a skills issue
you lost your intimacy with masha. you started having imaginary conversations in your head with george. you gave up with odko.
'though in her own way, she loved you' - that was how you were going to start this paragraph. it's a delusion you've told yourself now for 13 or 14 years. she didn't love you.
masha - more details best left for another post, but she destroyed your confidence in bed, in women, in love.
then there were the endless conversations with george, both real and unreal, happening around the same time as masha's idea of closeness being mutual masturbation with the occasional mechanical sex thrown in as a duty.
he hadn't paid you for six months, nine months, a year. refused to answer emails, calls. you started imagining situations where you told him what for, where you were assertive. those imaginary conversations expanded to others and never stopped.
and then you thought you had moved on - masha had left, george paid you. you started your own little business in mongolia. you shared an office with odko, a man you realize now had as much insecurity as you had started to build a year previously.
months of suffering, months of almost no progress, it all took its toll. and that's when you gave up. you gave up your autonomy.
moved back to australia with nothing.
it took a while to get out of the void, but slowly you built life skills you never had - hygiene, fitness, nutrition, how to talk to people.
still, you never got back that confidence you had before, where a woman desired you, a man respected you and you surrounded yourself with people who cared for themselves.
what you want now is to integrate the two. having confidence with the actual backup of life skills.
and that's what you'll do.