My Story... Part One

Ok, so this is going to be a multi-post story. I have a lot of junk to work through, but if I don't talk about it, I am going to lose my mind. Unfortunately I can't afford therapy right now, so it's getting out via this blog.
I'm sure I'll forget things, and it will be extremely confusing, but I have to start dealing with all the things that I have been avoiding for entirely too long.

I'll spare you the details of my normal childhood and fairly normal teenage years. With the one exception that I have this thing called "approval addiction." I apologize a lot for things that are not my fault because I don't want people to be upset with me. That will play into the story at a later date. However, inspite of this approval addiction, I was never afraid to do what I wanted to do. I just always apologized later... even if I hadn't done anything wrong.

In high school I was involved in an abusive relationship. Nothing to talk about there. I was 15 and wanted to be liked. However, all that got me was my head bashed into a television and getting punched in the face on prom night.
But my sophomore I met this guy that I thought I was going to marry. Of course, it didn't turn out that way, but we dated off and on for 8 years. You know how Bella loves both Edward and Jacob... I somehow fell in love with 2 people. One was good for me and worshipped the ground I walked on. The other lit up my spirit like I can't even imagine. Two totally different personalities, yet they both appealed to me in ways that I can't describe. Ok, I'm getting off topic. Bottom line, one chose drugs over me and the other decided he wanted to marry someone else.
I was devestated. I was graduating college and I was alone. So, I left the country. Not totally to get away from everything, I was planning on moving to Ireland anyway. But I had to remove myself from all things familar so I could deal with everything and "regrow" my backbone. I lived in Ireland for 4 months in 2004. I loved every minute of it. To phrase the movie Sabrina, I found myself in Ireland. I thrived living there. But unfortunately my visa expired and I had to come back.
When I came home, I was ready to start the next phase of my life. I was ready to settle down, find a job (since you really can't get a job in my field right now), and find someone to settle down with.
The weekend I got back to the states, my friends threw me a welcome home party. All my friends were there. Some brought other friends to hang out.
That was the night I met the man I married. I wasn't interested at first. As I said, I knew at the time exactly what I wanted out of myself and out of the man that I ended up with. And upon first meeting, I was interested in someone else. About a week later, I was at my best friend's apartment dyeing her hair and our friend called to see if he and his friend could come hang out. Of course, we said. So, our friend, we'll call him B, brought his friend (same friend that came to my welcome home party) , we'll call him L. After the hair dying, we just hung out on my friend's front porch. We were dancing and that's the first time L kissed me. Out of the blue.
Long story short, we started dating 2 weeks later. Telling each other we loved each other in a matter of weeks. Had a huge fight over New Year's for a ridiculous reason. This was the first major red flag that I ignored. Because I had been drinking (shock is allowed here... I used to drink a lot!) and something that I did while intoxicated reminded L of his ex-wife. So he felt like he had to "re-evaluate" his feelings for me. So instead of saying, ok... we had some good times, see ya later... I latched on to him like a stick-tight (Dana knows what I'm talking about). Eventually I convinced him to give me another chance (note the approval addiction here, I really hadn't done anything wrong--I wasn't even drunk, I was just extremely talkative and apparently he didn't like what I was saying). But, since I had convinced myself that I loved him, I wanted to keep him. I know I was in love with him, but given that I had always been a force of nature (personality-wise) the fact that I was basically groveling at his feet should have tipped me off. This was not new backbone behavior.

Ok, I have to get to work now. I'll try to make it shorter next time!