Is the grass greener?

Feels like I'm born again
Feels like I'm living
For the very first time
For the very first time
In my life

- Third Day

I can remember a time in my life that I felt alive.  

It is amazing how you can go through life, hanging on. 

Barely hanging on.  

And then something wrapped in an unexpected package finds its way into your hands, and it is life.  It gives you what you need to make it through the day. What you need to be happy.

I can remember days, all too many, where I did not want to live.  Where I thought about ways to get out of being alive.  Instead of drastic suicidal methods, I took a different route.

I didn't want to be alive, so I shut down in every way possible.  

It started out spiritually.  

I fell fast from God, because it just felt like too much work to keep up a facade of being a great Christian wife and mom when I knew those things were the furthest from the truth.

Then I shut down emotionally.  

I didn't want to feel.  

Anything.  

My marriage was falling apart.  

I had a husband who preferred to look at dolled up, fake women on a computer screen than the overweight woman who bore him four children.

I was alone. 

And sad. 

And desperate.

I didn't want to live, but I didn't feel like I had a choice. Giving up and leaving my kids without a mother kept me moving forward.  

They are the only reason I didn't pursue suicide.

But I was such a mess.

I needed to die, but couldn't.

I needed to be rescued, but there was no hero to come riding in to save the day.

So when a kind, encouraging man entered my life and began pursuing ME of all people, I started to feel hope again. 

Hope I hadn't felt in years.  

Hope I didn't think I would ever feel again.  

Hope that someone truly cared about me.

And as my home life continued to spin out of control, my emotional life began to stabilize.  At least, that was my mindset at the time.

For the first time in years, I felt alive!

It is no surprise to me that there would be a connection between sexual temptation and depression. I was horribly depressed and it did not take much got me to make one little compromise, in simply having online chats with another man.  He listened. He laughed. He complimented me.  He made me feel good.  

Beautiful.  

Alive.

In hindsight, it is also no surprise to me then, that the affair went on for as long as it did.  I sought after that feeling of being alive.  It was all I cared about. It is what woke me up every day. My first thought was texting this other man or hoping there was an email waiting for me to read.  I lived swayed by whether or not he communicated with me.  If he was silent, I was the same sad, miserable person that I was before the affair. 

But if he texted? 

If he called? 

If he emailed?

I FELT ALIVE!

And much of the time, he was there for me.  Physically and emotionally.  Sure, there were days where there was tension and he wasn't my knight in shining armor.  But on the days he was?  Not only did I feel alive, I loved it.  I had never been happier, and just knew that I never would be again, without him.

The attention I received from him defined me.  I let his opinion of me control my thoughts and my actions.  It drove me.

Until the day it ended.

I died that day.

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...to be continued
Come back tomorrow to find out how I learned what being Born Again REALLY meant!