I’ve had a bad week. I fell off the wagon in terms of drinking, comfort-eating and not exercising – but that came after the ‘bad-ness’ started (it was my reaction to it) and (yeah, I know!) made me feel worse, and thus, added to the bad. My ex (as ever) is leading me (and everyone else) a merry dance, making promises which I know he has no intention of keeping but we have to go along with it because that’s what the court will want to see – that we have given him the benefit of the doubt (apparently, that’s what my solicitor tells me). He’s been turning up at her office, harassing the reception staff, demanding to see her and sending her disparaging and untrue emails about me, saying things like: “…….TW will not have told you this but she has issues and it was these issues of hers that she denies having that caused all the problems in our marriage. I am saddened the marriage has ended but I have come to terms with the fact that (as the District Judge said when I attended court on the 1st) I must accept it now………..” NO SHIT SHERLOCK! So, because the District Judge says it’s over, it’s over, but when I said it’s over – well – that doesn’t count!

I, for my part, have been doing so well: adhering to the court schedule, doing my bit, being dignified, getting on with my life now and moving on, not reacting to his ‘crazy-making’ and basically getting over it – except this week. It just got to me. He promised me that if I left him he’d pursue me the rest of my life and he’d make sure there was no money left – and guess what? That is exactly where we are now. He has come good on his promises and it just seems so unfair to me that he should be ‘getting away with it’. I am having to get into debt to pay the solicitors bills because the way it works in this country is that you cannot just get divorced you have to have a final judgement order and to do that you have to either co-operate with each other or go the legal route. He (you can imagine) is not co-operating, neither does he have legal counsel which makes it even harder. By the time we get to the final hearing it will have cost me the best part of £20,000, which I am having to borrow because my savings ran out after £5,000. Also, there will be no financial settlement. He’s made sure of that as he is about to be made bankrupt. The thing is, if I don’t pay the legal bills, I could be vulnerable to him making a claim off me: I’m working, he’s not. I have money, he doesn’t! It’s so unfair. Oh, I know, that’s me keeping myself stuck in my victim mode – yeah! I get it okay! But sometimes it is hard to keep it going – especially when faced with such an enemy.

But you know what the worst of it is? Let me tell you, it’s not the money. It’s this: coming to the realisation that the past five years of my life – five years of hellish imprisonment – have been for nothing! That’s a real bitch of a realisation I am struggling to come to terms with right now. I did think, a year ago when I left my abusive husband, that one day I would make some sense of it and perhaps write a book about it specifically to help others in my situation. I started. I collected up all my material: journal entries, blog entries, diaries, over 350 abusive emails from him (and my replies – not to all but to a dozen or so none of which was abusive) and I wrote a chronology that charts how it all started (the abuse), how it escalated, how I felt about it, how others responded, how I escaped and so on. I even began to write sections but although it was cathartic it really wasn’t delivering what I wanted it to. It’s like it failed to talk to or make sense to anyone but me. It was like it was my bitch that no-one else would find interesting. I even sent an outline to a publishing agent and they wrote back and said they weren’t interested. But I kept on, writing and writing. See, that’s what I do – I’m a writer. Some people do Judo or Yoga or play sports, I write. That’s my therapy. But I was trying to make it mean something – the past five years of my life I mean – and in order to do that it would have to be something that others would want to read and that they would benefit from and I’m not there yet. What’s more, loads of people have told me not to write it because they are afraid he will sue me. Well, I know about libel (I’ve studied media law as part of my job) so I know enough to write a factual piece that cannot be disputed but still their negativity has done enough to put me off and now I am down and despondent because the whole thing, the whole five years, all that material is meaningless. It means nothing. It amounts to nothing.

Victim, victim, victim – yeah, yeah, yeah! I know. But this is my blog. This is where I vent. I’m just having a bad week, that’s all.