There are certain people in your life that you just assume won’t betray you.  A family member, an old friend, your parents, pick your confidant.

As I listened to you talking about me like I wasn’t even there, I felt sick to my stomach.  I wanted to run but I had no where to run to.

The things you said, they hurt my heart.

I wanted to trust you, I wanted to believe that you wouldn’t betray that trust.

I talked to my therapist about it, he said the fact that I got sick to my stomach was a sign that I’ve grown.  That most healthy people would be sickened by your behavior.

In the past I would’ve just overlooked it.  Kind of like ignoring the proverbial elephant in the room.  I learned that skill from being sexually abused, it’s a survival mechanism and came in handy.

The only way for me to get around what happened is to believe you are a very sick person.  I hold no resentment, no contempt.

It’s one of those really hard lessons that you only need to learn once, that I am unable to trust you with intimate pieces of my life.

For your own good, for my own good your secret is safe with me, along with all the others.  I won’t declare revenge and threaten you with my insider information.  That would not serve anyone, but mostly I have no desire to do that.

I’m taking that as another sign I’ve made progress on this whole being human thing.

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My heart broke when the truth revealed itself to me.  I tried to hide from it, bury it deeply inside of my body, I didn’t want anyone to see it.

That was successful for a long time.  I tried to blame you, the reasons were all turned around and put back into my court and I couldn’t deny this was a truth I could not hide.

Looking for things that were wrong for so long until I found them, then I looked for ways to put them up high so no one could find them.

We’re in too deep, it has to remain as it is until one of us dies.  It will hurt too much, I can’t take much more hurt.  It will bury me eight feet under next to my Dad.  What have I done wrong?

I dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s, I checked and rechecked, went to the Doctor and went to God.

To stay in the condition would mean choosing you instead of me.  I thought that choice was the answer for me and I forgot who I was, what strengths I had, the hurdles I’d climbed before, and that I can overcome adversity no matter what’s on the table.

I sat, I cried, I wrote, I lied to myself.

I thought of him and how he did the same, exchanging his life for another.  It made him happy to do so, or it was what he wanted us all to believe.

A message from somewhere deep, rose up to greet, whispering in my ear, “don’t do that”.  “Right or wrong, it’s been so long, don’t walk the same road you saw me on”.

I love you, my heart would burst to prove to you if it could.  It’s time for me to sever that tie and find myself and I don’t even know why.

The beyond this will be beautiful, the beyond will be better than any of us could have hoped for.  I hate to be the one to change the tracks, it was the last choice, and when everything turned to black, I knew then it was only choice to bring my life back.

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Does this mean I’m eternally broken?

Aren’t humans supposed to couple up and live happily ever after?  If I listen to the inner voice that lives inside of my mind and body, it tells me that this may be true for others but it’s not true for me.

After years of investigating, getting my heart broken, and breaking others’ hearts I’ve learned a lot.  I’ve learned that when I am unattached, I can move mountains.  I can build bridges and soar through the sky.

I miss that part of myself that is capable of great things.  I miss the loneliness that feeds my creativity and moves me to the next level.

I don’t need you, or anyone else to complete me.  I can complete myself far better than anyone else.

I know as I type that the panic of not having a special someone by my side is going to be excruciatingly painful for me.  I’ve been here before, it’s horrible and ugly and I’ll hate myself for not being a better person.  It will not be pretty.

When we love, there is no escaping the inevitable pain that accompanies it.  It’s a part of the package, the sacrifice you make to let your heart soar.

I’m afraid, I don’t know what to do next, and I don’t like not having a direction.  I question my sanity, why on earth would I choose to leave the safety of my life at this point?

It would be selfish of me to continue, knowing I’m not as fulfilled as I should be, you deserve better.  It would be selfish of me to keep you here.

I’m sorry for the upset and chaos that this will bring into our lives, we’ve certainly seen too much of that over the years.

Looking back, I once thought it would make us stronger.  What I realized was that it broke us in ways that cannot be repaired.  I’ve been grieving much longer than you, as I’d hoped it was something I could find a solution to.

If I could block it out, and change how I am, I would.  I’ve tried medications, therapy and behavior modification just to make it all fit.

It’s not something that can be repaired because it’s not really broken.

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This hurt, this particular hurt controls me.  Maybe I let it control me.  I expected you to protect me, to protect her, protect the ones you love.  My expectations getting in my way again, causing me to have resentment.

People cannot give what they do not have.

I thought by taking care of you that it would take care of the all of us, maybe I’d even learn to let you take care of me.  I know I’m not perfect, I have my own issues.  This really is my issue, because I am no longer able to deal with it.

I thought you were ready to do that work too.  It’s ok that you aren’t, I understand that knocking down walls isn’t for most people.  I also realize that I’m probably not meant for a long term commitment.  Not because I can’t commit, I’ve certainly proved that to myself once and for all.  Maybe I expect too much from my partners.

A Doctor recently told me after hearing my story, “You’ve come too far to settle”.  I nodded my head and agreed with her.  Not in some “superior” way, in a way for my own journey.  I HAVE come a long way from my humble beginnings, and my fucked up scars.

My heart aches for the loss we’ve suffered, and I’m not sure that it’ll ever stop aching, it goes really really deep.  It’s attached to some major core stuff for me and I’m powerless over it.  I’ve tried to make it something other than what it was.  Truth seeker that I am, I wasn’t successful.

Just a simple call or text can send me spiraling out into crazy land.  I love her, I love her so deeply it’s alarming even to me.

I can honestly say that I tried every avenue possible.  This isn’t me running away like it used to be.  I dug in my heels and willed it to get better, then I sought outside help.  I can comfortably say that I did the very best I could, tried everything I could, experienced heart wrenching pain for the both of us but to no avail.  A partnership only works if both are willing to work at it.

There are two sides to you, and 99% of people only see the one side.  I’ll be the “bad guy”, I know that’s important to you.  I’ve carried that title for many years now, and was blamed for things that I had no involvement in.  I let it be like that because I didn’t know another way and I thought it was the solution.

I’m not a bad guy, I’m just a regular person trying to survive just like everyone else.  And I can only take so much medication before I become a zombie.

I’m worth more than that and I’m grateful that I finally saw the truth, before I lost myself forever.

I love you.

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The wounds created long ago, continue to re-open and re-play themselves as a form of private torture.  “It’s not fair”, I scream quietly to myself, calling out to the universe, begging for it to all stop.

Looking for the escape hatch, the trap door, that pathway through the ceiling.  My knees have scratches and are bleeding, visual proof of my endless attempts to find the way out.

It wasn’t always like this, I remember good things, events, feelings.

Perhaps a spell cast upon me by an evil witch, unknown to me, unable to break it’s binding upon my soul until the Dark Horse arrives to rescue me knowing that I am the Dark Horse, not something outside of me.

The searing sadness, each time I think about the task before me wondering if I have another fight in me.

There really is no permanent happily ever after.  I often think someone should have to take accountability for that. I want my money back you lying motherfuckers, I’m not buying it anymore.

Spiraling, so tired, unsure of what my next action should be, I pray silently, with desperation for this to run it’s course so that I can move beyond it.

I know it’s there, I know I’ll find it, I know I can float.

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I always thought that if my “ship came in” as it were, I would be in the water so fast, the sharks wouldn’t even know I was there.

The reality is not so immediate.

After a lifetime of broken trust and a broken heart. After being abandoned by my parents, the Department of Health and Human Services, by my “adoptive” family, then, finally by my husband I am pretty beaten up- on the inside.

The divorce was a two year battle, and finally, it has ended.

I am free.

A man I have known professionally for about a year, approached me, on the day of my divorce, professed his love, and promised me everything. He’s handsome, independently wealthy, his long term goals are the same as mine. We have a lot of fun when we hang out. I could have all the children I ever longed for, a good husband that could provide, family vacation, I could get that PhD…I don’t love him, I don’t know him that well yet- not on a real personal level. By the nature of our professional relationship he knows damn near everything about me.

I’ve been dating a guy for about a year. He’s awesome. We have fun. He’s affectionate. He never wants kids, will never get married again.

It seems like an easy choice.

It isn’t.

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She has blond hair, and she’s thin.  Her teeth are perfectly white.  I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, but I’m judging her.  She knows I’m judging her.

At the end of the day, I write my friend.  He used to be in the lab—he knows how it used to be.  He knows me.  I tell him that I don’t know if I’ll like her.  He tells me to send him a picture of her in a bikini.

***

There’s nothing like going crazy.  Having already gone crazy and then recovered and forgotten what it felt like, I feel uniquely qualified to say it.

In my head, I try on metaphors:

Going crazy is like drowning in a deep warm ocean.  At first, it shocks your lungs.  Your limbs flail and you struggle against it.  You fight.  You fight so damn hard.  But eventually, you sink too far and you just give up.  You let it wash over you, fill your alveoli and stop your heart.  You let it have you.

Bipolar disorder is the color of water.  Bipolar disorder is the heat of the sun on a day in December.  Or July.  Or both, all at once.  Bipolar disorder is wanting everything in the world at the same time, wanting everything and knowing—without question—that it’s already all yours.

Bipolar disorder is pain.  On your couch, in your car, in your bed.  In the shower, sitting in your seat at the dinner table.  In your head.  Pain that moves down your nerves and makes you hot and shaky.  Makes you not eat or sleep until you’re nauseous and immobile.  Makes you so much less than what you ever wanted to be.

***

Sometime after I fell in love with her—in the passionately innocent way that only girls can fall in love with their friends who are also girls—I told her about the crazy.  We both have chronic illnesses.  We both have friends who didn’t want to deal with chronic illnesses.  We were both dealt shit hands, and we spit in the face of the dealer.  She’s better at it than I am.  But sometimes, I can get a good shot in too.

Still—I never wanted her to experience it for herself.  To see the crazy unleashed in full-force, wild-eyed and swirling patterns of dust around my existence.  Didn’t want her to see how it could consume me, steam-roll me, hold my head underwater just to see me squirm.  Didn’t want her to see how it made my legs shake and stomp, my teeth clench up in my mouth, my hands curl into fists until my nails leave half-moon patterns in the skin of my palms.

***

Bipolar disorder is a devil, a demon.  Real-life, with hot hooves that burn you and sharp horns that gore you, right through your abdomen, and pin you to walls.  Think back to all of the literature you can think of, all the ones about Satan and his minions.  Animal-shaped and furious, they dance with you—grab your hand and spin you around and around.  You are dizzy.  You are exhausted.  You sweat through your clothing.  You don’t know if you’ll make it.  You’re not sure you’ll survive.

Do you even want to survive?

The sole purpose of a devil is to tempt you.  To hold your hand out toward all the shiny things you think you could be.  You want to smoke weed, drink too much alcohol and fuck.  You want to run—as fast as you possibly can—in the warm streets on the darkest nights.  You itch in your own skin.  You are uncomfortable.

You want to be uncomfortable.  You want to lose yourself.  You are tired of holding it together.  The devil tells you that you don’t have to.

***

I didn’t want her to see it, but she did anyway.  She knew where I was headed.

My head lit up, hair messy and undone.  The previous day’s clothing, my fast words spewing out of my mouth.  A sideways wicked smile.  I was unraveling.

“Tell me how you’re feeling.”

I tell her I don’t want to.  That I’m sick of people who leave when I’m sick.  If I pretend that I’m not sick, I rationalize in my fucked-up head, then people will have no reason to leave.  I don’t want to get her involved with the nasty tangled web of my mind.

But she jumps in.  “I’m not going to leave.  I just want you to be honest with me.  I just want to help you.”

So I tell her about the monsters in my head.  Tell her I’m drowning.

I cannot see, in my own mirror, how crazy I am.  How crazy I look.  But in the reflective pool of her concerned face, I can see it clearly.  Because she is scared, I suddenly am too.  She’s pulling me back out.  And then, I do something I’ve never done before, not with any other person.  Not really.  I let her.

When I write that I feel run-out and done-for, she writes that she’ll pick me up.

When I say I’m glad she’s in my corner, she promises she’ll be princess of my corner forever.

When I remember that I once thought we couldn’t be friends, I think of how stupid I can be.

Here, with her, there’s hope between the devil and the deep blue sea.

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You want my time, they want my time, I love you.

All of you.

Sometimes I want to be left alone, maybe for an hour, a day, a week or a month.

I’ll come back to you, I always do.

I just need time to collect myself, my thoughts, my emotions.

To shake them off, disperse the intensity, to just be me.

There’s a lot that I share freely, and then there’s a lot that I do not share freely.

You think you know me, and you do.

But not all of me.

I always keep some for myself.  I have to, or I’ll fall down

in a heap of empty and nothing.

And you won’t have anything to greet you when you are invited back.

Never forget that I love you, and I love them,

but sometimes I need

to

just

love

me.

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“But aren’t you hurting yourself in the process”, he asked.

I said, “In way, yes.  But…”

His response, “But what?  Isn’t that how it was as a child?  You put others before you, you weren’t important.  You were made to be responsible for other peoples emotional well being and that’s never the job of a child.”

“Oh” I thought aloud.  Back to that.  It always goes back to the origin doesn’t it.

If I take care of them, they will at some point take care of me.  Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?  No.  That’s how we think it’s supposed to work but it never comes out that way. Not for me anyway.  Maybe someone, somewhere (besides Hollywood movies) it’s worked like that.  Never for me, yet I keep trying to complete that cycle and I lose myself in the process over and over again.

The source of that thinking, if I can protect the others, take their beatings for them, take the blame, take the spotlight and make it all my fault, I can control it and, somehow make it better.

No one comes out and asks me to do this, it’s one of those wordless agreements that we all make.  It’s an entire script, in my head, set on auto pilot.

My therapist suggested (about a year ago) that I needed to have a conversation about that wordless agreement, to tell the other person that I could no longer hold that position.  I was losing myself in the process and it wasn’t their fault, but I needed to resign from that job.

Sometimes, I think other people don’t mind that we lose ourselves as long as we serve as a prop for them.  (Again, auto pilot behavior.)

Once you’ve established that type of “agreement” it’s hard to move away from it.  It takes time, more conversations, discipline.  I have discipline to change my behavior, or I’m pretty sure I do.  It can be done even if it is like trying to turn a commercial ocean liner.

Funny how it is that I forget this small detail, that I push myself to the side in order to make things better for another person.  Not because I’m a martyr, I have ulterior motives (see above “If I take care of them…”).

All this collected crap manifests itself in many ways.  Much like plant roots, seeking the water and nutrients it needs to survive all the while hidden underneath the ground never seen by the casual observer.

Until something starts to wilt or die, then the journey begins again to find the source.  In order to make it right.

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This someone was the most important person in my life for many years.  He was instrumental in my highest-flying moments of joy, and in the worst, dark depths.  He was my best friend and my worst enemy.  In the end, he fulfilled a pattern that had been present in my life since childhood:  the ones who say that they love you are the ones that hate you most when no one else is looking.

I focused almost all my energy alternately on pleasing him and rebelling against him.  Relative to how I am now, people say that I looked smaller then, more like a ghost.  (Physically I’m the same size as I was.)   I was more of a sidekick than a wife.

I don’t blame him.  I know his past, and how it shaped him.  After the divorce, I read that two only children should never marry.  You’ve both been brought up as the centre of attention.  You never had to learn to share.  We were two only children in a battle to be at the centre.  He was dominant.  All our space was his space.  All our plans were his plans.  All our friends were his friends.

And yet, he was my best friend for twelve years.  He was my high school sweetheart.  He had some wonderful qualities.  After I left him, despite how bad things had gotten, I missed him unspeakably.  I felt as though I had chewed off my own leg to be free.

Time passed.  Close to ten years after I moved out, I have reconnected with him online.  I barely thought of him anymore by then, but it was nice to share some memories together, and catch up on news.  We started writing more often, re-kindling the friendship side of our connection.

At first it was fun and easy.  But it’s been getting more difficult for me.  The more I know him now, the more it feels like he’s a real presence in my life, the more all those unresolved feelings come floating to the surface.  There were so many things we never talked about, near the end.

Sometimes after an e-mail from him, I can’t sleep at night.  I wake at 3 am with a pounding, racing heart.  All the insecurities I thought I had outgrown are being triggered, almost as though no time has passed at all.  I thought I had forgiven him, but I had only forgotten.  Now that I’m reminded, I can time-travel back to my old self instantly.

I have to stop, look around at my new home, my new life.  I remind myself what year it is, how old I am.  I look in the mirror and see that I’m different.  As soon as I stop focusing on the now, the past snaps me back like an elastic band.

Why don’t I just cut him off again?  Same reason why I can’t sleep at night.  There are too many unresolved issues begging to come to light.  I hope that if I can weather the anxiety, we might be able to talk through some of the past, and heal it.  He has changed.  He went through his own personal hell, and it humbled him.  I can’t bear to lose him again.  I’m willing to let it be messy, difficult, and awkward.  The possibilities are worth the risks.

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