Partner is fixated on a life choice regret this morning and has been teetering on the edge of meltdown. It's a line of thinking that most often gets triggered if I make even the slightest reference to where I was living in my late 20s and early 30s.
It's a painful thing to witness because of the level of anger and resentment he has around his choices, and often leaves me feeling like I have to walk on eggshells and supress my thoughts around my own memories of that time period of my own life which makes me feel inspired unsupported because it wasn't exactly the "time of my life" like my partner seems to assume.
A few times this week I found myself escalating to the point of meltdown due to me completely misreading social situations happening and reacting to them like they were traumatic events of the past.
It's always incredibly embarrassing when this happens, and anytime there's a meltdown there's a risk of dysregulating the people around me... which happened last night. My outburst triggered my partner into a meltdown, which triggered his roommate to emerge from his room screaming at us for our dysregulation being "unacceptable" which escalated my partner further.
It's not the first time we've had trouble with this particular roommate dysregulating due to our inability to keep it cool 24/7, and it had me realizing that I've been walking on eggshells and holding so much anxiety around him for years because every time my partner starts to get a little meltdown-y, I'm terrified he's going to emerge from his room and lash out and make things worse.
I'm back home and recovering now, but I just feel really sad about the whole thing and angry at myself for just jumping to conclusions and yelling my head off.
On the thankful side, the other roommate who was the person who had done the triggering thing both times I lost it this week seemed to get where I was coming from was able to help set me straight and help me regulate.
Home now, trying to process and recover. Being a person is hard.