Written in 2022:

So this is one of those instances where I ended up being really troubled again by the ex-wife. She was excited that Karen came to visit, and decided to try drinking. And after that, all she wanted to do was drink, and she had a small glass of wine and got fucked up on it. I kept warning her to take it easy since she hadn’t drunk in a long time and we weren’t sure how it would interact with her meds. It was jarring— after I left her, the exwife was on a drinking kick and I wondered if my “no alcohol in the apartment” rule maybe fucked her up and she decided to just go nuts after. Did she want to drink the whole time we were together?? She never brought it up, so I didn’t really know until she started fixating on the one glass of beer she had with pizza one night.

Then again, she was upset that the expartner drank without her— there was a long-distance situation, and the expartner would drink with their friends. Exwife got mad because she was concerned for the expartner’s safety and felt she couldn’t trust them to be safe. In the back of my mind, I felt like the exwife was envious that expartner was able to drink while the exwife felt that she could not and took it out on them.

Was it just a control thing? Was she feeling stifled about it? I don’t drink because I don’t like the smell, the taste, and I worry about how I would take to drinking. I’ve already got issues around worrying about mood regulation and I suffer from panic attacks, so I just don’t tempt fate. I don’t smoke weed for the same reason.