In Which I spend $1,100 in One Afternoon in "Mediation" with My Ex-Wife, Who Hates Me

Three years ago, in a mind-state I can hardly reconstruct, I agreed to pay much more money than the State required.  I needed to be generous to prove that she was wrong about me, and I needed to disdain the State's pigfuck mandates.  Also, I had a lousy lawyer, and I was heartsick, and I was making huge amounts of money.  A nearly lethal combination, turns out.  I've been busting my mule ever since trying to keep her off my back.

I am so fucking autistic.  I really thought M would be grateful for my generosity.  I didn't want her back.  I wanted her to have to admit that I'm not the asshole she said I was when she ended the marriage.  But I am the only person who's surprised she took my generosity for granted.  Something like that.  Or maybe she saw it as stupidity or weakness, the way victors do.  She and her attorney won a fight I wasn't even in.  I never even raised my gloves.  When I saw her attorney's smug piggy face today I had to close my eyes and sink down into that place I didn't know about before all this, where the moments are cut so thin there is no suffering.  When I surface from that place I believe I could take a knife in the forehead and remain impassive, and I think he saw that because he seemed scared of me.  But that could be theatrical imagination, or that M now describes me as a violent and heartless monster.

We didn't reach any resolution.  Attorneys and mediators have no incentive to solve problems because their income depends on drawing out problems as long as possible.  $325/hr.

When the love is gone, you better go.  The only way to be fully human is to be around people who love you enough to not mind your foibles much.  Because as soon as they want to lay down the law, all kindness is impossible.  I can't tell you how violating it feels to have the State, illegitimate in my opinion, rake through the minutia of my life, and question my conduct, and ask how much I spend on movie rentals, and demand third-party verification of my working hours, and question the food I serve my children.  Mute, ineffectual rage is unbecoming in a man, and is not the natural fruit of democracy.