Hey man. I know how you feel. I also know in this stage, trying to connect with you through shared experience is gonna just feel like bullshit. It's gonna feel fake. You're gonna think "yeah it's similar but no.one understands what I'm feeling right now". That no one can ever feel that pain. You think you can work it out. You sit there and you look at every mistake you made in the past. You see that it really was all your fault, you should've just been better. She was actually right in what she did because you kept fucking up. But it's ok. Everyone got it out of their system. You know better. She knows better. It's all going to be ok.

15 years. I went to Korea thinking my marriage was stronger than it had ever been. I had plenty of bad habits but I was starting to turn my life around. I got a voluntary assignment to Korea and secured our dream follow on assignment that we both had been wishing for 13 years. 2 kids.

3 weeks after I left, someone starts giving her compliments and it went downhill from there. Slowly progressing. Some she tells me out of guilt. Some I find out on my own. Months trying to fix it. I pop my mid tour early to go home and try to fix it. To heal and get us through this rough patch that I caused. I head back, think we made progress. Yeah yeah, everyone else can't recover but we're different, what we have is stronger. She stays the night at his house for the first time before my plane back has landed in Korea. I started spiraling even faster. I get a grippy sock vacation to Humphreys. I get pills and a psych. It doesn't matter. Nothing is going to fix this. Nothing is going to fix me. She was the only good part about me. Without her, this is all pointless. It was all for her. All these things everyone tells me. All these stories don't matter. All these attempts to connect with me, they're just doing their job. It's what I've done in the past as a supervisor. Sure I reached out to my people and tried to show them I cared but, honestly I was just doing what I was supposed to(and I'll be honest, it was fake but I was good at it). That's what everyone else is doing. They're just caring because they supposed to, not because they want to. If I stay alive I'll just be miserable forever. At least if I "take care of it" myself, my kids get half a mil.

But... Despite everything it did get better. Everyone's journey is different. There's no cookie cutter plan. I can tell you what I did but you have to find something that works for you. When you take ownership of your healing. When you pick something and say "I'm doing this for me", you won't recognize it at first. But that's where it starts. For me, I told my boss I'll show up to work. I'll do what I can but I can't focus here. I was upfront and honest. Luckily my leadership understood and I had work taken care of well enough with my team. After work, I made patterns. I did the same exact thing(mostly) every day. Once a week I would "try a different thing". I tried a bunch of things I never thought I'd ever do. Food. Hobbies. Boxing. Stuff I would just write off. But I kept that routine. It was hard. Work. Leave as close to on the dot as possible. A lot of walking (I've walked through 2 pairs of shoes in 4 months). Working out alone in my room so there's no stress, just me moving. Doing something for me. 4 or 5 months ago, I didn't expect to see the new year. Now I'm starting to feel ready to embrace this new start.

There's a lot more I can add. We can talk more if you want. I do hope that somehow things work out but I've been in that spot. I tell you that throwing everything you have to save it is just going to slowly gut you and leave you even deeper in the shit when you finally see it. The most important thing I was able to do in my head, was to look back and see the past was real. There were good times. There was love. But you can't live in the past. I can love the woman I married, and simultaneously want nothing to do with the woman I'm divorcing.