AliHasStories

No one asked…and it’s not funny…

We were in the middle of life. Bananas ripening on the counter for bread, halfway through the latest season of “The Last of Us” even though I have a phobia regarding…zzzeds…zzzomb….ya know. As is normal.

It was a basic Tuesday. We had celebrated our wedding anniversary, also MY BIRTHDAY, three weeks prior. There was lots of…intimacy, communication, future planning. Then, he came home from work and just….shattered my world. I was the worst version of a human he had ever encountered. Everything I did was wrong. I wasn’t sexy any more because of “how I cleaned the toilet.” I didn’t make him happy. Everything I did and said was selfish, I only care about myself….

I thought he was different. Like an idiot. When they say all men, boy do they mean it. We shared household chores. We didn’t judge, we just cleaned. Everything was wrong, tilted. He complained about things in our distant past, things that we had worked on and, I thought, had resolved. I’ve literally never been so wrong about anything, ever.

After he unloaded this stream of vitriol, he casually mentioned he’d be going to stay with his coworker and, again I THOUGHT, a friend to both of us. I took her children to doctors appointments, dropped them off at school, took them back to school shopping…meanwhile, he stopped talking to my son, whom he had raised as “dad” since age 8.

Less than a month later, while I was left going through 13 years of history by myself and deciding how to pare down, he announces they’re dating. He left me and went straight to live with her. Depression? Mid-life crisis? Sheer lust? A fuck it all moment? I dunno. Ultimately, it really doesn’t matter. The damage is well and thoroughly done. And in writing…

Fast forward to the recent present. I went to my brother’s for refuge. This was a risky move, given how inconsistently my brother has ever been there for me. Of the two of us, he’s the one everyone would unanimously agree was selfish, not me. He’s an alcoholic who won’t admit it. He kicked me out twice while upset with me about perceived behavior that he described in terms vague and revisionist, and refused to change his mind given new information. The second time he angrily kicked me out, I took him seriously and left. I believe unhoused is the term? Couch surfer, if you’re unfamiliar.

Fast forward a bit more, and you’ll find me buying in the process of attempting to buy a van camper trailer sufficient for me, my pepper spray, 3 dogs and a maybe blog, and hitting the road.

As my kid said, “This is the first time in 23 years you can just focus on yourself.” The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. It should’ve.

I hate being a consumer. I don’t believe capitalism works. I hate how we’re actively destroying the planet in less time than it took the asteroid to destroy the dinosaur. Relatively speaking, of course. Nomadialand is appealing.

My current trade is as a critical care RN, though I’m not currently working anywhere. I’ve actively kept a valid license and done, on both my dime and my decision, hundreds of hours of CE (continuing education) in the 4 years since I graduated from my ADN nursing program…graduated in the middle of the most recent global pandemic which shall not be named, but the year was 2021….

I graduated and immediately began working in a general 20 bed ICU as a nursing technician pending my passage of the licensure exam, the NCLEX. Just saying, I did easily pass on my first try *brushes shoulders* and was being precepted just a few weeks later.

A point of caution reading what I’ll share next. I will be discussing death. And PTSD.

When the cycle of patient deaths becomes exponential during your first exposure in an already crumbling house of cards we call healthcare in America, add a heaping pound of 20 years of an idiopathic GI disease (with likely autoimmune sources but no actual diagnosis) that leads to some anatomical issues toward the…well, back end of the GI tract that required surgery. And, because of the bad luck of having a terrible surgeon disguised as a good one, permanently changed my anatomy and nearly killed me.

He tried not to let me go to the hospital and when the ER docs override him and admitted me anyway, he tried to kill me again in the hospital. Once admitted, he tried to kill me by denying nutrition, pain relief, pretty much anything to help resolve the blockage. I tried to fire him, and then found out it’s not so easy. Once you’re in the hospital, no other surgeon wants to take over your case. In some ways, it’s related to office politics. Some of it is a CYA culture profoundly embedded within healthcare.

So, my body finally resolved the blockage and I was released home. I went back to work about a week later. Straight back into death. Into the politically charged pandemic madness, again.

I’m not sure how many people died during this time, but I believe if I said hundreds, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration. My charge nurse, a nurse for twenty years, and paramedic for ten prior to that, said I had seen more death in two years than he had in thirty. People came to the ICU with COVID, and most of them never left alive. Many were just people with a disease that wanted help. Many others were fully bought into the dis/misinformation campaign, and refused what few treatments we had.

I had spouses trying to stop care because they didn’t see a multivitamin on the patient’s list. I had patients telling me COVID just “isn’t that bad” as they’re breathing 50-60 times a minute and gasping for air, even through BiPAP. I had my own family telling me ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were the cure, even though study after study was proving that to be false. My father had been hospitalized with COVID for nearly a week. I fully expected him to die, especially since he was parked in a hallway for nearly three days getting inadequate care. He didn’t, and of course he lauded the benefits of taking a horse de-worming pill off-label as the victor to be congratulated.

Not only was I immersed in death, but I was surrounded by the living who seemed to be pushing us toward more death. It’s a wild place to be in as a new critical care nurse. Add in my own health issues and we have a recipe for what I ended up with; PTSD. When those four letters are uttered, most people tend to recall images of Vietnam veterans turned teachers diving under a desk as one of the idiot boys slammed a book to the ground. Or of the hundreds of vets living with PTSD and other debilitating injuries from the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

The truth is, anyone can develop post-traumatic stress disorder. If you experience the right combo of trauma, lack of support, and an overwhelming desire to help, fight, whatever, in spite of these things, you can develop PTSD. Wow, how perfectly our current healthcare system fit into that box.

It got bad for me.

By summer of 2022, I was starting to become concerned about my ability to take care of my patients at the standards I had prior, which were very high. No one was in danger, and no one else was seeing these warning signs. But I cared enough about being a GREAT nurse that I knew I needed to step away. I took FMLA, which is a federal law meant to allow for short-term leave for certain situations without the employer giving away the position for which leave is necessary. This is unpaid leave, mind you. During all of this overwhelming stress, as I’m in the middle of breaking down, I had to fight tooth and nail with HR for my hospital to allow for leave.

I had to jump through so many hoops that it took nearly a month more before I could actually take a break and get myself together. And that was only step one.

Next, I had to find myself a therapist specializing in what I now know I was experiencing; PTSD. That’s another delay in care that mental health patients experience. Doing the dance of finding a therapist who’s the right fit for you and your circumstances, that ALSO takes your insurance, is…well, really fucking hard. But I made it through step two and found a therapist who was also certified in a type of therapy called EMDR, or eye movement desensitizing and reprocessing. It’s a fancy way of describing the idea that in order to lay down a soft “blanket” over the neural pathways that created the wonky stress response to begin with, you must engage both sides of the brain, usually with a light bar that slides from one end to the other at a particular speed.

If you think that sounds more like science fiction, I get it, because it seemed like that to me at first, as well. But I started researching EMDR once my therapist had suggested it, and learned that not only is the science sound, but it is one of the leading treatments for PTSD and has a remarkable track record of improvement. So, I was in. And it worked. Rather than being on the verge of a full blown panic attack at every turn, my panic attacks began to diminish both in frequency and strength.

Of course, nothing works in a vacuum, so there were tons of other tools I was learning as well. Progressive muscle relaxation, breathing techniques, tools for what to do if I couldn’t stop the panic attack from becoming full fledged; I was healing. And not just from the trauma of the pandemic that had brought me to this point. I was healing from lots of traumas I’d experienced throughout my life. Not specifically, but because I was using these newfound therapy tools, I had the ability to view other trauma through a new lens.

In the meantime, my six weeks of FMLA was about to expire, and I was nowhere close to being able to go back to work. System failure number three was awaiting me around this corner, and it almost re-broke me.

HR at my hospital was being even more aggressively unhelpful in working with me on returning at something less than full-time. My boss in the ICU followed suit, claiming that unless you’d been working for her longer than two years, (my two year anniversary was coming up in less than a month) you couldn’t move to a part-time, much less a PRN (as needed) schedule. As I saw it, they would rather have to go through the process of hiring a brand new nurse for the unit, pay for the twelve weeks of precepting, (training every critical care nurse must do upon hire), etc., than just work with me. The one that had a stellar record and was sought out by traveling nurses for questions, only for those nurses to be shocked I’d only been doing this for two years. The one who’s patients raved about my care. The one who’s patients’ family members literally sought me out to hug and thank for the excellent care.

It made no sense, and what I realized, as I was meeting with the unit nurse manager and assistant manager, is that they were judging me for having owned up to a mental health crisis. A semi-hidden danger within the healthcare community writ large is the absolute stigma that’s not only allowed, but often encouraged, against healthcare workers experiencing mental health issues. Apparently, we’re not supposed to fall victim to such banal and common issues. They were letting me move toward quitting because they judged me as not being good enough to stay in the club, now that I was damaged. That logic is absolute unmitigated insanity.

So I did quit. But I managed to leave a legacy in spite of their mean girl tactics. During my one year residency program, we were divided into groups of four or five and tasked with addressing something within the hospital that could use improvement, then creating a project that the hospital board would judge, with the best one winning implementation. As is the case with almost all group projects, most of the members of mine sucked at, well, trying. It didn’t matter to me. I was beginning to develop early, early signs of PTSD at this point, and I knew exactly what our project should be about. It took a little convincing, but the group finally acquiesced and we were off.

My idea was to create several “safe spaces” or decompression areas within the hospital system where workers could go to recover, whether after a difficult code that ended poorly, or just a bad day, for fifteen minutes. I began working through the details, fine-tuning the idea, until it was ready for presentation. We were the last group to present, and we won by a wide margin. I had gone as far as to build the actual board proposal, including suggested setups and decorations with associated costs attached. Ultimately, because I had gone the extra mile, it was my name alone on the proposal that was submitted to the board for consideration and ultimate approval.

The day I met with my managers and quit, the prototype safe room just outside the ICU had been recently completed, just a couple of days prior. My manager asked if I wanted to see the fruits of my labor before I left the unit forever. Of course I did.

I definitely cried when I stepped into the room. The managers were at least smart enough to let me take in the space alone. Verbatim my proposal, the room had a massage chair, a couch, a mini fridge stocked with water and light snacks, a noise machine, and cloud covered tapestries draped over the harsh fluorescent lights to subdue them. I took a deep breath in and closed my eyes. This was the space I had needed myself and wasn’t available. Even when “on break,” nurses are expected to have their phones on and be prepared to leave mid-break at a moment’s notice. But not in my safe spaces. In there, we don’t have our phones and no one can disturb us. It’s a true moment of peace within a permanently chaotic scene. I did that, mother fuckers. That’s MY legacy. There are now nine other safe space rooms across that hospital system.

Just wait, it gets worse

My now ex-husband, let’s call him, oh I don’t know, Jared, was instrumental in helping me regain my sense of self post-trauma. He was my rock, my constant. He was there for nearly every panic attack, sometimes finding me in the corner of the shower, fully clothed and water off, hyperventilating and panicked beyond reason. He’d put the progressive muscle relaxation video on and lay with me through it. He quite literally helped save my life.

Now, looking back and processing through how our relationship went so wrong so quickly, I wonder if I didn’t develop a trauma bond with him in those moments. He was, after all, my only safe space. My family is not only unhelpful, but actually harmful to my mental health. My friends were all going through their own crises at the time, or lived too far away to really be of help. Jared was it. Maybe I should’ve realized that sooner, so we could work on breaking the trauma bond, not our whole relationship. Hindsight really is a fucking bitch.

It took me all of 2023 and 2024 to really begin to function somewhat like I used to. In fact, early this year, in 2025, I finally started to feel like myself again. Different, but myself.

Side note: I recently retook the Myers-Briggs personality test for the first time post-PTSD diagnosis. I used to be an ENTP, and now I am solidly an INTP, meaning the only thing about my personality that was truly changed through the course of this latest trauma was that my extroversion became introversion. I never used to really understand the mechanisms and behaviors of introversion, because being social literally recharged me. Now, it’s all I can do to make myself social. It’s all I can do to leave my little space and encounter…people.

I was really excited to see a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. But along side this progress, something insidious was brewing. Let’s talk about her.

We’ll call her Melody. Melody was brought into our lives in 2023 when Jared started a new job. They worked together and enjoyed each other as coworkers. Being the self-confident person I was when it came to my relationship with Jared, it never once bothered me that they were friends of the opposite sex. I trusted him completely. After all, we’d been together thirteen years by now and had weathered myriad challenges, always together.

But it wasn’t until about the summer of 2024 that I became involved in her life, I thought as a friend, as well. Her story isn’t uncommon, especially for someone raised in the country in Oklahoma. She had four kids by four different fathers and was in prison for child neglect by 2018. To hear her tell the story, she was completely innocent in the whole thing. What actually happened isn’t exactly like the news stories painted it, but not like she did, either. She worked at a strip club, either as a stripper or door girl, depending on when and to whom Melody was talking.

When she got home after 2 am, she and the current baby daddy she lived with decided to leave together to get some food to-go, for her kids, according to her, though why a toddler, an infant, and a baby were up at 2 am needing food always did confuse me. (By this time, her second oldest child was in the custody of his baby daddy and she was prohibited from seeing him.) While the only adults in the home were gone and the three young children were home alone, the two year old managed to open the front door and wander down the busy road next to a highway, in the middle of the night, in the cold, with nothing but a dirty diaper on.

Witnesses called the police, and when she and baby daddy number four returned, they found several police cars and child protective services awaiting them. According to the news articles written about her, the inside of the house was atrociously dirty, with rat feces found in a crib, and significant diaper rashes on all three kids. According to Melody, one kid barely had the tiniest bit of pink irritation and the rest of that description was just made up.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t trust any cop, and I tend to want to believe the person who isn’t in law enforcement out of solidarity against them. In fact, that’s exactly how she wormed her way into our lives; we both chose to believe her version, and wanted to be people in her life that were reliable and safe.

Quickly, I became very close with her four kids, the oldest of whom she was fighting to get at least visitations with for the first time since he was a baby. The reason she was able to get visitations was because of us. Because of me, really. I helped her navigate the court system, helped her keep her lawyer working on it, and helped her get into a better living situation. I volunteered to be the sole babysitter during his visitations, and my qualifications helped silence baby daddy number one.

When we met Melody, she was living in a slumlord type house. Nothing worked right, it was dangerously close to an incredibly busy street, and it wasn’t really safe for her kids to play outside in the neighborhood. To cap it off, an ice storm froze the pipes in her ceiling, which collapsed and ruined nearly everything she owned. The first time we decided to help her financially was at the end of 2024. I gave her $3,000 cash to help her get ahead. Jared and I had mutually decided we wanted to do that. I wish now I’d never given her a cent.

Next, when her ceiling collapsed and her home became unlivable back in February of 2025, we decided to let her and her kids move in with us temporarily, while we helped her look for a new rental. We helped her find a rent house in a much better part of town, with a neighborhood that looked like it was straight out of “The Wonder Years.” Kids riding bikes, skateboarding, throwing footballs, playing basketball. It was every kid’s dream, and I fought to make it her kids’ reality. While she went to work every day with my husband, I nearly single-handedly filled her house with new furniture, new decor, new everything. I spent nearly $40,000 on her. Yes, for real. And I don’t say that as a “woe is me” whistle, I say it to explain how deeply I had been committed to making her and her kids’ lives better. How much I had committed myself to being her friend.

Melody and her kids stayed with us for nearly six weeks while I set up her home and the landlord worked on a huge plumbing issue in the new house. By early May, the house was ready. New beds, new TVs, new couch, new dining table, new refrigerator, new kitchen cookware, dishware, lawnmower, etc. New everything.

By the third week of June, Jared had left me suddenly and out of nowhere, at least for me, and moved into that same house, with her. But just as “friends,” he constantly likes to remind me. They were friends only for exactly one week, according to the timeline he insists on sticking with, before they were more. By early July, they were officially dating. We were still married at this point.

Side note; just after this revelation in July, I accidentally saw Jared had a new prescription for…duh da na nuh…Viagra. It really was an accident. I was trying to figure out how to get him removed from our family prescription account and found that piece of information. Can I just say, he never needed Viagra while we were together. In fact, one of the ways that this seemed to come from nowhere was how good our sex life was. It was fantastic, actually. We had sex at least 5-6 times a week, were enjoying exploring and expanding our sex life in new and interesting ways (that didn’t involve other people) and felt close and bonded in that way. That just wasn’t one of the warning signs you usually see preceding divorce. We had not grown apart in that way.

It’s interesting how much effect guilt has on our bodies. Sometimes, when we do something we know is wrong but don’t want to face it, our bodies do that for us. In Jared’s case, a little blue pill was all that was needed to push his conscience to the back so he could pursue this new path of bullshit.

Something else I find interesting is men’s ability to just ignore something they don’t want to address. I say men specifically because, although that is a generalization, it’s an accurate one. I personally believe women, in general, are stronger in terms of emotional intelligence and facing hard truths. One of those truths I see in the destruction of our relationship was Jared’s unwillingness to see that emotional cheating is a form of cheating, when you intend to do something about it. It’s that last part that’s key. People can catch feelings for others even when in a loving, lasting relationship. But if they don’t want to do anything about it, the relationship can outlast those feelings. Jared clearly wanted to act on those feelings, but felt he was too much of a “good guy” to actually cheat.

“After all, you always said if you’re gonna cheat, just leave,” he told me stonily the night he left me. But he didn’t leave me because of her, he also said. “Trust me, it has nothing to do with her. This was a long time coming.”

I should mention here that we had a couples’ counselor we’d been seeing for two years at that point. Not for real issues, not because we were unhappy, but because communication had always been tricky, mostly for Jared, and we both mutually decided we wanted to do better. The best way to do better, we thought, was to find a marriage counselor, and so we did. He was very good. In fact, he’s currently my individual therapist as well. We learned lots of tools that we both tried to implement, though admittedly Jared was a lot slower at that, and a lot more likely to slip back into old habits. His favorite bad communication habits included becoming immediately defensive and accordingly mean, walking away, or agreeing to circle back at a better time while NEVER actually circling back.

Those things were in the background of our marriage, never really pressing but never really gone. I was okay with our progress, because it was progress. And we had tools and a plan. We were in it together. Somewhere between there and June, it changed for him. He quit trying. Suddenly, things we’d worked through years ago that, as far as I was aware, were no longer issues, were many of the reasons he’d decided to leave. He “thought we’d resolved them,” but suddenly we hadn’t. He couldn’t give specific examples, just a vague he “wasn’t over it.” He just never explained what “it” was. He told me I no longer made him happy, even though three weeks prior we’d celebrated our twelfth wedding anniversary and we’d agreed we both still had butterflies around each other. Even though two days before he left we’d had sex just like always. Even though I was still madly in love with him and would’ve done my very very best to fix whatever issues had cropped up.

He just decided it was over and he was done. Without trying at all. That doesn’t make sense to me, unless you add in emotional cheating. And I do believe him when he says he was “faithful,” I just think he only means physically. I’m not sure he recognizes that emotional cheating was a big part of his reasoning. Also, he stepped over me, collapsed in a heap on the garage floor, stunned and devastated he’d come home from work on a random Tuesday only to destroy me. He stepped over me in that state and went straight to her. Not his parents, not his brother’s house, not a friend’s, but hers.

He’s the only one that can’t seem to see the truth. Everyone else can. And for Melody’s part, she showed her true colors. She told me, in a roundabout way, that she’d been waiting in the wings for Jared to decide to leave. She told me she’d “still be a good friend, even if it meant seeing us together every day.” Melody was never my friend, I realized too late. I was hers, but she was just using me until she could slither her way into Jared’s heart. She let me set up her new life with my fucking husband. It doesn’t get much more surreal than that, as pedestrian as this scenario really is. I’m nowhere close to the first person to experience this exact situation, and I won’t be the last. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less. It doesn’t take the sting out.

Not only did I lose the person I thought was my person, not only did I lose my best friend, lover, confidante, partner, I lost someone else I thought was my friend and I lost my relationship with her four kids. After all, Jared and I had gone from being aunt and uncle to the kids to him being, I dunno, uncle dad, I guess, and me being, well dismissed. I have no relationship with them now. But Jared gets to, even though it’s likely going to hurt them in the end. I was the stable figure in their lives. I was the one taking them to school, to doctor’s appointments, back to school shopping, winter coat shopping, going to the science museum and the arcade. I was the one there for them daily.

Melody was most concerned with Fae shit, with finding a man, (she’d already fucked half the men she worked with, before she set her sights on Jared) and with dollhouses. Her kids were always secondary to her needs and wants. Maybe that’s why she ended up in prison for four and half years, huh?? Guess how much of the stuff I did with her kids gets done now that I’m out of the picture? Yup, none of it. In fact, she took down my chore charts and other scheduling things I’d made for the kids and when the kids asked for it back, she told them it wasn’t working so there was no point. This was her answer to the kids asking for the charts back. The truth was, in my opinion, she didn’t want to fuck with training them to stick with it like I had. It would take up too much of her precious time fucking my husband.

When their relationship comes to a crashing halt, as it inevitably will, those kids are who’s going to be hurt most. She really doesn’t deserve to have custody of those kids. She’s not a good mother. The only thing she’s good at is stripper moves and buying dollhouses to restore that she can’t afford. Is this the bitter part of me saying this? Yup. But is it any less true? No, I don’t think so. The only difference is how much I censor my words from my emotions. And I want to be clear. Jared is a piece of shit for all of this as well.

And now we’re current. I’m less than a week away from closing on our my house, which means in less than a week I’ll have the funds to buy my camper and hit the road. It’s close enough I’m actually getting very nervous about starting this next chapter of my life. I’m simultaneously sad I don’t have the life I thought I did, excited to do something for me for once, and terrified I’m going to immediately fail. After all, lots of people say they want to travel and live like a nomad, but not that many of them actually do it. And of those that do strike out as planned, not all make it.

I don’t know where I’m going or what I’m going to do once I get to each “there,” I don’t know what I’m going to do for work, or how my three dogs are going to handle the constant transitioning (although they’ve done so well in the last three months since Jared left, as I’ve bounced from place to place, couch to couch while waiting for the house to sell).

Will I take Route 66 from end to end? Find a place in the Pacific Northwest to hide and rest for awhile? Maybe go to the east coast and see New England better?

Will I be able to handle the camper on my own, the driving, the parking, attaching/detaching the camper from my car? Will I be freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer? How much water is twenty gallons, to someone who’s always had access to unlimited water, given relative financial constraints? Should I mostly go to RV parks, where I’m afraid I’ll only see weird red hat cult people, so I can hook up to water? Is laundry going to become an incredible chore, given I’ll need to use laundromats exclusively? If I want to convert to boondocking, will I still be able to given the current political climate here in the U.S.?

I suppose if you’ve stuck with me this far, you might want to know some of those answers as I find them. If that’s true, feel free to stick around. I swear I’ll get to the funny parts soon.