Rebuild my friendship with my ex wife.

Yeah, I’m ending this, and removing this goal. I may comment on it when the legal stuff is done, but probably not.

...just that stray cat, the muttering homeless lady, and that conversation that started out as a tell-off 6 hours earlier and, after a handful of “what the fuck am I doing here” near-storm-offs, transformed into something much different.

Sometimes a nugget of truth will get surfaced, and I’ll have this total “duh” moment when the whole situation makes so much more sense. Ultimately, if we just talk long enough, we can never avoid the fact that we really do like each other.

I fucked up my marriage by being insecure. (Qv. “be more genuine” goal.) All B ever wanted was the real me, and I couldn’t deliver at the time. Eventually, it was so messed up, there was nothing worth salvaging. The fail was inherent in the relationship so long before the eventual end.

Now she sees me changing, and is quite understandably resentful—it’s not that the changes are bad, or unwarranted, or wrong. It’s that they’re changes I should have made when they could have saved us. The thing about hindsight is that you keep getting more and more of it.

It took a long time to get to the core of what’s been bugging us lately. It’s terribly late now. Need sleep.

Just keep not giving up.

I’m kind of an insensitive person. Not in the “doesn’t care about people” sense. I do care about people quite a lot, more than most, I think. I’m insensitive in the way that blind people’s eyes are insensitive to light. I just don’t see what’s going on with them. My empathy score is way low. It’s a problem.

We got in a bit of a fight a few days ago, which I didn’t even really realize was a fight until it was already underway. (So, I “acted like nothing was wrong” because, well, as far as I knew, nothing WAS wrong.) Sometimes people ask questions, and then the answers make them feel bad, even though they thought they wanted to know. (With contradictory shit like that going on inside human heads, I think it’s clear that empathy is weird and magic, and I’m normal.)

What made it worse, I got a vaguely threatening text message in the middle of the night from a San Jose number I didn’t recognize. It clearly wasn’t from B; even pissed off, she’d never write anything like that, and it was way ungrammatical and awkward. Overall a deep language fail.

She only told three people about our latest conflict. One, her best friend in Orange County who is a professional editor, and incredibly good with language. Another, her sister, who is in socal, and not the type to get involved with shit like this. The third, her roommate Christopher Hackler, the stalker fucktard. The same Chris Hackler who’s invade my privacy and gone out of his way to break down my and B’s friendship in the past, and who I’d threatened with legal action if he ever harassed me again.

He set up an alibi this time, and the number has no name associated with it. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the message came from him somehow. Doing it anonymously after being told to stop shows some serious unbalanced crazy, and a fear of getting caught, so he knows what he’s doing is wrong.

Tempted to buy a handgun. Or at least some pepper spray.

B and I continue to hash shit out. It’s a process. We really like each other as people, and both of us seem to genuinely want our friendship to go back to being something healthy.

In situations like this, I think the only way you can probably lose is if you give up. If you just keep doing it, even when it sucks, it’ll keep getting better on average, until eventually it’s not bad at all. Her hurt and my lack of empathy both slow the process, but they can’t block it if we don’t let them.