I Can See Why Non-Destructive Testing Is So Popular

It has not been an easy month.(tm)

It is perhaps accurate to say that I have experienced stress levels higher this past month than I ever have before. At one point Entrepreneur offered to take me to the shooting range and I said, "No. I can't be around guns right now."

It's calming down, though. Thanks, in no small part, to Entrepreneur, of course, and his friends, and support network. They have been the best support network ever, not because they actively went out of their way to comfort me (although many did) but because seeing stability and functionality at its most basic level, implemented on the cellular level, was a light at the end of a long and dark tunnel, a logical proof that I was not slowly going mad, that the chaos and destruction I saw in my own life every waking minute was not required, that I didn't have to live in that land forever. The Blonde Squad (tm) also helped enormously, of course, and they should not feel like an afterthought. I grasped moments with them like a woman swimming the Channel would grasp breaths between chops. After all, it was partly the presence of Entrepreneur in my life that made things so stressful, because if he hadn't been who he is the breakdown of law and order would not have happened. Of course, if Roommate hadn't met Her Lady, either, this also would have never happened, at least not all at once.

I don't mean to be cryptic. Entrepreneur is Water, and Rommate's Lady is Oil, and never the two shall mix, which Roommate and I could have dealt with...if we hadn't gotten ambitious and tried to make Salad Dressing.

In fact I owe Roommate's Lady a debt, really. Just by being herself--the constantly chaotic and destructive person that she is--she pulled out of Entrepreneur everything that I was unsure about and set it up in front of me like a barrier; she built a barricade between me and my love for him and I had to knock it down, brick by goddamned brick, in the presence of witnesses.

She also forced me to see Roommate as Herself, not as the woman I'd been imagining all these years, especially the past few years, when I'd been so close to her, Roommate's Lady is a magnifying glass, a crucible, the Devil's Funhouse Mirror; she magnifies everything ugly and unsure about a person and displays it back on them tenfold. If Roommate and I had been actually married and had to get a divorce, it could not have been worse.

(Well, probably it would have been, honestly. I've never actually gotten divorced.)

It was as bad as it was with Handrolled; I had to not only break up with him, but also divorce in my head the person whom I was with him, and him only; I had to examine all my assumptions about him and explode them, one by one. Destructive testing is...destructive. WHO KNEW.

It was worse with Roommate and Roommate's Lady, in point of fact. Part of it was the surprise factor. At least I knew the breakup with Handrolled was coming.

Roommate and I are still roommates, for the time being; we may continue to be for some time. We've hammered out a truce. And we always knew our roommate relationship would be temporary anyway, at least for some definition of "temporary".

The scars, however, are permanent.