(Soundtrack to this post: https://soundcloud.com/afnandurrani/drifting-by-on-and-on)
In intimate relationships, it has taken me too much time to determine when it’s time to leave. For one reason or another, I stick around even when it’s bad. “It might not be pleasant”, I say, “but it also isn’t unbearable.” Like any major change we make in our lives, sometimes it takes letting the discomfort grow…until the dull ache becomes a piercing jab, poking holes at you until you have to tend to your ever-growing wound.
It could be a feeling of why is this happening…again? Or, why does this relationship make me feel so…shitty? It might be questioning: is there something better out there? Is there “more”? What is that “more”?
These questions creeped their way into the back of my mind as the relationship I was in slowly fell apart. I found myself in increasingly disbelieving moments that finally tipped me over the edge. I would keep replaying what happened in a detached manner –in a “meta”, coping kind of way — leaving me with no appropriate response but to almost laugh out loud in my incredulity.
My questions about the relationship escalated. Did I have some sort of a responsibility to stay with somebody else? If I didn’t, would something really bad happen to this person?
I wondered: am I actually helping you, giving you reasons to want to stay alive? How much of what you say to me is true, or are you saying it to manipulate me in a way so that I will come “save” you? Is our codependent relationship contributing more and more to your depression? If I tried to explain this to you, would you even understand? Do I have the courage to try and describe that to someone so fragile, and to someone who doesn’t want to see it?
I felt like I was shouldering someone else’s happiness, reasons to live, and struggles on my shoulders. And even though it may never have seemed that way to anyone from the outside looking in at me…it was crippling. Sometimes I’m not even sure how I did it.
I had to learn that despite my fears of this person self-harming, there was very little more I could do to help.
You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves.
You know what they say about “rock bottom”? I don’t know if this concept of needing to hit “rock bottom” before climbing back up is true for everyone. But it is the most agonizing feeling to watch someone you love fall, one step lower, time and time again. To not know just how far that bottom might be.
It is even more gut-wrenching to see a person’s mental illness ever-so-slowly take over their lives the way it did one of their parents’. When you know how much anguish their parent’s alcoholism has caused, and yet the same pattern of behavior has also slithered its way in.
To have what broke you most as a child start to close in on you, too. To see the pain in your eyes, when deep down you knew what was happening but refused to say it out loud — because maybe acknowledging it made it so much more real and unbearable.
How do I walk away? How could I leave you like that?
Learning how to is so, so hard. But I know it was for the better, despite the uncertainties I felt about my decision. You know what they say about loving someone from afar? That sometimes one of the best ways is to let them go? It was true. From this, I’ve learned to hold on to the deep empathy I have for those who struggle with mental illness and addiction. I, too, shared the ache felt by their lovers, friends, and families.
This was a wake-up call for myself: that I need to break these toxic relationship patterns I’ve fallen into in the past. Because I see now, on one extreme side of a spectrum, what it can take for the dull ache to turn into a festering wound — and what it could do to someone else, too.
