Many of you, especially those who follow my Twitter and/or Facebook accounts, know that I've been struggling for a while, and I promised several nights ago to make a blog post detailing what's going on, but I'm just now doing it. I should never promise to write a blog entry because I can't ever force the words out when they don't want to come out.
I've now officially put off the main point of this blog entry, not for days, not for weeks, but for months... since December 2nd to be exact. It will take a while to get this out, so bear with me.
My long-term readers most likely realized that I was going through a bipolar manic phase from the beginning of September when I kicked the now ex-husband out until the end of November. You've probably noticed that things went from manic to relatively tame to a real struggle as of late.
After I booted the ex-husband, the borderline cleared up almost instantly (except for the desire for reckless casual sex and a little instability with relationships), and my doctors started taking me off my mental health medicines slowly, one by one. I was still experiencing bipolar mania, but my mania is never too crazy. I don't go out drinking or doing drugs. I don't gamble. I don't go spending thousands of dollars on stuff I don't need. It's more of a hyper mood that's 24/7, and an extreme desire for sex as I already mentioned. So the mania didn't concern my doctors or me too much. We were mostly concerned with making sure the depression didn't get the best of me.
During the last week of November, I was taken off the last of my anti-depressants (can't remember which one it was, either Effexor or Lexapro), and it quickly and dramatically made me crash off the mania. That isn't really a bad thing because I desperately needed to come down off it, but it was too sudden, and my brain couldn't handle the sudden change. I didn't get depressed or anything like that, but it made me feel severely unstable in my mind, and when I feel unstable, I feel like cutting. All I can think about when I'm feeling unstable is self-harm. I can't be too hard on myself for that because in the process of recovery from any sort of addiction, you're bound to make mistakes every once in a while. I'm human and when things are bad, I'm naturally going to go back to how I've always coped.
The morning of December 1st, I woke up feeling horribly unstable. I couldn't shake how bad I felt. I didn't work that day so I did everything I could think of to take my mind off cutting, but nothing was really working, so I decided to use one of the movie tickets my brother had sent me for a birthday present and go see Twilight which had just came out in theaters. I thought seeing a movie would help me escape from the self-harm thoughts. I knew that there would be blood in the movie since it was about vampires, but like I've said several times lately, I never get triggered by the images most people do, so I thought I'd be fine. But the fight scene came onto the screen, and then the image of Bella's wrist bleeding and her facial expression with a mix of pleasure and pain showed up. That was the single biggest trigger I've ever had in my entire life.
When I left the theater, I thought I could deal. I thought I could make it through the night on my own without cutting. I thought I'd be ok until the desire to cut subsided. Well I was wrong. The longer I sat that night, the worse it got. I couldn't get that look of pleasure and pain out of my mind. I wanted to cut to feel the pleasure and the pain I used to feel each time I cut.
It may have been better to just make a small cut and give myself that little pleasure to make it through the night, but I didn't. I'm so stubborn when it comes to my mental health issues. I've spent so much money, so much time and energy trying to overcome everything that I'm determined to not let myself stumble.
Instead of just cutting to get it over with, I decided I needed company, someone to watch me and make sure I didn't give into the desire. At the time, I didn't really have friends in Oklahoma City (I have a few now. I'll explain that later). I had co-workers, but no one I felt comfortable calling to come over. I thought about taking myself to the emergency room for observation, but I had nowhere to take the dogs for the night.
When I was in the middle of trying to figure out a game plan for the night, Q sent me a message. Q was someone I had a one-night stand with at the beginning of October. He's not a good guy. I knew he wasn't a good guy, but I was desperate for someone to watch me for the night. I told him exactly what was going on, and he asked if I wanted him to come over. I said yes, but I made it clear (or so I thought) that nothing at all could happen, that he was there strictly as a "friend" and nothing more.
My act of desperation when I asked him to come over turned into horror. I was forced to have sex with him. Not only had I told him that I did not want to have sex, he knew I was in no state to mentally consent to sex anyway. He had pinned me down. He held my head down by grasping my throat. He left bruises. I bled ... BAD. I didn't end up cutting that night, but I sure ended up with pain and blood. Of course, after Q left, I went straight to get checked out by a doctor and did a report about the incident.
Surprisingly it didn't have the effect on me that you'd expect it to have had. It didn't send me into a deep depression or anything. I didn't try to kill myself. I learned from it. I talked it out with my therapist, my mom, my fiancee R, and my best friend. I realized that I made a mistake trusting someone I shouldn't have. I realized the kind of danger I put us in by having Q come to the house. I realized that if I was going to soon have a baby in the house, I couldn't take a risk like that again.
I haven't written about it in the blog before now basically because it never felt like the right time to sit down and write about it. I wanted to be able to look at what happened 100% objectively and that just hadn't happened until lately. I've told less than 10 people that it happened, so writing this now will tell more people at once than I've told in the last four months since it happened.
After that night, I took a long hard look at my life to figure out what I wanted and needed. I decided that I needed to be by myself for a while and learn how to better deal with stuff alone while at the same time building a network of friends both here in Oklahoma City and online who I could depend on when I'm at my worst. Then I made one of the hardest decisions I've made in a long time ... to break off my engagement. I know I hurt R a lot. I know I'm still hurting him, but I have to do what I have to do to fully recover from everything that I suffer from. I guess it goes back to the old saying "You can't love someone else until you learn to love yourself" that my mom has told me over and over again since I was a teenager (or maybe even before I was a teen). I know that if it's really meant to be, R and I will get back together in the future.
For a while after the breakup, things went pretty well for me. For the most part, I was able to avoid unneeded stress and didn't have any problems with depression or thoughts of self-harm. Twitter has become a very good resource for help when I'm struggling because I can post and update about how I'm feeling and then I'll get tons of supportive replies instantly, and it makes me realize that I'm never truly alone. And of course, this blog continues to be a source of support. I know I have people I can count on when time gets tough for me.
So how did things go to crap lately? In the last month I've made several new friends in Oklahoma City and had already gotten quite a bit closer with some of my coworkers since that night in December. Making new friends should be a good thing, right? Well, not always.
In the last month and a half, I've met three Oklahoma City men online. All of whom are really good guys, but each one is different.
The first one I met through the blog's Twitter account (I have a personal Twitter account also). He once dated a girl with borderline, so he knows the type of struggles I deal with. In his words I "intrigue" him because he's really interested in how I deal with the borderline and maintain a relatively "normal" life. He has a really good concept of how to treat a person with borderline. Whenever I say that I'm struggling with something, he'll gently offer to listen if I need to talk. He understands he can't push me to talk if I don't feel like it. He lets me know he's there if I need him. He's now on both Twitter accounts and on both my personal Facebook and Myspace friends lists, so he always knows how I'm doing. He is a journalist, so having that networking connection is nice, plus he also intrigues me for reasons I won't get into right now. He's becoming quite a good friend.
The third one I met was also through Twitter. First he added the blog's account, but we never had any communication through it. He's also in the communications field, so I did want to make the networking connection, so I added to my personal Twitter account. I'm not 100% positive that he's made the mental connection between the blog's Twitter and the personal one because it's never came up, but he too is very gentle when I say I'm having an issue with something. We've never talked specifically about my mental health, so I don't know if I "intrigue" him or if he's just an understanding guy. (BTW he's married, so I know he's not just out for a hookup). He also makes it clear that he's there if I need someone to talk to, so I know I can reach out to him if I need to.
Now, the second man I met is the biggy. One day last month I was playing around on Tumblr and found the blog of someone I knew was from Oklahoma City. There were photos of two really cute kids and a super adorable puppy. I honestly thought it was probably a woman's blog because most men I know don't post pictures of babies and puppies. I left a comment about the puppy, and somehow that bloomed into a friendship. I gave him the blog's yahoo messenger screenname and we started talking on there. To this day, I'm not sure why I gave him the blog's account instead of a personal one. Anyways, he used the yahoo email address to find the blog's Twitter account and then found the blog. After a few days, I added him to the personal Twitter account and then we became friends on Facebook.
This guy and I have a ton of stuff in common, right down to the divorces. My divorce became final at the end of January, and his divorce was February. I instantly felt like I could talk to him about all sorts of things, so I opened up to him a lot from the beginning. But a problem comes in because he doesn't know how to deal with someone who has a mental illness. He has no concept of what I go through every day. He just doesn't understand it. Even going through a divorce with two young children, he's a hundred times more stable than I feel most days.
There's been a bunch of times when he knew something was bothering me, but I wasn't wanting to talk about it. He always pushes and pushes and pushes me to talk about everything. I keep telling him that I'm not the type of person who feels better after talking about something. Talking about painful stuff only causes me more pain because I have to dredge up all my issues at once. That's why I struggle so much in therapy, but at least when I'm talking to my counselor, she's been trained how to deal with mental illness so she knows how to handle things. He has no training so he doesn't know what to do.
Monday I was having the worst desire for self-harm than I've had since that night in December. I told him that I was wanting to cut, and his reaction was "That's so stupid." Saying that is one of the worst possible things to say in a situation like that. You can't tell someone that their coping strategy is "stupid." I know it's not a healthy way to deal with my problems, but it's the way I have always done it, so to me it's normal. He can't understand it. To make things even worse, about an hour after he said it was stupid, he said it again. It made me start crying, and I couldn't stop crying. I had to go to work crying. But at least he didn't tell me to "just get over it" like some people do.
I'm trying really hard to not be mad at him, and it's not easy. It's not his fault that he's never dealt with anyone like me before. It's not his fault that he doesn't know what to do or not do. I have to be just as understanding with him as (if not more than) he is with me. I really feel like if I can teach him how to handle being around someone with a mental illness, then I will have made a small difference in the world. Maybe I can help him help someone else in the future if he ever meets another person like me again.
I'm going to stop this post there. I could write more, but it's about 3 a.m. and I really need to go to bed. I am very proud of myself though for finally getting that all out and onto the computer screen.
