Feeling Trapped and Masking Darkness

     When a person starts seriously contemplating leaving husband and kids, you know something is seriously wrong at 'home' - somehow. In this case, it's the mind, heart, and soul.

    I found myself this morning considering finding my aunt's mailing address, writing her a letter, and then following that letter days later.
"Aunt Brenda,
 I know we aren't close, but we're about to fix that. I'm coming to stay with you until I can get on my feet..."

Only, I haven't written that letter cause responsibility holds me here. I promised 'forever' and 'until the rose dies, with a frozen rose that couldn't die'. I had kids, kids I find myself occasionally spiteful of. I'm raising a foster child, another responsibility I can't shirk, but it doesn't chafe as much.

    The husband is fine; caring, supportive, usually understanding, loving even. I even love him; but it doesn't feel solid anymore. Lately, it's felt 'forced'.

No one understands how deeply I've been changed - but not even changed, but how strong the masks I wore were. I masked peace and contentment, and enjoyment for decades. I saw that my 'dark' was affecting the people around me, so I shuttered it away. Closed the 'dark' into darkness and left it to swallow up everything that didn't serve the people around me. I gave it a name, and fed it my grief, anger, despair, any emotion I couldn't cope with was used to fashion this dark entity into a living, defensible being of my psyche. I married, and started trying to squash that being, and for a time I thought I'd won - thought it was fading; in reality, it was winning, it was consuming more and more of the mask I wore daily.

I was sinking into a thickening darkness that presented itself as contentment, but was really just submission.