Thanks Kathy. No not nice. I hope you are all having a much better time.

The holidays have been hard. But the timing of everything was the absolute pits. Afraid the sentimental time has not passed for now just yet. In 3 days I will "celebrate" my 30th birthday without the man I thought I would spend the rest of my days with. But I will have my family and friends around me.

I got thru the holidays in avoidance/distraction mode. I have known the whole time I was doing it, but it was all I could to to get thru. Thinking about it all, thinking about him and what he has done, her, it has all been too painfull to acknowledge. So I have distracted myself from thinking about it as much as I could. But yesterday and especially now (5:00am - INSOMNIA OR WHAT!) it is all flooding in.

I can recognise a few "phases" of feelings I have gone thru. First I felt absolute horror and like my lefe was ending for the first couple hours. Now that it is all beginning to flood back I keep hearing myself screaming when I was told. I see myself collapsing, alone in my house and slapping the wall and crying, saying "No no no no!" after my sister arrived minutes later. All I want to do now is sleep but I can't get those moments out of my head. I am getting angry at myself that my ability to distract from my thoughts and pain seems to have gone.

But I do realise that distracting completely for too long is only going to make it more painful when I have to face it. ANd I will have to face it. So I guess maybe that's why I got up out of bedd, sick of tossing and turning, to come and get some of it out on here.

So the stages I have gone thru I think have been the initial shock (probably only a few hours), then denial and thinking maybe it only happened once and he is sorry and I can forgive him and he'll come home (this probably lasted 2-3 days), then I did the distraction thing - as much as I could, keeping "busy" and hence why I have not been on here much.

Now it feels like distraction is not working, or able to continue and with all the thoughts and pain flooding back, I yet again feel a sense of compassion. This could just be denial again I suppose.

I feel like my dear husband (who I love still, despite what he has done) must be so very tormented to have done such a thing that he really needs care and support. I feel a desperate need to speak with him now. I feel I need to let him know that regardless of what happens, I want him to be OK. I just feel like I must let him know that.

I also feel as though I need to ask him, once and for all, how he is feeling about us. Not that he can probably rationalise that right now anyway, and even though his answer is likely to crush me, I feel a need to ask him if he truly sees this as the end for us and if that is what he really wants.

There is something eating at me that says if he needs to be reached out to, I need to do it. I couldn't abandon that, no matter what he has done and no matter what the outcome.

I realise this will probably make no sense to anyone else and maybe not even to me when I read it back after I get some sleep.

I really hate this feeling inside me and I don't even understand it.