, disgraced in her church or, when I really felt the core of my morbid hatred toward her, when I was in the zone of maleficent loathing, I wished for notification she had suffered bodily harm.  With any luck at all, she'll have been in a horrific car crash that left her a quadriplegic, barely alive, a vegetable on a breathing tube.

PLEASE don't judge me.  I know you must be thinking, "WHOA!  Shawn was WAY over the top!  Nobody deserves to be hated THAT much!  Not even a despicable slut like Jaymie!"
If it makes you feel any better, I think the same thing....Now.  It hurts my heart deeply to know how much hostility and animosity I was capable of then.  It pains me even more to know, that umbrage lives in me today.  I fed it for so long, it grew so strong, it took a part of me that I'll never get back.
Wasted time, wasted effort, wasted heart.

I know I don't need to continue to preach Let the Bitch Whore Go.  Did that in many previous posts.
But, I do want to reiterate why you should let her go...not just because she can't help you understand why your husband cheated.  She never will.  She has no clue.
Not just because you can never hurt her the way she hurt you.  You know you can't.  The pain betrayed spouses feel is distinct and specific to each of us.
Let her go because if you don't, you are injuring yourself forever.  You're losing pieces of yourself that you won't notice until it's too late, until they are irretrievable.
I never want any of you to have to regret anything the way I regret allowing myself to become lost in my delusion, my nightmare that was Jaymie.

It's a scary thing to become so well acquainted with your dark side.  We all have one, but to the wisest among us, their dark sides remain strangers.   Most of us don't take it out and examine it thoroughly because it's too difficult, too haunting.  I wish I had never gotten to know mine in such a profound way, but maybe my story will help you keep your dark side under lock and key.  My guess is after DDay you'll need to nurture it for at least a short time.  You can't discover your spouse has been unfaithful and NOT hate the affair partner...CAN YOU??
Well, if you were able to find nothing my forgiveness in your heart after DDay, please let me know.  I'll write directly to the Pope on your behalf requesting an immediate appointment to sainthood.

For everyone else...try to limit your association with your dark side.  I promise, you'll begin your walk on the Road to Happy MUCH sooner if you put it away as soon as possible.  Let your dark side rule the way I did, and it'll scar you for life.

Richard called it.  He said sometimes when we were in the lovely Dr. K's office, he'd look at the contorted grimace on my face, hear my cold, calculated words and wonder, "Where's Shawn?  Who is this person sitting next to me that detests me?"  Richard had no control over my dark side and he hated her.  He told me he did.
Can you believe the man didn't hit the ground running?  I can't.

My dark side is now dormant.  I haven't fed it in months and so, much to my relief, it hibernates.  I'm able to revisit what my dark side hath wrought while keeping it at bay.
Because my dark side sleeps, I can continue to share the story of what happened when it ran amok.

It was just at about this point that Jaymie blocked me from her FB page.  Whatever.  You all know signing up for a fake FB page is free and easy!  I was back in business and pissed.  My dark side decided to punish her.
I sent the email she had written to Richard after their last night together to her Christian Daddy, James.  It was quite the tantalizing bit of prose.  (If you wanna read it...Rough Night)
Knowing Richard would never try to stop me and my dark side, and to be sure the email was delivered and read, I sent it from his email address.
James was not pleased.

Hope & Hugs. We Need Both After DDay.

 I sign all my replies to comments with "Hope & Hugs,  Shawn".  (Except for some replies to the haters.  I welcome everyone with an opinion to share, but I surely can't be expected to want to hug them!)  I didn't come by those two words easily.  After DDay, I couldn't find much hope, so I really needed a freakin' hug!

I began this blog HOPING that I could find my way forward out of Crazy Town.  It wasn't long after I began to type that I found The Healing Heart message boards.  It was there that I received an abundance of Virtual Hugs from many caring former betrayed spouses.  I remember the first question I read on the forum...."Is it normal to have a ton of sex right after DDay?"
Whaaaat???  Someone else was banging their cheating bastard of a husband every which way, 3 times a day, besides me??
Thank God!!
I know....not the kindest thought for that poor woman, but such a relief for me!  Even better when I read the many replies to her quandary.
To summarize:  "It's called Hysterical Bonding and it's completely normal."
Oh my Lord!  I might be normal!  For the previous year I had done a pretty damn good impression of a certifiable whack job, but maybe it was normal to be a whack job after you find out your husband of 30 years was writing love poems to a 24 year old dip-stick while screwing her at the local casino!
Whew!  
That, my friends, was the moment I exhaled, expelling complete despair from my body,
and embraced HOPE.

Wouldn't it be wondrous if we could help someone do that here?

I'm taking another detour from my story to ask you, my dear readers, what do you need?  What should I write about that might shed a little light on the darkness of infidelity?  What do you want to know from the other readers that are a bit further down the Road to Happy?
There's still so much I wish I knew!  I have lots of questions, new ones daily.
Example:  Is it just plain nasty that I still can't even type whore-bag-Jaymie's name without adding a dig or two with it?  Is it wrong that I insist on reminding my readers that she was dumb as a box-o-rocks?
How can I get to a place of serenity about the hatred I harbor for the skanky twit?
Yeah...I still need a whole lotta help.  That's why I continue to blog.  I know there's a kinder, gentler Shawn in there somewhere, but I'm gonna need lots of hope & hugs from my friends to help find her.

Let's compare notes.  Let's help each other.  Let's share Hope & Hugs.

Trees Blocking the Road to Happy

Funny (funny strange, not funny LOL) how our brains work sometimes.  Have you ever heard the expression "Can't see the forest for the trees."? That's where I was.  Buried smack in the middle of trees so dense, there was next to no light peering though at all.  I understood there was a forest to behold and to analyze but in the darkness of my depressed state of mind, all I could see were the trees, the twisted, decaying trees.

Let me elaborate...Metaphorically speaking, (which my regular readers know I enjoy!) my marriage was the forest.  The forest had been severely damaged.  It had become infested, but I couldn't see it because of the trees.  My trees had a name.  They were called Jaymie.  In the previously mentioned funny way, my brain was protecting me by focusing my vision, my undivided attention and my pain on Jaymie, AKA the trees, because I was no where close to finding a way to actually face how Richard, the hallowed keeper of my marriage, AKA the forest, had betrayed me.
(Too metaphorical??  Maybe.  Sorry.)

You might have assumed the trees had another name, the emails.  Nope.  Not really. The emails were a means to my ultimate goal.  As I have been telling my story I've come to believe, if not yet completely understand, the emails were another trick of my brain.  I had convinced myself, with the help of my rapid firing, creative grey matter, the emails were essential to me ever being capable of moving forward, absolutely crucial, vital to my slim hope of marital recovery.  
The email trees were a massive blockade on my Road to Happy.
My mission was to break through the blockade and have my multitude of questions about Richard's affair answered.  I convinced myself that my mission was pure and good because my goal was to heal my marriage.

I consider myself a fairly intelligent woman...albeit a tad slow on the uptake at times.  My slow brain has played catch up and now I get that the trees, blocking my view of a better, healthier forest weren't really the emails....Like I said before...Call the trees, the mental blinders I wore and my obsession...Jaymie.

I've gone back through all the emails I sent to Jaymie the next few months.  I didn't just ask her for the emails she exchanged with Richard.  I wanted her to face me.  It was all about having an opportunity to ask all my questions and after I got a some answers, verbally incinerate her.  Rip her a big, fat new one!  Gather intel and expel pent up fury.

You might argue, rightfully so, that I didn't keep much fury pent up!  Let me assure you, as much as I had erupted with hateful behavior to date, there was still a massive amount of angry lava under the surface.  If it had ever burst forth, my marriage, the forest, would have been destroyed.

I sent her this on March 4th, 2011:

I'm sure you want to be done with this red-hot mess you helped create, but I'm not there yet.

You can continue to ignore me but I'm tenacious.  I still have questions, mostly about what Richard did to suck you in.  I want to know how it started.

Was it the money?  The perks?  His lies?  He is a lawyer.  They always have a way of twisting the truth.  And, God knows, they sure figure out what they need to say to get what they want.  It's how we pay the mortgage.

His shrink told me that Richard went through the worst mid-life crisis he has ever seen.  So, that means you were his Porche, his lost youth, his regrets.  He told you what he knew you needed to hear.  Your self esteem was blown to bits by Josh.  He built you up.  THEN...he shot you down much harder than Josh ever could.  At the very least, you must be so embarrassed that you could not see through Richard's lies.  I'm embarrassed that I missed all the clues.  Actually, I didn't miss them, I never looked for them at all.

So...continue to ignore me if you must.  I can almost understand why you just want to forget about any of it.   

Maybe I'll give up....but I doubt it.  Come on!  What can it hurt?  A couple of emails?  It'll be better than having to meet me in person.

`shawn`

Most of the emails I sent her were just like this one.  Am I sure she ever read them?  Nope, but I would guess she did.  I mean, if I had been fucking another women's husband and she found out...I'd change my damn name and I'd watch my back 24/7.  Hell...I'd probably move to another state!
Too bad Jaymie didn't leave, but I think she kept her eyes on me even as she ignored me.
So, yeah...I think she read them.

My life continued to deteriorate.  Spent lots of time on Jaymie's Facebook page.  She blocked me shortly after I sent her the email above and changed her screen name to the hip-hop-esque "Jay Mie".  Hilarious.  Like that would keep me out.
It was such a pathetic existence.  It was getting harder to put on a happy face when required so I spent lots of time alone in cyberspace with Jaymie.

Why on God's good earth did I punish myself so when I had done nothing wrong??
It was the damn TREES!!
I was so emotionally depleted I couldn't deal with the forest so I fixated on the trees!

Yikes.  This post wore me out.
Seriously, I am so not an outdoorsy kind of girl.
What the hell was I thinking prattling on about trees!!??