Leyana

Leaving is also trickier for me than I would ever have believed.

Yesterday, I told him that I could no longer sleep in the same bed with him; that I wanted separate rooms. We have a two bedroom apartment, so that was not an impossibility.
In the past, I've hidden in the smaller guest bedroom, using it as shield during his times of rage and irritability.

I told him that from now on, the big room was mine, with the big, new bed that we bought on credit together--in my name of course, as he has no credit, with the agreement to make payments on it together--and then, of course, I wound up paying for it myself.

I told him to move his things into the smaller room, and when I got home, it was done. He asked me if we were through, and I wanted to scream, "yes, of course we're through", but all I could do was cry, go to my new room, and lock my door behind me.

Seven, eight times last night, in between reading and rereading the same pages over and over in "Codependent No More"--a book that has quickly become my bible, become the thing read most in my kindle over everything I own--I tried to stand up, to walk out into the hall, to his room, to knock on the door, and find the words to say that he had to leave, that my own room in an apartment he stopped paying rent for two months ago was not good enough.

I got as far as the hall, maybe three times, before I crawled back to bed, defeated.

Toward one in the morning, I got so lonely, so sad, in this big bed that we always shared, that I went into his room, intent on crawling into bed with him, holding him.

I couldn't make myself do that, either, but that is the moment that I finally realized how sick I was, how deep my need for something that was so bad for me. That I had totally confused love and desperation and codependency, that I really *was* a codependent. Not a little bit codependent. Not codependent at times. That my inability to just show him the door, even after a year of bad treatment, even though the apartment was in my name, that I paid all of the bills, that I often paid his bills--that I was happier, so much happier, on days he wasn't home . . . I finally realized what it meant to be addicted to your addict, and that I hadn't escaped that fate the way I had somehow convinced myself I had.

I work at an apartment complex. Recently, we installed new lights in all of the basements; the old management had left these weak fluorescent bulbs that flickered like a horror-show. So in went these new, bright lights, and for the first time, we saw the basements as they really were, dinged, scratched, water-stained, filthy, and half-painted with an awful cotton-candy color that must have been somebody's drug fantasy.

That is how it felt, the moment I saw things for what they really were. Not some earth-shaking revelation, not some religious epiphany, just this quiet moment where something in my head clicked and I said, "oh, that's what that is. That's what that looks like. Needs paint."

I couldn't tell him to leave. But I did make some small changes, small wins, and I hold them dear to me, even though they seem stupid and little and silly. I would like to share them. I hope that if I can make these little changes, I can make changes just a little bigger, and just a little bigger, until I have my life back. That is how almost every book I have written got written--ten words at a time, a page at a time, a thousand words a day, until suddenly there was a series that was three books long, with a complete story arc--and it never felt like something big or monumental, but little and quiet, and yet it turned out big all the same.

My first victory happened yesterday. In my misery, in my escapism, a cute guy came into the office, looking for a place to live. I flirted with him a little; it lifted my mood, even though it made me feel guilty.

It wasn't until after he left that I pieced things together, saw little yellow flags sticking up out of the grass. That he was almost thirty, and had never been on a lease. That his one crime on his application was a misdemeanor OWI that was expunged while he was 16--who drinks and drives at sixteen, really? That he smelled, ever so faintly, of alcohol, at five o'clock on a Thursday. Are any of these things damning evidence? Not really. But it was enough that I felt an instant check on my level of attraction to him, that for once, instead of thinking about how somebody made me feel, how I felt bad for them, wanted to help, to understand--I thought about these yellow flags and what they could potentially mean--and through the lens that yes, there could always be an explanation--but wasn't the most likely connection between the dots the one I should use to make my decisions or calculations?

As I have counted lies, so I will count victories and truths. There is one.

This morning, I had to enforce one of my newly drawn boundaries. I told my addict that in two months, I was going to stop giving him rides to and back from work completely. He is eligible to get his license back (for a mistake he made while using no less, and oh, I wanted to UNDERSTAND, my life story and the story of my relationship has been one of me UNDERSTANDING) but has not tried, claiming that having access to a car might leave him more predisposed to using. And instead of saying, "Oh, well, you're going to have figure something out, because I don't actually have the time or energy to wake up at five in the morning and then drive you the forty miles to and back from work, and then do it again as soon as my own workday is over" I have driven him.

One of the boundaries I gave him was that he would pay for all of the gas associated with me driving him to work. Another was that if he snapped at me, for any reason, for anything, instead of treating me like a decent human being, I would pull over and just make him get out, no matter where it was. I would not subject myself to any more verbal abuse. The last, final boundary was that he try to find a way home. Previously, I had asked him to do this, but he had been "too embarrassed" and "trying to get hired in". Well guess what, he got hired in last week, and his embarrassment was a consequence of his own actions, right? And enabling was letting him feel his own consequences, right? That I should rescue him?

This morning, the first words out of his mouth were, "I guess I can't go to work today. There's no money for gas. I was supposed to get my check deposited today but it's not in there."

And OH, how badly I wanted to UNDERSTAND, to say, "I'll cover it this time--you pay me back", but that little voice, that unpainted basement with new lights, it waved at me and said, "Credit is earned. I wouldn't trust a tenant that couldn't pay the rent to suddenly start paying it without seeing the payments first, would I? Why trust him?"

And then, I saw something else with my new lights--that this was a form of manipulation, this kind of all or nothing way with him. *I have no cash! Guess I can't go to work! Not going to bother to make any sort of intermediary suggestion or devote time to an alternate solution! This is your problem!*

So I said, "I don't understand. You haven't given me any money for the rent or anything, so you should have at least five dollars." I mean, that's what a ride would be for that distance, just about.

And then I heard, "well, I paid my phone bill, and my student loan, and then my mom asked me for some money yesterday . . ."

I heard myself saying things, as if I was't even saying them. "That isn't my problem. I don't want to know about your finances anymore." This was five dollars we were talking about here, and the gas tank was on "E", and if he had money to pay for his PHONE and loan cash to his MOM and pay for his gaming subscription then he could pay to get to work.

And finally, in the end, he found the five dollars. He was quiet and respectful the whole ride there, and said "thank you" when he got out, and let me know he would ask everybody for a ride and try to find one back, and if not, he would figure out another way to get back that didn't involve me.

Is it a stupid victory? Yes. It's a five dollar victory, that's it. But for once, for once, I did not make his business my own, and actually enforced a boundary that I drew.

And to me, it is everything.