Allegra has been off-line for a while but us now back. She would like to share her story and get some feedback.
Where has Alegra been? On a terrifying journey of loss, betrayal and lies.
For the past seven years, Alegra has been married to a man whom she deeply loved and whose artistic life she supported both emotionally and financially. They were a loving and caring couple, sharing many happy moments together and expressing love and concern and respect for one another. They had plans for the future, for the art and music that was possible. They were a team.
That is what Alegra saw, or wanted to see. She believed in love and in building a relationship, making it stronger over time.
Unbeknownst to Alegra, her husband was filled with doubt – doubts about his talent, his love for her, his path in life. What kept him there, with her, if his heart was truly so filled with doubt?
In the shadow of her husband's doubts, Alegra became depressed, part of an undiagnosed clinical condition that ate away at her. In her depressed mind, her husband’s artistic block and inability to achieve his goals was somehow her fault. He complained to her that she talked too much, that she was oblivious to other people’s feelings, that she didn’t understand art, that she did not know herself. She believed all the things he said and took them to heart, isolating herself, trying to give him as much space possible so that he could focus on his art.
Then came the day her husband told her that he “didn’t want to share his life with her” any longer. Alegra was devastated. She broke down, unable to sleep or eat. Her world was crashing down around her ears, the taste of debris in her mouth.
Her husband had her committed.
The humiliation of being committed to a mental hospital – stripped naked and inspected by strangers, medicated, monitored – shocked Alegra into a new reality.
When she was released from the hospital she began to take stock of her life and what had led her along a path of destruction.
And there it was, in front of her eyes and she saw it clearly. Yes, it was the old cliché, the 7 year itch, the midlife crisis, the husband straying. Yes, he had begun an affair with one of his students, and together the two of them had conspired to commit Alegra to the mental ward. Yes, it was easiest, wasn’t it, if the “crazy wife” were labeled thus. He would get so much sympathy for his years of suffering, and would be free to explore “all the experiences” that his life with her had kept him from. And his lover would benefit from the belief that he was justified in the affair, and in the treatment of his crazy wife.
Was this just his doubt about the uncertainties of life and love? Was this simply a mis-match? Or is there a darker side, one where a man and his lover can commit his wife to such a cruel place? Is this a man who will ever find happiness, living as he does with a personal philosophy is so bleak that it allows the uncertainties to dominate even the most intimate of acts, so bleak that joy becomes colorless?
Alegra must forever live with the specter of a betrayal so profound and so cruel that it defies description. She had no voice, no say no choice in the way that her world came crashing down, the tragedy in which she now plays such an unenviable role.
Tell me, who deserves such an end to seven years of a marriage where never once were harsh words exchanged, never once were insults thrown in anger? How can a human being so cruelly discard another?
Ah, but this is not a new story; the world is full of such tragedies and stories of exacting pain. But Alegra has learned a valuable lesson. We can never really know what is in another human being’s heart, no matter how much we might believe that we do.
Tags:
betrayal, cruel, depression, infidelity, mental hospital
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Posted on 2/26/2007
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