I am submitting my story in letter form.  It's a letter I wrote to my husband....
Dear Mike,
I'm not sure if you'll ever read this but my therapist has suggested writing things down to process my feelings.  So here goes.
Where to begin?  For the past 9 years I have been happily married to a wonderful caring, considerate, responsible, loving guy who is sweet and thoughtful and quite frankly who I believed to be a far better person than myself.  A person who listens to others and has empathy and genuine interest in what they say and feel.  A person who went out of their way to help others and be considerate of their feelings.  In fact at first I just flat out thought you'd be too nice to marry.  I'd be bored.  Well one thing I can tell you, it hasn't been boring.
Now mind you, I knew there were issues.  The estrangement from your family.  At first I found it odd.  Then just sad, but eventually I came to feel the quiet strength that it must have taken for you to walk away from what was obviously a toxic situation.  In fact to some extent I began to take a page from your book and distance myself from my dad a bit and it did lessen the pressure I felt to comply with his wishes all the time. 
You were my best friend, cared for me and put me first.  Spoiled me with flowers and compliments.  People used words like "Mike adores you". "You are the sun in Mike's world."  I believed these things.  And over the years as things changed sexually the thing that never changed for me was the friendship and trust that I had for you.  We were family.  A team.  When people would disappoint or hurt you ( your family, Dylan, Jay etc) I would charge to your defense.  Never hearing a word against the kind giving man that they had clearly taken advantage of.  And when temptations arose, opportunities to be unfaithful, I never gave in.  I knew that I could never hurt my husband who loved me so completely.  For me, it really was just that simple.
We never fought.  I knew that was weird.  I just figured we both hated it so we avoided it.  Now did I understand that that meant that some issues were not being appropriately addressed?  Yes.  The lack of intimacy, some passive aggressive stuff was all flowing under the surface.  I knew it.  We occasionally had small discussions about it.  But in the end all unpleasantness was pretty quickly swept under the rug.  And we figured "Hey if the worst problem we have is we don't want to hurt one another's feelings then we must have a pretty good relationship."
The things you told others about me, even when you thought I would never find out was all part of this idealistic fantasy.  You told Tamera that I was such an unselfish and loving person.  How I was the strongest smartest person you knew and I stepped in and took over when you were unemployed.  I really thought I was your entire world.  And I loved it.  And I believed it. 
Up until January 2017, if anyone had said my husband is a liar, or a cheater I would have laughed in their face with 100% certainty that those things couldn't possibly be true.  Remember this. 
100% certainty.
And then came 2017. 
To be fair as I look back there were signs.  Signs leading up to what happened but they were easy to explain away.  I could do it, and if I didn't want to, well you were there to just gaslight the shit out of me and lie your way right out of every single questionable situation. 

The falls -Mike's just clumsy

The forgetting- you just flat out ignored that

Spills and uncleaned messes- meh sloppy, or tired

Oh yes being tired.  Your sleep issues.  Great excuse.  Sound sleeper.  Barely able to go to the bathroom without banging into shit.  So difficult to wake up. 
Excuses.  I just accepted them as that being how you are.  And over time as this started escalating slowly and steadily, weight gain, drinking more hard liquor, isolating, no intimacy.  I just thought he's depressed or work has him feeling pressured or his family issues are upsetting him.  And every day I slowly got used to it.  As I went to work long hours out of our home feeling like you were just home reading a book or watching a movie content with our life.  I got used to you not sleeping.  Not eating much.  Making excuses for not going to the dr.  And you would fight me.  Lie to me.  Gaslight me and tell me I was overreacting.  You made me second guess my own instincts.  That might be the worst part.  You did to me the very thing you watched my father do.  You did it to protect yourself even though you knew it would hurt me.  The center of your universe. 
Now January 2017.  My world as I knew it ended.  My best friend who I trusted without question became a stranger whose behavior frightened angered and confused me.  My happy life and home descended into a hellish nightmare that I can scarcely begin to comprehend let alone describe.  I began to fear for you and eventually, fear you as an unrecognizable unstable stranger whom I could not trust.  And with that shattered trust went my ability to trust myself or my beliefs about the past 12 years.  Everything I understood about our life exploded in a hail of lies and life and death scenarios where I had nobody to turn to.  I felt terrified and utterly alone.  Traumatized by the depth of your disease and mental instability.  It's as if I suddenly had a child.  A horrible combative child who was much bigger and stronger than me.  I felt so sorry for you at first.  How much pain you must be in to do this to yourself.  Rolled up my sleeves.  I was ready to fight right alongside you.  Even though I knew you lied.  You let me worry.  You let me watch you fall apart mentally and physically at the hospital and afterwards and you refused to get the help.  I felt bad for you even then. 
Once I saw the evidence.  The bottles.  I knew you had to go right away.  And I knew it was the only answer.  Still I wanted to fight.  And then I found out how truly sick you were.  You could die.  Need a transplant.  Looked up all the info.  Knew your meds, your condition etc.  trying to see if I could give you a piece of my liver.  I wanted to fight.  For my husband.  Who had been abused and was sick. 

Then I saw the bills.  One after another.  Unpaid cards and consolidation loans.  More lies.  Where had this money gone?  Why had he allowed me to spend money we didn't have?  He knew I would be angry.  What was he buying?  What didn't he want me to know? 

And then I looked further. 
And my world changed permanently and irreversibly.  I knew about the thongs.  He liked thong underwear.  So what?  But when I saw how many thongs you bought.  Over and over.  For years.  And Craig's list.  The ad.  The lingo.  Just typed out plain as day.  MSM.  You Host.  Regular blowjob and rimming.  I just froze.  I knew you had that bag of toys hidden in the closet.  I knew you liked that kind of thing to an extent.  But with a guy?  My husband likes gay sex.  What the fuck does that mean about every single second of the last ten years of my fucking life?  I honestly have no idea.  And through no fault of my own I am thrust on a path of lies, and deception and the flip side of human sexuality that I never chose to walk down.  Someone else made that choice for me.  Someone else put my health at risk from a host of possible STDs.  Someone that up until 2017 I trusted 100%.
Now I have a raw stranger who resents me for seeing through his lies.  For finding his shameful secrets and daring to show the hurt they caused.  I am being snapped at and told that I am cruel and have daddy issues.  I am in my home sobbing uncontrollably while this strange person whistles and cooks dinner while listening to the Beatles.  This is a soul crushing pain that will go down as the worst I have ever felt.  Completely shattered and utterly alone. 
If I could have seen the broken person sobbing in the basement 15 years ago when I walked in the door for that audition.  Well I wish I had seen that.  I thought I was going back to music.  Back to what made me happy in the past.  The fact that that had led me to you.  I thought that was such a good healthy sign.  What an incredibly heartbreaking contrast.  All that potential.  All those years.  What does any of it mean?  I have to ask other people if they believe my own husband ever loved me.  I honestly have no words to describe the pain you have made me feel.  And you say it's because you weren't in your right mind.  Well that may well be true.  But there were always choices.  Choices made out of pain are still choices.  At least you had choices.  I did not.  You chose what you wanted.  Every time.  And every time you chose to ignore what the consequences of those choices would mean for me.
So in the end it turns out that the center of your world was never me at all.  It was always you.
You chose what made you feel better and gave no thought to my feelings or health or safety at all.  I can never unknow that.  I can never unfeel that pain.  I can never freely give myself to anyone or trust my instincts the way I did with you.  You said you loved me.  Stood in front of my family and our friends and said you would try to be worthy of my love.  Well I don't know if you tried, but you definitely aren't worthy of it now.  I deserve to be loved the way I loved you.  I know that to be a fact.  I will not for one second settle for less. 
I hope you someday know yourself.  I know myself.  I wish I knew who you were.  I wish you had the strength to show me.  But I am tired and your denial is a mountain of pain that I feel too weakened to climb.  I have no idea what the future holds.  I just want my hurt to go away.