The Cockroaches Followed Us Honey

The blog below was written in early 2018. I removed it for many reasons that weren't mine, and have since decided to republish it in order to regain my sense of self in an attempt to heal past trauma. The passages highlighted in red are points of view I no longer hold and perhaps I will elaborate on that in a future blog, but I have grown from those places and it is no longer applicable to my reality.

I decided to leave it in because deleting it somehow felt dishonest. I can't move past things if I hide from them.

Let me start out by stating, simply, that I am not delusional.

I am fully aware of the difficulty of my personality, my crass level usually cranked up to ten, my emotionality turning me to a ball of mush that can’t manage a simple sentence. I know, I know; I’m anxious, needy, wound tight, easily angered, irritated beyond reason… I yell sometimes, I scream, I cry… I isolate, and wallow… I’ve even been known to stay indoors for weeks at a time because the sound of a car pulling into the driveway has made me want to draw the shades. All this has manifested in the past two to three years, but it’s a definitive part of me.

Like I said, I get it. I’m not a million little problems, I am one big mess, and the people who have tried haven’t been able to fix me. That includes myself by the way.

In my last post I mentioned I would have explained my life before the anxiety problems tossed me about like a rag doll, but ‘it would only hurt people, and I’m not in the business of hurting people.”

I still remain firmly in the space of not being the type to intentionally hurt people, but here’s the reality: I have to speak my truth, put it out in the universe, instead of letting it eat me up. Allowing it to chew at the insides of my muscles, making me weaker and weaker until I fall apart again and lose everything I’ve managed to gather in my years on earth. The things I’ve held on to, the people that matter to me. I’ll lose them if I keep quiet any longer, if I hide that part of my life like a dirty secret because it MIGHT make others uncomfortable.

No offense to any of those that might fall into the above category, but I don’t give a FUCK about your comfort anymore. I want my own back.

You start by starting… and I can do this, I can talk about this. I can… so yah… I’ll start wherever the beginning feels natural. Which isn’t the beginning at all, but why bore myself and others with the moments that aren’t real moments? Just little warnings, signs of what was to come, my 24 year old self completely unprepared for what life had in store. You know… I think that’s the last time I remember feeling a true kind of happiness. Before I ever said yes to the beautifully ornate ring held between his fingers.

So, time to start. And I suppose the most natural place to do that is with the apartment. My husband and I have lived in places that leave a lot to be desired. Costly, too many flights of stairs, no parking… mediocre shit like that. But as far as the worst of the worst (which we dealt with for years, horrible apartments) it started with Summer Street. The home where literal and imagined bugs were coming out of the walls. The cockroaches had tiny little translucent bodies and long antennas and scattered at the bare bulb light hanging from our kitchen ceiling. The imagined bugs belonged in our walls and in my husband’s mind, listening to his every word and thought, taking notes. He started believing, truly believing, that he was being targeted by not only people in our small town, but certain television producers due to the content of shows I enjoyed watching. Somehow, he believed these Hollywood hot shots gave a shit about finding out his deepest darkest feelings and words, his whole life, and airing it for the entertainment of millions to his chagrin. He started getting angry at small things I did, such as post on facebook about a restaurant we went to, or a movie we were going to see. Speaking too loudly in our apartment hallway. Telling anyone, whether he knew them or not, even the smallest, most inconsequential detail of his life. If I mentioned these things in the presence of someone else, or even just with the two of us, he’d get angry. Angry to the point of ignoring me the rest of the evening while we shared a pretty much one room apartment. Being angry and unwilling to solve anything when you live in close quarters like this isn’t an option, it’s a sentence. I had been given a sentence without even being aware of what in the holy hell was going on. I didn’t know what to do, so I got angry, so I yelled, I acted like an asshole to combat his innate assholeishness (I know, it’s not a word).

I got a new job, maybe me making more money would appease him? Perhaps the idea of me working in an office where I could possibly grow and make something of myself would be good enough to ease his mind? Quell his thoughts, keep him calm, rescue him in some small way. Some time into that new job, when I realized entirely what it was doing to me, I found that not only had I failed to rescue him at all, I’d done something deeply detrimental to myself. Id made a decision I wasn’t comfortable with simply to try and fix our problems, do what I could to fix him, and it didn’t amount to shit. I thought, maybe a new apartment?

Maybe a new home, the bugs in the walls wouldn’t follow us, people would leave him alone so we might finally have peace.

We never found it, as a matter of fact, all this place did was make it worse.

Basement apartment, demanding heat bills, moisture in the air you could never get rid of… but worst of all, the voices lived there along with those bugs that had found a permanent home with us. The voices that started to come from the recesses of his mind. Well, perhaps they’d been there all along, but now they had names. They had goals, their main one being slowly destroying the man I loved. Telling him he was shit, convincing him his friends had ulterior motives, saying people would be better off without him, that all the bad things he’d done in his life would never be forgiven. This eventually developed in those feelings projecting outward, and it wasn't himself who was the enemy. It was everyone and everything else.

Time passed, things happened; he wanted to board up the windows and went as far as asking our landlord if he could, he heard machine guns in the walls, I would wake with the feeling of someone watching me and he’d be right there with his ear pressed against the wall asking me if I ‘heard it too’, he pushed friends of ours away and I’d be left explaining why he was never at parties or wanted guests. I didn’t know what was happening to him, all I knew is that it was destroying us like a cancer. And no matter what I did, even though I went to the point of humoring some of his delusions with the intent of trying to make him eventually see reason, nothing was working. Nothing was good enough. I could not figure this out and I sure as fuck couldn’t understand it if he didn’t understand it himself. So the day came.

I had gone to a divorce lawyer, figured out where to print out the paperwork, and I was doing this quietly, as quietly as anyone has ever done anything they are ashamed of. I didn’t believe I could help and so I was going to run away. This, however, was after 6 years of this illness consuming everything around me. I was overwhelmed, empty, afraid of my husband. I was done. I was going to tell him, and start the process of getting away so I could figure myself out after what had been done to me during the entirety of my twenties. I needed to take care of myself right?

Then he stopped going to work, three days in a row without calling. I came home on my lunch break that day to find our apartment cold, and completely blacked out. I thought he was gone somewhere, despite his car being in the driveway, but no. He was there. I turned the lights on and saw his eyes adjust over in the corner of the living room, where he’d been sitting and staring at nothing for who knows how long… I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t come home then. I opened the shades, crying, turning on each light with the kind of fury you save for boxing class. I cursed myself more and more with each passing moment, because I’d been about to give up, I was about to toss him to the side because I believed I couldn’t handle what he was going through.

Bipolar was going to win because I wasn’t strong enough to save him. He was down, he was lost, and I was going to just give up on him. Selfish fucking move. I’m not capable of that.

I shook him to his feet, I told him to get help. I threatened to call his job, his parents, his grandmother, and the hospital to come get him, if he didn’t take the initiative and go there himself to check in. He didn’t believe me until I pulled my phone out and dialed his work number… and then he gave in to me. His eyes dropped, and he suddenly looked so tired he could cry, succumbing finally to the constant battering ram to his soul and mind. He finally said, “ok” and checked himself in to the psych ward. It wasn’t his only visit during our marriage, just his first. He’s not healed, he’s just approaching his illness with a different attitude.

This is the attitude that has left me by the side of the road. The road where the fucking crash called our marriage went up in flames. The kind of accident you just stand back and watch because the people inside the car are gone and you know it, and why get close? You going to blow yourself up too? Bottom line is, I get it. I understand now how little of a chance we stood against this problem. Parts of me though, the loneliest parts, wish it had been me.

I wish I had said enough, instead of him giving up on me because of grief. He distanced himself slowly and carefully and then pulled the plug. Why didn’t I do that? Why do I have to always be so FUCKING GUILTY? WHY DO I ALWAYS HAVE TO FIX THE PROBLEM? Why? Why can’t I just look at myself in the mirror and see the bags under my eyes and the lines that have formed over the years and say ‘enough is enough’? Why did I allow that selfish mother fucker to beat me to it??

Never going to know the answer to that one so I might as well be proud of my resolve. No one else will ever get that part of me. It’s all mine now. And I’m slowly finding my way back to what I wanted at the beginning of this post. My comfort. My comfort is mine to dish out and keep as I see fit. I will put my energy where it is useful and never again be lured in by the idea of lifelong partnership because, for ME personally, it’s a lie. It’s a joke. It’s bullshit.

I hope he gets better. I always hope he’s okay. Always. I may be easily fooled by a loving smile, but at least I’m not a SELFISH fool.