I haven’t written here for a while. I happen to have tonight alone and I don’t have work or an agenda to distract me. My wife has headed off to see her partner for xmas eve.

It has been a long tough year. Even in spite of the breakups from last year, I feel like this year was harder. There was certainly a lot of big changes that were well intentioned but ended up just putting me in financially hard positions. Emotionally hard ones too. I really should start doing those “Morning Pages” again, an idea I learned from “The Artist’s Way”. Artistic practice aside, I need to journal my life more because my memory is just not as great I feel. For that reason, I’m not going to try a month by month recap of what happened. It would take too long.

On the health side of things, I worked with a PT for most of the year. I didn’t really lose much in the way of weight, but I did get stronger and gained more confidence with building my workouts for strength purposes. I was able to make a bit of progress on my chest development with changes in my grip positions. Part of the financial/home situation eventually made it so I could no longer continue with PT or the regular full gym I was going to, and with the whole move and holiday wombo combo I gained some weight. I’m not happy about that. It is a vicious cycle. Maybe it’ll stop now with no more Halloween candy craziness. I’ll need a more aggressive plan for the holiday leftovers of doom though.

Home and finances have not been great. It has been a bit of a rollercoaster really. Originally, my wife, her partner (we sort of have a thing too, but I don’t feel right calling her a partner so I just refer to her as my wife’s partner), and I had this plan about combining finances to try to get a leg up on things and get into a bigger house together. The whole “poly dream” as it were. N (wife’s partner) was making decent money and stood to make even more once they moved in with us. The plan was they’d pay rent, and we’d pool down payment money and leverage our house value to move into a nice bigger place that wasn’t out in the boonies. Of course, it didn’t happen that way. N moved in, but didn’t pay anything and the communication was just shit. Their plans kept changing too, and it was rarely ever directly communicated with me but rather my wife had to be this strange in between for communication. The changed plans made it so N’s spouse would be moving in too (originally it was going to be just us 3 and they would figure out their own stuff…it was never clear if they were separating or not). Suddenly the requirement was 7 cats and a dog. Then before long, add another dog. And still no money as their partner did nothing with their home back in Fl.

I could go on for a long while on all the unnecessary BS I was put through. Oh, and my wife changed jobs…which was good originally as her previous employer was toxic and the drive was very unhealthy for her…but after the 6 month contract was up, there was no more work and she has still yet to find a new full time job. So I was supporting 2 full grown adults all by myself, and technically a proxy 3rd. This shit is getting fucking old.

Eventually, and rather quickly now that I look at what few private journal entries I wrote, I had some major anxious breakdowns. I made the choice to call off the whole group housing initiative. I couldn’t handle living with them as is, and I knew their financially situation well enough that living together would be untenable even with their selling off their old home. My wife and I took out a heloc to pay off some major debts, do a few much needed repairs on the house, and took the route of renting a home with just her and I. We are renting out the old house to N and their spouse (we did make them sign a legally binding rental contract). It’s been nearly a couple months, and to no fucking surprise they still haven’t paid rent. They do have a close date on their old house. I do expect to be, at minimum, paid the rent they owe as tenants after the close. We’ll see how that goes.

Relationship-wise, I feel like I’m in some sort of limbo. I had started dating someone new (“L”) around June. We connected a lot on mental health topics and they seemed really into me. I think I may have been operating from a place of loneliness as while I liked them, I never felt quite safe and supported around them. Maybe my subconscious recognized the controlling behavior signs before my logical brain finally did. Things were going “okay” until E came into my life. E is a great person. I do love her, and she’s one of those people I have a lot of respect for. She’s been through a lot of hardship, and has worked hard on improving her self and healing from all the trauma she’s been through. She owns her shit, and I admire/respect people that can do that. After our 3rd date, L started having problems and started pushing for some sort of parity. I went to an event with E for one thing, suddenly L had to have us do the same thing the next day. There were a lot of things she was trying to push me into doing or saying that I was not ready for. Layer that with the major home stressors, and I started having a hard repulsion to her that no amount of logic would undo. I dreaded conversations with her. I tried to push for distance and time, to see if after the move my nervous system would calm down and disassociate L with all the other stressors. But it didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen quickly enough. So they broke it off, “I need to be with someone that wants to be with me”. I don’t blame her for it, and to be honest, it was a relief.

Things with E have been going well. Yet, I still feel like something is missing. I don’t feel supported/valued the way I did with H. I don’t feel the mind numbing attraction I had with C (or S for that matter, though S had major emotional instability issues that made it not worth it/not safe). While at least I don’t feel trapped in my home, things are still tight financially while my wife isn’t working and N’s finance situation is in question until their close date. I think I need another person in my life but I just don’t feel ready for it right now.

All I can do right now is refocus on my health. I’m planning to double down on those early morning workouts. I’m going for a 4/2 build. 4 bootcamp days, 2 strength training days (push/pull + leg/shoulders). I really need to lean down and that means more cardio (hiit really) and reduced calories overall. The more important thing about this strategy is the consistency. Plus there is a bit of community with the smaller classes I’ve been going to. I was able to gain about 2 lbs a week starting early Oct and ending today. I should be able to do the reverse of this. I have enough fat stores to be able to take it until I get into the 180s. I gotta do my own thing for a while.

Hopefully 2025 goes better. The big plan is to sell our old house. With the expected gain from that, at least my income alone will hold things together…barely.