A Hard Story To Tell

Time makes me lazy. The more time I have, the less likely I am to do something. The more time that’s passed, the less likely I am to deal with what happened. Last February I went into the hospital with a mental breakdown. I’ve been trying to find ways to talk about what happened February of 2017 and it seems to me that there is no good place to start. There is no solid beginning to this story so I will start with the moment that was the worst mental health moment of my life. I will start with one moment at a time until my story has been told. This isn’t the beginning of my story, but rather it’s where I’m going to start. This story needs to be told, even though it’s a hard story to tell. So here we go…

I had been convinced, for a long time, that Andy didn’t love me. I knew, or thought I knew, that he was pretending to love me all of the time. I believed he thought mostly about how difficult I am, how unlovable I am. I thought he was plotting ways to leave me. What’s more is that this triggered the most intense feelings of anxiety over abandonment. To cope with the anxiety, I simply got angry. Not just angry but furious. Mostly at Andy. I could hardly tolerate living in my own body, my own brain. I had never felt the thundering tide of rage come over me the way I felt it then.

The week before I went into the hospital, Andy had gone on a trip for work. I started to get more anxious and more hateful toward him. I was thinking an awful lot about how I wished I were dead. I cut myself. I knew I was a mess, but I couldn’t stop it all. I felt like I was on one of those pirate ship rides that takes you back and forth, front to back until you feel like you’re going to flip over upside down and plunge to your death. I couldn’t get off the damn ride. I was in a complete rage when finally, I packed, put my dog in the car, began driving, and called my friend J. Through sobbing breaths, I told her unabashedly everything I had been thinking and fearing. It says a lot about the kind of person she is that she never once judged me even though she’d never seen me like this before nor, I am guessing, had she’d ever seen anyone else like this before. In between talking through sobs, I was driving- or trying to. It was reckless and stupid for me to be behind the wheel of that car that evening, but there I was. J may have been the only person who could have handled me, and she did perfectly. She talked me into pulling over and breathing. She then talked me into driving back home, saying that she would pack her things, find someone to take care of her horses, and drive down to be with me. We were both scared that I’d hurt myself. I was not safe, but with J on the way, I felt like I could hold on until she got there.