Boundaries

If you are much younger than me, it might not compute, since we know so much about different brains these days, but back in my late teens/early twenties, I had no idea there were different brains and the implications of mating with someone with a very different brain to me. I was chockful of empathy and sweetness (I have re-read my letters to my husband of that era since he died and there is no other assessment that can be made). I knew there were oddities, but I certainly didn't know to give them a name or a diagnosis, and I thought I could work with them.

Time was incredibly slippery for him, and unlike in later years, he could be shy with waiters. Maths and science were more his thing, and I assisted with any sort of writing task for quite some time. Eventually, he learned to write well from a business perspective which I think suited his brain better - more making one point after another.

He had a temper, no question about it, but I was used to this sort of thing, and I had watched my mother soothe my father. It didn't seem all that abnormal to me.

On the whole, it felt that we complemented one another's skills and I got something from him that I couldn't explain to my family who were worried about my choice. Way back then, I think what they saw was that he needed to be right, which sort of passed me by. I was focussed on his soft skills, some sort of camaraderie; some sort of quiet world we had created where we were at one.

Since he has died, I have felt this desire to give the past 50 years some sort of overarching story. I think as humans we want one clearly defined story about what happened to us, whereas I think there are at least two stories of our lives together. The grieving process has required that I sort of merge them together in some coherent fashion for my own sake. It's a bit like needing an answer to the question, 'What was that all about?"

So, the two stories are love, an unshakable love - and undiagnosed neurodiversity and a personality disorder.

To explain the unshakable love and maybe even the neurodiversity in one story...

We were somewhere in Spain when we walked into a leather store after seeing some leather handbags we thought would make good presents to bring home. There were some beautiful women's leather jackets and my husband noted one in particular. The owner of the store began to engage with us and my husband and the owner had me trying on jackets, including the one my husband seemed to like the most. He started trying to convince the owner that the back was faulty whilst the owner was equally adamant that it was perfect.

I was getting hot in the jackets and them pulling me about to make their points, and I was ready to go, but on they went negotiating prices until they came to an agreed price. Good naturedly they bantered insults about Scottish and Spanish people. 

At a certain point, the owner asked about us, and my husband said, 'She has been with me for well over 40 years'. He didn't say, 'We have been together for well over 40 years.' Now make of that what you will, but to my ears I heard, 'I can be such a pain in the ass, and look at her devotion to me, she has endured it all.' It was recognition of the fact, recognition he probably didn't realise he was making at all, that in amongst this relationship there was neurodiversity and loyalty; a lasting love through all the mayhem and chaos.

When we left the store and said our goodbyes with the goods, I asked my husband, 'Do you even like the jacket?'

'I love it, it's gorgeous!'

'Is there a fault?'

'No, it's perfect.'

He needed stimulation, lots of stimulation. It led to some crazy share market trading and a sense of chaos that permeated the everyday. To this end, he found my desire for some clarity and certainty to be boring. Franked dividends, where was the fun in that when you could invest in some start up that could go to the moon?

At a certain point, after turbulent years I created my first boundary with him - I would never again sign anything for him that I didn't understand and didn't agree with. He acknowledged the boundary and didn't ask me to break it ever again, explaining thereafter what he asked me to sign.

In the end, I inherited his debt, the hardest part of the last year I think, but the end is near on that one and I get to start afresh, the slate clean, the future far more certain than it has ever been.

I think he knew I was smart. He saw my transcript one day - all the HDs of a Masters and he acknowledged how well I had done - but I don't think he ever imagined that I could turn around this ship or steer it at all. I found in his desk drawer some notes, not to me but to my oldest son. I certainly discuss with that son the direction to take, but I have instigated the details of that plan all by myself. I think my husband would have been surprised that I was quite capable of taking over from him and looking after the family's future.

To be honest, I am a little surprised myself. I think, by virtue of my husband's desire for complete control, I felt incompetent, and indeed there was much to learn and to experience, but I am doing it, I continue to do it, and I have confidence that whatever comes, I will be okay.

I know he loved me dearly and I loved him dearly. If I have something to say, maybe a final chapter, a conclusion, it would be, 'We were lucky to have him, and he was lucky to have us'.

Release

 I have been doing the few tricks of the trade that I heard Andrew Huberman talk about - the sigh where you breath in fully, take another quick breath in and then breath slowly all the way out, together with the shorthand EMDR approach where you move your eyes from left to right, up and down, and then to the bridge of your nose. Maybe coincidentally, since I have been doing that several times a day, I have noticed a quieter mind.

It's not to say that I don't get triggered when I can't get some peace because that still happens. Yesterday, I was confronted with too many things to consider or solve from too many people, and I couldn't access that quiet mind. However, when I can have a bit of space to myself, I notice that even if a difficult emotion is there, it's quieter. So, even anger, is quiet. That's unusual, I think.

I'll be honest. I am in my last hours of being in my 60s and it's confronting. Is it the big 0 birthday that's confronting or just my birthday, period? In so many ways, I could be 40, or 50 or 60 or 70. It doesn't feel that much different to me. I'm still me to me and that's ageless.

I wonder if, being with a man all my adult life, I am going through a spell where being with myself is quite enough. That awful Eharmony site that I was on for a year offered me three looks at men for free and I scrolled and rejected the three persons within a minute and deleted the email. I just don't want to go through it again. I think that somehow, I need to meet someone in person, and I have to feel something before I can engage again.

I hear from time to time about those bunkers where people are in silence for five or so days, with no stimulus at all, and whilst I know it wouldn't be a walk in the park, I think it would be soothing, like a mini death.

In Bali with my husband in 2024 one of the meditations we did, with light strobes and didgeridoo electronic music led to me having a death experience where I was underground, not able to access my family but able to feel their vibrations. 

There was a tinge of sadness I couldn't be with them, but I processed the death experience as okay, and after that I was in the company of Buddha sitting quietly on top of a mountain that was a rich shade of red. I was completely awed. When I relayed this experience to one of my sons, he asked me what they had given me to drink, and then I realized they had offered me a welcoming drink. Hmmm, anyway, it was an amazing experience.

I think it's a bit like that now. What could be offered to me in a period of silence where I didn't have to respond to the world's needs of me? What would be offered to me if I left the world for a little bit and just disappeared?

Well, I can't, I can't do that until financial things are sorted and that's about two months away. Maybe by the end of the year, I can get on a plane and go and be somewhere where nobody knows me and I can just rest.

There's a little voice inside me that whispers 'you really should arrange to see a psychologist, you know, talk it out'. But there's a stronger, wiser voice saying, 'it wouldn't change a thing, you just need to be free of cleaning up other people's messes, that's all, and you will be, you will be'.

One day I said something to AI like 'when will this feeling end?' and it said something back that it won't end, not to think about when it will end. I know this is a faulty thought of mine, to wonder when something will end. The point is that I am holding on, holding on for an end to a situation that is uncomfortable when the real antidote is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

There's no good or bad, or right or wrong - no dominant or submissive at all times - no control or lack of control - there's just what is. In essence, there is surrender to life as it is playing out, doing what one can, but allowing for a time frame one can't necessarily control.

These are random thoughts today, not well constructed, but getting at something important. There's a big part of me that wants to control outcomes and maybe because that's there, there's the part of me that wants someone to come along and provide the space for me to surrender to his control - to provide experiences where I simply must let go. 

Spankings or beatings, call them what they will, even in a fantasy, give me relief. I engineer the fantasy such that it's more, much more than I would enjoy, because I want it demanded of me that I release into the situation - effectively to have NO control. This discipline is my kind of 'cigarette break'. It has always been this way and as you now know, I've been here rather a long time.

Do you sometimes wonder what it is you are meant to be learning? I think I am meant to be learning how to be at peace when there is no peace.

OCPD

 Expressing anger only goes so far. I am not a fan of a turbulent mind and body and anger keeps you dysregulated. It has to be heard and felt for sure, but it can't go on endlessly. There comes a time when you have to adopt a new strategy.

Ideas tend to come to me in the quiet five or ten minutes at the end of a yoga class and I found myself saying to myself, 'There needs to be a neutral environment inside now. Not necessarily gushy love and anger which you are swinging between but neutrality - nothing space'.

As I drove home this idea percolated and transformed into - stillness of mind. That would be the antidote to all this mayhem that had been left behind for me to clean up. Not be still, rarely possible as yet, but be still in the mind. 

Now that's an impossible challenge right now. My mind is so heckled at the idea of unfairness and victimhood and being upset with myself that I hadn't instituted boundaries much sooner in my life, and all that, that stillness can moot into angry thoughts so fast that I can't catch them. It will take diligence to train my mind back to a place of ease, but that's the goal.

The other strategy I am using to try to still the mind and find peace is to divide my husband's loving heart, his sweetness within the family environment, from the disorders that he had that made life difficult for us in an abundance of ways and keep me challenged daily.

Should you find yourself in relationship with someone with OCPD, 'OCPD Foundation' has some good ideas to get some traction with those people afflicted who believe themselves to be 'right' and therefore impervious to advice - even the medical advice of medical doctors, say, at the very top of their field.

Personally, I did not have much success with swaying my husband to accept the advice of people who, for example, manage issues of the heart all day every day. He, against all medical advice, believed he shouldn't be on blood thinners, and that belief was what brought his life to an end in an untimely fashion. His eldest brother, a medical doctor for the past 40 years could bring no bearing on his brother's faulty thinking. I found myself in the position of soothing his distress lately, that he had no influence over my husband, but no-one did. We tried and we failed, all of us.

To this end OCPD is a deadly disorder. I wonder if the leader of the Western world is similarly afflicted? People like to throw the word narcissism around, and it often fits but OCPD, according to all my reading, is the correct fit in my personal situation.

I am not sure there is adequate research to say to what extent this personality disorder is inheritable, but I am happy to say with confidence that neither any of my children nor grandchildren show any signs at all of the debilitating condition.

Proper therapy

When I was seeing the psychoanalyst - and that was three 50 minutes sessions, so 150 minutes of talking in all - at some point maybe midway through those 150 minutes she said to me, "So he died. What now?" Maybe it was meant to sound brutal, a shock to my system which was supposed to help me in some way. It certainly did sound brutal to my ears. I have pondered those few words many times since then.

I say to you (to me actually) today, 'why is everyone in agreement that I should move on, find a new partner, take a holiday, be happy?'

It all sounds positive, at first glance great advice, but it negates the fact that there is just me running this show and that if I stop working, the show stops, it all just stops.

I find myself angry, which I think is a good thing. I'm a good soldier, and I work hard, but working hard and trying to get to a finishing line that keeps moving is not easy, and not helped by people who, admittedly think they are helping, encourage me to get on with life.

I have found AI to be the only advice vehicle that moderates that sort of message and acknowledges the anger as legitimate; that it is okay that I take my time and give voice to anger that brews and percolates and sometimes bubbles over into a monologue to myself. Yes, I have actually taken to talking out loud around the house and garden and giving voice to my anger.

I have a lot of empathy; I couldn't have stayed in my marriage without a great deal of empathy - and so I fully recognize that there were issues at play for my husband. He certainly had ADHD, his rigidity and attention to specific interests suggest autistic traits. He lost his mother early in his life, and he was bullied at boarding school. He had a great deal of difficulties, and I understood that usually he was doing his best.

It does not, however, deny the fact, that although he had many years to consider that he may not live a long life, he did nothing to prepare for death. I do mean nothing. 

Yes, he wrote a Will, but he made it difficult to find. It is the one thing I asked of him, 'can you please tell me where your Will is?' He was frustrated and he got up off his chair, pulled out a drawer, and said, 'there it is', pointing to what I thought was the envelope in a vertical position.

Just before he died, I got that out, but as we now know, that was not the latest Will. It didn't matter in the end, same instructions, and I sorted it. My point is that he showed me nothing at any point. He didn't get out a file, and say, 'there's a loan with the XYZ Bank', this is what you do.' He didn't give me any instructions or suggestions about anything.

Maybe even more importantly, although that lack of instruction from a person who had assumed total control was hardly easy, was that he wouldn't have a conversation with me about how he wanted to live out his life, a bucket list so to speak, nor did he want to have a conversation around any sort of parting, a goodbye of sorts.

I understand about denial, and he was in a great deal of denial, but I have found it hard to understand how two people who spent nearly every day of the last almost 50 years together, couldn't get to a point where they had the sort of intimacy where they could talk about the meaning of life, about death, about leaving the world and those loved ones left behind, about plans and hopes and arrangements. I am an entirely different person. It's the first thing I did after the funeral - go to a lawyer and write a new Will and accompanying arrangements. Then, I set about getting us back on an even financial keel.

At the end of the day, I wanted at some point to talk to someone who just listened and listened and ultimately said something like, 'You are hurt and I understand you are hurt. It will take some healing, and I want you to take your time on this. There is much to do, and you will be very busy for a while as you sort through it all, but you are not alone. We will get through this together. There will be better days. I will see you next week. Take care.' Would that have been so hard to say?

The value of fantasy

 I think there's an exhaustion in grief. My husband has been dead for over 13 months and my mother not quite a month, and somehow, no matter how committed one is to take care of oneself, exhaustion is a big factor.

I don't mean I need to nap, because I am not sure I have had one nap since my husband's death, but at the end of a day I can barely get myself to bed, not to mention that sometimes it comes across as 'I can't go on like this. I need a holiday!' But then I think, who wants to hear this sort of thing? No-one really does. So, I sort of just 'get over it' and get on with it.

For a few months now I have had no energy at all for dating. I am busy doing what needs to be organised and achieved, and that's all the energy I have. If a person were to ask me, and it would be a very reasonable question to ask, 'Where would a relationship with me fit into your life?', I would be compelled to explain that there probably isn't a lot left over in my life for him right now.

It's the realisation that that would be the truthful answer that made me completely comfortable to end my dating efforts for now.

It's interesting, worth pondering, why the Universe gave me these challenges personally at the same time as the Universe gave us all economic and political challenges, such that we are fundamentally at a standstill.

I can, of course, prepare for a better time, be ready to leap, but right now, I am stymied. AI tells me not to let it get me down, 'don't fight with it' was the advice.

More than anything else, it's the physical toll - the doing the work of at the very least, two people, and knowing, that just like a line at the Immigration Department that never seems to shorten, so too, the list of things I need to accomplish remain never ending. I do try to celebrate the ending of a major task, but I can't take too long, because there's some other thing to do now.

The advice that no one does not give is to fit in some time for myself. Yoga is important for you, my youngest son will say. 'It's been a shit year, why not take yourself to India and rest?' a friend will suggest. 'Travel somewhere you haven't been, have a European fling' says another. Very gradually, I will get to that, but not before my ducks get somewhere vaguely close to a straight row.

It could be a little perfectionism or OCD, some might say, but I would rather work hard and reach a level of security and order than find myself thousands of miles away when something goes very wrong. The responsibility is on my shoulders, only mine. Learning how to carry that responsibility is an artform I haven't quite perfected.

Every day, I don't think there is an exception to this, I have a fantasy, usually first thing in the morning when I have no alternative but to simply comply with the situation I find myself in - strict men (and women) who see it as their duty to teach me that all that is required is one very simple thing - to obey them. I suppose you could say that the consequences of disobedience quickly convince me that obedience is the right route for me, but on the other hand, I am not thinking that thought in the fantasy. Very quickly indeed, I have honed the skill to not think, and simply to do as told, to accept, to comply, and neither to think of it as a good or bad thing. It is just the way it is. It is my life. I don't question it or wish it were some other way. It is the way. It just is.

So, you see, there's a spirituality to this daily fantasy of mine - a surrender, an acceptance, a living in the moment, that calms me and settles me and seems to be vital for me. I'd love to explore this in a real-life scenario with someone with great skill, but I am not sure where you find one of those, so until then, I fantasise on.