Here is a thing I have been wondering over the past year or two.

"When is my time?"

I thought it would be eleven years ago when I left my ex, Lisa. We'd been together for fifteen years, on and off, since graduating college in 1999.

I was thirty seven. We lived in a house together but did not marry. She never asked me, I never asked her.

I kept waiting for something inside of me to tell me that I should ask her to marry me, and instead the signals I received were quite the opposite. I integrated with her family and saw them as much as she wanted me to. I did most of the dishes and most of the housework and all of the contractor stuff when it came to repairs. I drove her around because she didn't have a license and didn't want to get one. I helped her with her job when she wanted help. I touched her the way she wanted to be touched.

She said she wasn't interested in marriage. The last two years we were together, we did not have sex. I tried to initiate at least twice a month for a while – six months, maybe nine, picking spots where I thought there was a chance – low stress times – periods where I thought she didn't have too many obligations. She would turn me down and say she didn't feel anything. This made me wonder about the sex we'd been having the year leading up to the dry spell. I thought she enjoyed it.

I guess not.

On the weekends, over that period, we would either go to her sister's place or she'd disappear to Foxwoods in Connecticut to gamble and kill time. I suspected she had a gambling problem for a while, but later, I began to instead suspect she was cheating.

It hurts to write about all of this and I'm going to stop. I'll never know if she was cheating or just trying to get away from me. What I know is that I gave her most of my life during the years we were together. I didn't play guitar much. I doted on her, did her favors, tried to be a version of 'dutiful husband' that I felt society would approve of.

In the end, she adored my service, but did not adore me. When I told her I was leaving she said "it made her sad" but "if that's my choice, that's my choice." She did not fight for me. She did not ask what is wrong.

It felt like she knew. It felt like she'd been waiting for me to break up with her.

I thought that with her in the rear view mirror, I'd live for myself. I'd find something I wanted to do and do it. I'd rediscover my interest in guitar and writing. Something would grab me.

In reality, nothing happened. I drank heavily for a while in an attempt to get over the heartache. I worried about her – intensely. That's right – I could not stop worrying about the person I'd finally dumped.

And I realized that my identity had become so wrapped up in making her happy that I'd lost track of who I was and what makes me happy.

I still barely know. The thing I pursue most heavily when I have free time is drinking. This is probably because I associate it with college, and college was the last period of my life where I felt that my life was still more or less under my own control. It's also an activity with a very reliable feedback mechanism. You drink, you feel different. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, sometimes tired, sometimes more self-righteous or even angry. There are the blissful times when I achieved pure chemical happiness for a period, and wished I could bottle whatever strange combination of neuro-states plus alcohol provoked this specific response.

My other hobbies tend to give me feedback that is best described as a new portmanteau that I've labeled frintresting, frustrating plus interesting.

Let's say I'm writing. While I'm writing I'm probably following a train of thought for a while – that's the interesting part, the part where I'm allowing myself to take a step back from living my life, and instead changing my activity to considering something in particular about it instead.

But invasive thoughts will continually occur to me as I work through this, and most of them are along the lines of what is the point of this? You should be doing something else with your time. Nobody will ever read this or care about it. Honestly you might as well play video games.

The same basic pattern repeats if I play guitar. Playing is fun and interesting in and of itself, but after a 30 or 60 minute session, I'm always left asking, what exactly is the point of this? I am not good enough to play with others, and more importantly, I do not seek others out to play with. So it's a hobby that goes nowhere. Instead of helping with my loneliness, it contributes to it. Instead of making me feel good about myself, it seems to make me feel like shit once I'm done.

It wasn't always like this, and I'm not exactly sure why, but I think it has something to do with the following changes in my makeup.

First, I'm so accustomed to doing something with a concrete payoff that doing anything else feels like I'm throwing hours away with no return.

Second, I'm also accustomed to living my life in the service of others. At work, I serve the enterprise and the team. I don't push back very often. At home, I serve my new partner and wife Penny. I have become again that person that sacrifices himself for others.

And to do the things I want to do – properly – requires a lot of time.

But the things that Penny wants – the stuff that our house and our life together seems to need – also seems to require a lot of time.

So I stay stuck. And here, writing, I'm explaining why I feel stuck while looking for a way out.

I know what the solutions are. Youtubers in the Men's Help space suggest the solution. "If you are 45 or 50, a man with a job and a house and a family, chances are pretty good you are enabling other people to live their lives – making sacrifices for them – because you want to. But you are also waking up to the absolute fact that death is no longer an abstraction. You are definitely going to die. And you start to feel this in a way that's real and substantial that isn't the same as in your 20s when you could hold the knowledge at arm's length. The intruder is in the building, the knowledge is near. So you start to realize there are things you want to do with your own life and free time that you are going to have to make space for. And the only way to make space for them is to start to be more selfish."

And that's it. I know this is true. I have to practice being more selfish, it makes total and complete sense. I'm used to reading the room, deciding what could make people in the room happier, and doing that.

I've convinced myself that by making people happier, I become happier in turn.

And while I still think that is true, I also know that not allowing myself to be more selfish is harming me inside. It leads to depression.

So one of the main things I'm trying to figure out here is how exactly to be more selfish.

But also what to be more selfish about.

It is going to be next to impossible to tell Penny that I don't have the energy to cook for her so she's going to have to figure dinner out for herself, when instead of cooking dinner I am practicing guitar for a hobby that goes nowhere.

It won't happen. I don't think I'll ever be able to make that trade.

The thing I am doing needs to feel sufficiently important to me that it allows me to break through that sense of obligation and guilt about leaving my wife uncomfortable and alone to manage her own evening (or a section of it) without me.

Why do the most obvious solutions feel impossible when I break them down like this?

I'm just out of practice disappointing people too. It's not just that I'm out of practice being selfish – it's that part of me feels this intense need to be perfect for others. And letting people down creates a sense of internal failure that is very uncomfortable to sit with.

That's all the time I had to write. Penny will be home in a few minutes and I'm going to shower and then prep dinner. We'll mess around with our dog Shelley and she'll tell me about her workday and we'll share some laughs and eventually put the television on together. We'll watch a show – maybe Bodkin, maybe From, maybe The Incredible Hulk. The evening will pass, and not unpleasantly at that.

But inside I will feel this: Another day of my life passed without me doing anything for myself.

At least today I can tell myself that I wrote this post.

Maybe that's the practice I needed for now.