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thefaeborn · 8 years ago

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I never would have married if I’d understood Mental Illness.

When I met my ex-husband, I was just 20 years old. I was just out of a long-term relationship with an abusive partner—well, to be fair, we were abusive to each other. We were young, and stupid. (For those wondering, we’ve actually become close friends over the intervening years.) But that’s neither here nor there. When I met my ex, I was vulnerable and scared.

I have always had low self-esteem, so when I ran into him in the break room at the call center we both worked for, I figured I didn’t stand a chance with him. So I didn’t bother trying to make a good impression. I just launched into a rant about my (then) ex-boyfriend and how ridiculously stupid he was. This new guy was understanding, charming, funny, intelligent, and offered me some good advice—to get away from the ex.

We exchanged numbers just prior to my very first mental breakdown. I took a month off work and expected to never see him again. At the time, we didn’t know what was wrong with me, so they diagnosed me with depression and anxiety, and that was that. I got pills, went to some classes, and thought I was ready to take my bruised psyche back into the workforce.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, and neither could my doctors.

We reconnected, my ex-husband and I, and we got to know each other. We talked a lot on the phone, and tried to meet up whenever we could line up our breaks at work. I thought I was doing better, but I just couldn’t get in the swing of things at work, so I eventually quit. It was around this time that he and I became more intimate, and I had a huge fight with my ex-boyfriend (who was still living with me at the time—I told you it was dysfunctional). I stayed with my new boyfriend for a week, hibernating in his room while he went to work so as to avoid his roommate, whom I never actually got to know.

At the end of that week, he moved in with me as my ex moved out. I literally never spent a single night alone in that apartment. If I’d known then what I know now about my mental illness…but again, that’s neither here nor there. This is the story of how I learned, not lamenting the fact that I didn’t know to begin with.

So he moved in with me. I suppose it’s about time I give him a name for all of you, we’ll call him Sam. That’s not his name, not even close, but I don’t want to write this to blast him. I want to write it for myself, so we’re going to call him Sam.

Sam moved in with me, and we got closer. A few weeks (yes, weeks) later, he proposed one night while we were lying in bed. I accepted (I was terrified of being alone, as if that wasn’t painfully obvious yet), and I was excited. Remember, I’m only 20 at this point. I think this is going great, because this was where I had wanted to be with my ex—engaged and planning a wedding. I figured I could just replace him with Sam, and everything would be fine. No, that’s not fair. At the time I didn’t think that, I’m just reflecting on it now with my new knowledge.

Things were confusing at that time. I’d been close to my mother, but after I’d left home at 17 (that’s a WHOLE ‘nother story), we’d been tense. That’s a nice way of putting it: tense. She didn’t approve of Sam, because she’d heard (from me) that he’d been married once and engaged another time and I thought he would be a bad influence. (In the joy that is retrospect, I should have stuck to that assessment, but impulse control being what it was…I’ll get to that.) So she didn’t approve, and when I told her we were engaged, she basically said “Don’t want to know, don’t care, don’t bother inviting me to the wedding”, but in more words. I don’t remember exactly what she said because I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time.

We didn’t speak again for two months. Dear reader, you need to understand what a huge thing that was for me. I didn’t fight with my mom when I was growing up; we were thick as thieves, as they say. I had always been very close to her, and this devastated me. I started planning my wedding, sure that I would be happy in my marriage because that’s what people my age did. Normal girls my age were dating, getting engaged, getting married. My own cousin, a little younger than me, was getting married soon.

I don’t remember how things got patched up with my mother, but I remember it involved her seeing a car parked out front of her house and having a sudden, irrational fear that I’d run off, eloped, and was now coming to tell her that she’d missed my wedding. (Pro-tip: It wasn’t our car.) We worked on repairing the damage, which we didn’t realize at the time stemmed all the way back to me leaving three years earlier, and she and my family tried their hardest to get to know this man I was planning on spending my life with.

I should have known something was amiss when I had to buy my own engagement ring from eBay, for $25. That really should have been a sign, but I was (again) young and stupid. We originally planned this huge, grand affair in San Diego, with all of the families present. Then, when that proved to be outlandishly expensive, we changed it to Las Vegas, at one of the resorts. It was still going to be big, but not nearly AS big as the Hotel Del Coronado on a private beach for $35,000.

Sam left his job when I found him a better one. When I say “I”, I mean I. I fixed his resume, sent it out, fielded the phone calls for potential interviews, scheduled them for him, and got him ready to go. All he had to do was walk in and show them he knew computers—which he did. With this better job, we planned our big day.

Then I panicked. I attended a very short wedding at a casino in Reno, and freaked out at the idea of having a 5-minute ceremony where I was bustled in and out to make way for the next blushing bride. So I called off the Las Vegas wedding. My family was understanding, his was not. His stepmother gave us grief about the “non-refundable plane tickets”. Because, as you know, your in-laws’ cost to fly from Sacramento to Las Vegas (when they already owned three homes) was supposed to be your biggest concern surrounding your wedding, right? No, I didn’t think so either, but at the time all I felt was guilt and shame.

So we rushed it. We planned, in 14 days, our entire wedding for Tahoe. My mother bought my dress, and his suit, and we reserved the chapel. We got a package deal, where for less than $2,000, we could have our wedding AND honeymoon! We thought we were so smart, taking that deal. We rushed to get rings (they were horribly disfigured from resizing them at home and almost breaking the nickel bands), and got all the extras we thought we would need. We invited his mom’s family (Bakersfield) and my grandparents (Reno), his dad and his wife, and my parents. That was it. My maid of honor was my best friend, who had to stop at a thrift store on the way to Tahoe to get a dress, because she didn’t own one at the time.

This was how we started our lives. I didn’t know it at the time, but the reason for all of this was two-fold. I was manic, and he was terrible at keeping a rein on me when I got like that. He avoided conflict, and I was a walking conflict-o-matic when I got like that. So we got married in Tahoe, and for a few weeks, we were fine.

Then the panic set in again. I had no idea how to be a wife, or what I was supposed to do. I knew it somehow involved supporting him in what he did, and I was happy to do that. My own mental health was deteriorating, and I had no idea because I was on the inside. In a healthy marriage, this would have been the time for my spouse to take matters into his own hands and get me in to a psychiatrist, but my marriage was not healthy. To be fair, neither was my spouse.

He quit the good job (where I was receiving medical insurance, something that wasn’t easy for me to obtain at the time, this was the early 2000s), because he wanted to start a business. Okay, I’m supposed to support him, so I went along with it. In a healthy marriage, this would have been the time for me to stand up for myself and my health and tell him he couldn’t quit his job until the business took off on the side. My marriage was not healthy, and neither was I.

For a little over a year, we tried to make the business work. There were good times and bad times, but we stayed afloat (mostly because my parents supported us by throwing as much work our way as they possibly could, computer or otherwise). After a year or so (I’m a little foggy), it became clear that we couldn’t support ourselves on just the business. So it was decided that we needed to get outside jobs.

I got a part-time job at a very small call center, and that was when my family realized something was wrong. I was sick constantly, I was a nervous wreck, and there were mornings where I wanted to wrap the car around a tree to avoid going to work. This should have been warning signs to my husband, but he didn’t know what he was looking for, so his only response was “We need you to keep this job.”

I quit the job. I couldn’t handle it, and as my mental illness emerged more and more clearly, everybody but Sam could see it. They just felt, as I did, that it was our job as adults and a married couple to handle it. We were all wrong.

He was having difficulty finding work, so in a moment of desperation (it’s scary how many of those I had in my marriage), we decided to move out of the area. Again, I was manic and we didn’t understand that. I got the idea in my head to move to South Dakota, where my best friend had moved, because at least there we knew someone. Stupid, stupid, stupid. We didn’t know anything about the area, we had no real support network there, and it was a terrible idea. But I had it stuck in my head, so I was going for it.

He moved first, stayed with my best friend, and I stayed with my parents. The idea was for him to find work out there, and get into a place, and I would join him. Now, I will say this with the hindsight of many years and much more understanding: somewhere in my mind, in my heart, I wished my parents would take over at that point and tell me to stay. I longed for them to sit me down and say, “Jen, you’re not moving to South Dakota. We’re getting you help, and you’re going to stay with us. We’ll file for divorce, and put this behind us.” I ached for that to happen, but it was buried so deep under my sense of duty to my husband, I didn’t know it was there. So I started this nasty pattern of hiding how I felt, and trying to pretend that I was okay.

This was the worst thing I could have done, because I’m a fairly decent actress. I pulled it off, at least for the six weeks I stayed with my parents. They thought I was missing Sam, that I wanted to be with him, and that I was excited for this adventure in life. And I thought, in turn, that I was supposed to be, so I tried to force it.

He finally got work (six weeks after leaving), and a week later I was heading out there. We found a place that weekend, a nice single-wide trailer with a landlord that wouldn’t ask for a deposit. We knew we wouldn’t find better with him working for Wal-mart and me just moving there (we were both still under the delusion that I could work). We moved right in and tried to make a go of it.

Two months later, he lost his job. They didn’t want to pay benefits, so they fired him after commuting his employment to “temporary” and claiming his contract had ended. At least, that’s what he told me, but looking back, I sometimes wonder… I started my process of finding him work again, and in the meantime he did day-labor work, making ends meet with some help from my friends and family.

The seven years we spent in South Dakota are difficult for me to write about, because so much and so little happened there. My time felt endless as I descended into my mental illness without support or care. He went from job to job for a while, finally settling at a call center that paid him decently but not impressively. I went outside less and less, being unable to leave on my own and him not being willing to go anywhere with me in tow. My days were spent on the computer, making friends with the pixels and words coming from the other end of the internet, occasionally emailing him at work to ask him to pick something up on the way home—milk or my cigarettes or dinner of some kind.

There were a few moments that stand out to me, but most of it is a blur. The first of those moments was when I tried to kill myself. I had been to see a psychologist, who diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, and the resident psychiatrist started me on medication. I didn’t understand how many different factors went into treating mental illness—neither did Sam—so we thought this would resolve it. I would remain on medication and that would treat it. We thought that until I took too many pills one night, trying to escape what was turning into my own personal hell.

I was admitted to a mental hospital for a few days while they tried to adjust my medications and generally just kept an eye on me. During the time I was there, I was permitted to call Sam in the evening, which I did every day. He seemed…annoyed with me calling and I turned that inward. It was my fault, I was bothering him, he was tired from work and I was interrupting his “decompression” time.

I know I’ve talked about the Voice before, but South Dakota is really where it took hold in my head. It has always been there, making me suspicious of the people in my life, but being unsure if your husband actually cares about whether or not you die is definitely a way for it to take control. I didn’t know what it was at the time, didn’t know it was my illness whispering lies to me, so I didn’t know to talk about it. It wasn’t a hallucination (I knew it was in my head), so the doctors didn’t give it a lot of thought. They thought it was me saying those things to myself… If we’d only known then what we know now…

I got out, went through a month of CBT group therapy, and finally admitted some things about my past that I’d had locked away in my head for years. The abuse when I was a child, the abandonment I felt, a lot of things. I had to admit that I suffered from PTSD as well as my bipolar, and the doctors amended my diagnosis to Bipolar Disorder II. This meant that I didn’t have standard “mania” episodes, but rather episodes of “hypomania”, a lesser form. For the record, this diagnosis is somewhat incorrect, but more on that later.

We discovered that my bipolar was rapid-cycling, meaning that I would be manic or depressed more than once or twice a year. There is no word for how rapidly I cycle. I will cycle sometimes on a weekly, daily, or hourly basis (usually dependant on what medication I’m taking and what stressors are in my life at the time). I was very stressed at the time. My home life was a wreck and I had no idea how to fix it. My husband’s paycheck was being garnished for medical bills we couldn’t afford to pay, and he refused to drive to the capital to get a form that would exempt him from having to be garnished (he didn’t make enough, and he was the sole provider in our home).

I descended further.

The next instance of something I remember clearly was the night I was so hungry (Sam hadn’t been able to get us groceries for a few nights), I went dumpster diving for a burger tossed out by my neighbors. I remember being freezing that night, and I remember smelling the burger smell coming from the dumpster. It didn’t occur to me at the time what I was doing; all I thought of was how hungry I was and how stupid it was to throw out an almost complete burger. It wasn’t until later, when my friend brought it up, that I realized I’d just taken a burger from a garbage bag in a dumpster in the middle of the night.

Now, during our marriage (of 10 years before we decided to separate), Sam and I had been only mildly physically intimate. At first it was because I was uncomfortable with sex (a LOT of back-story there), and I thought he was just being supportive. That opinion changed when we went two years without being physically intimate at all and then seven more in South Dakota with literally two instances of sex. One of which was a traumatizing blow job when he “finally” got an erection.

Sam had a porn addiction, but wouldn’t admit it. He’d hide the videos, I’d find and delete the videos, he’d pretend he didn’t notice and go download them again. I want to be clear here, I didn’t care that he was watching porn. Well, I cared that he could get hard for porn and not for me, but I was glad that his plumbing at least worked! What bothered me was the way he would hide it, making me feel like the villain any time I would bring it up. He was the innocent victim (one time he tried to blame it on the size of his hard drive, saying hackers were illegally downloading porn to his drive because it was so big—I’m not kidding), and I was the harpy shrew because I was accusing him. I didn’t understand (or even know) the term “gas-lighting” back then, but boy do I understand it now.

I would try to initiate intimacy, he would pull away. I would try to talk to him about it, about how it was a need of mine and I wanted to know what I could do to help him, he would deflect and blame his blood pressure medication or his stress at work. That isn’t to say that these couldn’t have been factors, but he didn’t care enough to discuss it with his doctor, or me, or anyone. He didn’t care enough to tell me that he just wasn’t interested in me sexually. He couldn’t be bothered.

I tried to approach the idea of having an open marriage, but he said that was “no marriage at all” and refused. In short, he kept me tied to his sexless lack of desire. And that wasn’t the only thing Sam kept me tied to.

I remember my mother coming to visit on the last birthday I had there. We stayed holed up in the hotel room all weekend because I was too afraid to leave. Clearly the medications weren’t working for me, but I was still a great actress. My mom had an idea that something was wrong, but she’d been trying for years to let me live my life the way I kept telling her I wanted to live it. It wasn’t her fault I was great at lying about what I wanted.

See, Sam had convinced me that I didn’t have any option outside of him. He made sure to reinforce this thought by reminding me that my family had stopped helping us financially, and that my friends didn’t care about me as much as he did. With the help of the Voice, he had me convinced that I couldn’t go anywhere, because no one would take me in, and I was clearly unable to support myself. I needed Sam. He was the only one taking care of me, and I couldn’t afford to lose that or I’d be on the streets and arguing with the sidewalk.

After that visit from my mom, in November, I didn’t leave the house until I left South Dakota, 11 months later. Picture that for a moment. Through FOUR DIFFERENT SEASONS, I didn’t leave the trailer. It was a wreck, because I was so tied up in knots that I couldn’t even leave to take out the trash by myself. Sam would tell me, “If you ever want to go somewhere, just take me to work and you can have the car for the day.” But I was too afraid to go somewhere alone. I couldn’t be alone, that was crazy talk! And he knew it was, the bastard. He knew damn well that I wouldn’t leave the house by myself, that I needed him with me, and he conveniently managed to always be too tired or too worn out or too stressed or too something to go anywhere with me.

*deep breath* I’m okay. This gets me a little riled up sometimes, but I’m okay.

I smoked a lot during that time. I wasn’t telling anyone in my life how stressed and alone I felt, so I turned to my cigarettes for comfort. At one point, I smoked a whole carton in less than a week. These aren’t menthols, either. Cloves. Hard stuff on the lungs. I smoked 160 of those in 4 days. Every time I turned around, I was smoking or eating, because I had nothing else to do and I felt like I was trash. Sam would bring home fast food rather than go to the store (he was too tired after work), so I lived on McDonald’s McChicken sandwiches for a few months at a time.

Even when I finally worked up enough courage to move out, it was with the understanding that Sam would follow me at some point (a reverse of the move to South Dakota). I had someone I had been seeing online for a few months. He and his mother offered to rent me a room in her house for less than $200 a month, something I could afford with the help of a good friend. Sam would join me when we found him work out there (in western New York), and we would hit that giant reset button again, only this time there would be a little bit of a support network.

I moved out in October of 2013 or 14, and that was the last time I saw Sam in person. I almost didn’t make my flight out, because he was dragging his feet that day. I think something in him knew that this was the end. Something in me knew it, but I didn’t want to listen to that part of me just yet. I went to New York and settled in, then started looking for work for Sam.

He didn’t know that the person I’d moved to be with (we’ll call him Mike, but again—that’s not his name) was my boyfriend. He thought it was just a friend. Or maybe he did know and just didn’t say anything. It doesn’t matter at this point. Mike’s mom helped me sort out possible jobs for Sam, because when he moved out there with me, we were going to be renting the other side of her duplex, and she’d get more than $200 a month from us. So she was totally on board. Funnily enough, the one person who wasn’t on board…was Sam.

When I tracked down a job for him and told him to send me a copy of his resume to forward on, he said no. He didn’t want to leave the job he was at (that was garnishing his wages and had caused him two strokes), because he’d put in so much time there, he didn’t want to lose seniority. I told him I wouldn’t be moving back, we had a barely-there argument, and I told him I would talk to him later.

Sam had been taking out paycheck advances from our joint bank account for a long time. We were informed by the bank that they would be halting that program, and everything needed to be repaid by X Y Z date. We had talked about it, he had agreed to work extra overtime to help pay for it so the bank account didn’t have trouble, and I thought that was the end of it. When I first moved to New York, I was still using the joint account, but none of Sam’s money. I had my own, from little bits of online work and help from friends, and I would simply use the account as a way to route the money to Mike’s mom for rent, or to my credit card bill.

I went to pay my rent one month, and realized that the bank account was overdrawn—by $800. Sam hadn’t worked the overtime, this I’d come to expect. Or he had, and just decided to fritter away the money on something else, like fast food and video games. Either way, the money wasn’t there, so the bank had taken its piece of flesh, including MY money. This was followed rather closely by seeing a repossession on my credit report. Sam had lost the car, because he had stopped paying for it. He had stopped paying for it because it stopped working and he didn’t feel he should be paying for something that didn’t run. (Again, I’m not kidding. This was actually his logic.)

I panicked once again, but this time I did something I’d never done before. I reached out to people in my hurt and frustration. I posted on Facebook (not my finest decision, but I had nowhere else to turn by then) that I was so angry by something “someone” had done. Sam’s response to this was to take personal offense and tell me that if I wanted a divorce, he wouldn’t contest it.

That was it. That was his FIRST response to me reaching out for help. To end our marriage. But not even that; if he’d had the balls to ask for a divorce himself, this would’ve all been over more quickly and with less pain. No, he avoided the blame yet again by saying that if I wanted a divorce, he wouldn’t contest it.

Of course he wouldn’t. That would require effort on his part, same as filing for the divorce himself.

It took me several months to even get my fingers to type the words “I want a divorce.” Thankfully, Mike’s mom had an ex-husband who had treated her pretty raw when he left, so she understood. We worked out the missing money (again, with the help of a great friend), and I finally started opening up to my family about Sam.

They were shocked. True, they’d known something wasn’t quite right, but for the past 10 years, they’d had no idea the isolation and psychological abuse he’d put me through. I started talking about it with my closest friends, apologizing profusely for not sharing sooner, and their only admonition was at my assuming they wouldn’t have taken me in. I felt like a fool, like a complete idiot for believing Sam all those years.

Mike and I eventually moved across the country, back to where my family was on the west coast. That was when I finally felt safe enough to tell Sam that I wanted a divorce. I also told him not to try to contact me directly, to send all correspondence (and my belongings) through my mother. He never made an attempt except when he thought he could get her “on his side”, something he never really managed. I started talking more candidly with my mom about everything that had happened, about how it had messed me up, about how he never had a clue what to do with a mentally ill wife. It took me a while longer to realize he knew exactly what he was doing, and he did it quite well.

Even after I filed for divorce (admittedly, a long time after everything—I suppose part of me was hoping he would do this one thing for me, after everything he took away, and file himself), he is still being the same selfish, lazy, unmotivated jerk. When he was served with papers, he had 20 days to respond. The response form is easily obtainable (along with instructions) from an easy-to-find website. He even told my mother he’d get right on it. That 20 days ran out the beginning of this year. It’s now almost February, and Sam never filed his response with the courts. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he’s not even printed the form.

Fortunately, Mike and I have some of the same issues to work through, so we get it. We know how to care for each other most of the time, and when we don’t, we fight. It sounds like a bad thing, but we get our emotions out, the deep-rooted causes come to light, and we can talk about it and work through it. That’s healthy, surprisingly. I live no more than ten miles from my mother (after 7 years of living 1700 miles away, it was truly hell for me), and I’m getting the help I need.

Sam still lives in that trailer. He works for another call center (the one he was so determined to keep laid him off a few months after our fight about it), and as far as I know, his life is the same. As far as I care, his life is the same. Literally the only thing I miss from that decade of my life is my cat.

#tw:emotional abuse #marriage #mistakes #life #writing #amwriting #ex husbands #mental health #bipolar disorder #panic disorder #ptsd #abuse #regret #mental illness #get help #divorce

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chameleonwife · 8 years ago

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Marriage

I never would have gotten married if I’d understood mental illness at the time.

I couldn’t have been more wrong, and neither could my doctors.

I descended further.

*deep breath* I’m okay. This gets me a little riled up sometimes, but I’m okay.

Of course he wouldn’t. That would require effort on his part, same as filing for the divorce himself.

#marriage #abuse #emotional abuse #tw: abuse #mental illness #bipolar #coming out the other side

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