I have had a few days to think on things now and I am emotionally in a much better place than I was at the beginning of the week. I rang the woman back - you know the one who texted me at 2.09 am in the morning - and it turns out that she isn't such a psycho after all. Well, so I thought at first.
I would like to believe that things in my life happen for a very good reason, but they don't. What happens instead is there is usually a massive drama, which then turns into months of nothingness, then another massive drama and I am usually smack-bang right in the middle of it every time. My life totally sucks!
Call it intuition if you will but I was compelled to ring her. Maybe I am just being a nosey parker, but I just had to do it. Maybe curiousity got the better of me, but when she texted me the other day I just went into automatic defence mode and brushed her off. I am a single mum with two children and have been bullied for most of my life - it is just a natural reaction when someone tries to attack me now to defend my turf. Anyway, she threatened me with calling the Police, her Lawyer blah blah blah and I called her bluff and it worked. I owed it to the group to investigate the situation further I told myself, I wanted to be sure that I knew that the man amongst our midst could be trusted.
For some reason I felt connected to her and she had me crying within the first few minutes. And I almost never cry, but she got to me - and was in so much terrible despair that I could feel it through the phone. When I was much younger, I was an amazing friend to everyone I knew. I surrounded myself with lost souls who needed help, and I had a gift for bringing their deepest darkest thoughts to the surface and was a trusted confidante - and was always available at any time of the night or day for them. But I let myself get swallowed up in all of that misery, and gave away all of the energy that I could muster to make them well again. When at the end of the day, I finally realised that I was surrounding myself with distractions and that I was the one who really needed help.
For as long as I could remember, I had suffered a terrible depression and as I got older and tried so many things to gloss over it, the drugs, the drinking, casual sex, it got to the point where nothing worked any more.
At 26 years of age, I was struggling to hold a job down. My boss couldn't understand what was wrong with me. I am suffering from a terrible depression I said, I needed to have a few hours off work every week to see a therapist. He wasn't happy but he agreed to work with me on this.
The first lady I went to see recognised immediately that she couldn't help - I was a lot worse than she could deal with - but at least she was honest with me. She referred me to a colleague of hers - a Dr Burman in Double Bay and I booked in to see him the following week.
I will never forget the first time that I saw him. It was the weirdest experience ever. Dr Burman was a very tall man, and looked like one of those old professors from university. He had enormous brown eyes that never flinched, he never looked away and I liked him instantly. However, it took me a very long time to trust him completely.
I was one of those children growing up who never cried - well never cried in front of anyone else - not even my own mother. Everything broke my heart back then, but I would never show anyone. When all the lights turned off at the end of the night, I would hide under the covers and bawl my eyes out, and then carry on the next day and no-one would be any the wiser. I was the only one who knew and made sure that I was deathly quiet about it.
From day one in psychotheraphy, I had gotten to the stage where I was like a dam bursting and it all just came pouring out. But I only had an hour. The next moment he was telling me that our session was over for the day, and I made an appointment to come back the next week. So I did, and the week after that, and the week after that and so on.
Despite what you think, therapy is not about feeling sorry about yourself. Yes I spent hours upon hours upon hours crying it out. That's what tends to happen when you spend a lifetime holding back the tears. It's more about learning to cry with someone who isn't going to judge you, who wont make you feel stupid for being afraid of letting go , and it is about instilling trust - providing you with a safe environment to truly be yourself. Well that's what it was for me anyway. I think that therapy brings different results for everyone.
Dr Burman was with me every step of the way - for three years altogether he was my trusted confidante. I haven't spoken to him once in twenty years. I don't even know if he is even alive now. I suppose that I should try to find out.
So I rang her and we spoke for over an hour and a half. I wanted to get to the bottom of things and find out what was really going on with the two of them. Basically she told me that she was married, that she was living with one of the men in our group, and that he had met someone else while she had gone away on holiday for two weeks. She told me that her daughter was a mess, and that her husband had told her he was serious about this woman and was moving out. I have always been a sucker for a good hard-luck story and this was one of the worst I had head for a long time.
Basically we ended up agreeing that she could ring me once a week, and that I would be a kind friend to her. But she needed instantaneous help, because she had been lying in her bed for three days and was a complete mess.
When I got off the phone, the other girl that her husband was seeing had left a message for me. And so I rang her back - I asked her if she was safe and did she need any help. She said that she was fine and basically said that it was either them or her.
When the man got home that afternoon the woman went off on one. Then Audrey rang me, the woman rang me and it was a case of 'he said, she said' and no-one got any help.
Now the man has gone home and packed his bags and moved out of the house that was under his wife's name. He has also taken their 12 year old daughter to stay in a hotel to get away from her. I am pretty sure now that the woman should be on suicide watch for the next day or so. I am not sure whether there is a great deal that I can do to try to stop her from doing something stupid.
The boat has already pulled away from the station in that regard, and she has tried it before - just before Christmas.
Basically at the end of the day I would just prefer that none of them come along. I really don't need all the drama.