The thing is, my family didn’t tell me at the time, and I honestly feel like given how things played out, I’m glad they didn’t. The alternative is the person who told me they were together. I was at a camping event. We idly ambled down the hill, and someone asked, “Oh, is he coming to this weekend?” and the person next to me said, “Well, ***** is sick so I suppose not.” I got a cold feeling in my stomach, the culmination of a thousand fucking hints and shit I called them on, and I looked at her and blinked and said, “Why would that matter?”

She got this unmistakable look, a look I know so well I could identify it on anyone’s face. It’s a semi-smile where they know the punchline of the joke. It’s a hint of a laugh forming in their belly while they try so hard to look like they’re sympathetic.

It’s being a concern troll. Someone who is your friend and they’re just so concerned for you that they can’t fucking wait to be the one to break bad news to you. They see the cast list for the play you both tried out for, and they come to tell you with that half-smile that you get to be someone’s maiden aunt. Or you get to play a guy! Oh, her? She got the lead. But she’s so excited for you. So you can’t be mad.

These are the kind of people who have people you hate on their Facebook or G+ or Livejournal or whatever, just so that they can run to you and report all the nasty shit they’re saying about you. They act like they’re just friends with them still to support you, to watch out for you. They’re there for you. They’re SUFFERING through all this horrible drama and have to put up with this odious person just to be there for you.

Except they’re not. They’re Concern Trolls.

A concern troll doesn’t love you, like you, or even really give a shit about you. They care about managing you. They want to be the one to comfort you when you freak out – to earn cred with you, or so that they get to take all the things you say and go back to the other person. They run to you after someone puts a nasty forum post up about you so that they can turn around and maximize their social currency by being in the know about your reaction.

I can’t speak for what the best way to do anything is, but this is what I feel.

If someone’s a concern troll – if they’re haunting your blog telling you shit about another blogger, if they’re using terms like, “some people are saying” or specifically only telling you about shit someone you already hate says – ignore that person. Cut them loose.

A person who cares about you won’t come running to tell you nasty things other people are saying. There’s no altruistic reason to silently observe someone trashing your friend, remain quiet, and run to tell them – only drama.

Avoid the concern trolls. They’re only there to exploit your hurt feelings.

A year later, I very gently got back in touch with him and made overtures to be friends again. One thing led to another over a month and eventually we were dating. We had a decent fall together, and as winter drew on he began to act strangely. Despite being right there with me, he would withdraw and become nearly catatonic and unresponsive. His responses were monosyllabic and he seemed disinterested. After the first two times I started just letting it go because all attempts to talk to him about it failed and were met with shrugs.

Eventually he admitted he’s been depressed, but it’s no big deal. I spotted a scar on the inside of his wrist, and I put two and two together. It’s very old, but apparently some years ago he attempted suicide. I pushed gently to get him help. He finally agreed to see a doctor, but not a therapist, because he “couldn’t talk about it.” I told him that the talking half is vital with the meds, because they open Pandora’s proverbial box. He didn’t believe me and said I was pushing too hard, that medication should be “enough.”

Time passes. The doctor put him on Celexa. First week in, and he was a different person. I sleep during the day because of night time sleep issues, and apparently he (like many others) decided that this means my sleep time isn’t really all that important. Every day for about two weeks there were texts and messages about how he was falling apart at work, how the world felt dark and everything was horrible, how he couldn’t get through the day. It got very, very difficult to handle. His perspective narrowed to the point where I certainly felt like he was unable to see past the end of his nose. He would say things like, “But I’m stressed so something HAS to be wrong LET ME CALL YOU.”

This culminated on Christmas Day, when he turned suddenly moody and withdrawn at midnight when I wouldn’t go to bed with him, and left my house in very expressive despair, waving off taking one of his Christmas presents with him. I would call it melodramatic, but I understand his perspective was skewed. I get that.

I came to realize gradually that I had become his therapist rather than his girlfriend, and again, I pushed him to go see a therapist. He resisted and resisted. Said he wasn’t ready, he couldn’t, he couldn’t talk to anyone about it. I fought with myself and eventually lost my ability to cope. On the one hand, it was unethical for me as a psych student to let him use me for therapy, because I wasn’t qualified. On the other, it was wrong of him to ask his girlfriend to be a therapist, because therapists get paid, and are paid to be on call.

He saw how stressed I was and that I was pulling away, and pushed for “when can I see you again” type things. I gently said that I wanted to wait and see him set with meds and therapist before we hung out, or at least establish some sort of plan for how to deal with it if he went all depressive again.

A few days later, he railed at me over text communication that I was refusing to see him until he got better. Things got tetchy. This was the second time that he had ignored my request for a coping strategy and instead said that I was just refusing something. He had also said I “refused” to meet his family, when I had said repeatedly that I just wanted to meet them separately and out at a restaurant or something – I’d even treat. I just didn’t want to go over and meet all his sisters and his mother at once. Especially not for a holiday.

After all of that mess, it came to a head with one conversation. To make a long story short, he got very petulant and pissy because I didn’t reply to an instant messenger conversation fast enough and with the answer he wanted. He went off to sulk in what I felt was a childish way. I ignored him for two days. Then I broke it off.

I realized that it’s like chemo. Recovery to a place of balance with mental illness is like chemo, because you’re going along with this horrible thing inside you. They pump you full of toxic drugs that give you all kinds of side effects. You get fat, or you lose your hair, or you pick it out of your scalp because something has given you a neurotic condition. You utterly change from this person with maladaptive coping to someone who utterly falls apart before they start to cope again from square one.

I couldn’t be there for his falling apart, because I just barely got through my own alive. I feel bad about that, and I’m sorry for it. I wanted to be. I wanted to support him and to offer him my help, but he wasn’t letting me take a role that was healthy for me. The thing is, I have to respect my own limits, and my ability to say when.

I spent many years dating the wrong person for too long, far after I should’ve known it was over. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t live that way. I have to stick to those boundaries I set.

My parents, predictably, didn’t put a bent nickel away for my education, so I couldn’t go to school until I was twenty-four. Then I had crisis after crisis, until really the person most frustrated with my drama was me. I was undiagnosed Bipolar II, with complex PTSD. For those not in the loop, CPTSD is where the ingrained reactions were put in place at a young age and reinforced so much that it’s not going away easily. This differentiates from the model of “single traumatic event” PTSD and long term abuse/patterns of family behavior.

Going back to school is good; it’s given me a feeling of accomplishment and I feel like I’m achieving, which is nice. I’m going to school at night, at a community college, where 80% of my classmates are over 30, and everyone is there because they desperately want to improve their lives. It’s a very different ballgame from the state college I went to when I started this blog, where entitled kids who didn’t do well enough to get into a big name university went to wear slouchy pants and Uggs and drink where their parents couldn’t see them.

Ironically, I’m taking an abnormal psych class. We’re required to offer anecdotes, frequently, and I’ve developed a case study on myself where I talk about this other girl who has all these problems. It’s oddly therapeutic.

I’m back on medication. I made the decision because my stress and sleep issues were going to be a problem and I really needed to put them on a leash. I’ve spent the last few years learning how to be hypervigilant of my behavior, how to operate with no medication, how to keep working through it. I’ve learned to pathologize myself to a reasonable degree, to look at something and say, “That’s my tendency towards grandiosity cropping up.” Or, “My anger is not proportional to this situation.” But with school, which is a hotbed of conflicting personalities, and a schedule that is both irregular and somewhat trying, I needed to let go of my hypervigilance and ask the Lithium to take over for a while.

I’m not happy about being on it; it makes me gain weight, and many other annoying side effects. But it is what it is. I need my degree more than I need to be thin.

Life goes on, and I need to catch up. So I put my faith in myself, my family, and my need to succeed. I listen to music that gives me hope and I try not to listen to the parts in myself that say I will fail.

About a month ago I realized that I’m not upset that she stole my boyfriend, or whatever cliché one uses for that situation. I’m not upset that he left me for her.

I’m upset that I lost my best friend and she chose a man over me.

Anti-psychotics (and many other mental health medications) cause serious and permanent side effects that seriously inhibit your ability to function in society.

No one told me that when I was on Aripiprizole (Abilify) or when I was on Lithium, or Saphris (asenapine), Risperidone, etc, all had serious side effects. Here is the list of side effects I have had while on medications:

Tardive dyskinesia (rocking or rhythmic movement), severe tremors, seizures, orthostatic syncope, unusual inappropriate urges, lack of coordination, dizzy spells, insomnia, night terrors, sleep paralysis, hyperprolactinaemia (spontaneous lactation and loss of menstruation), frequent urination, epigastric pyrosis (heartburn severe enough to cause scarring), restless leg syndrome, digestive difficulties, weight gain, blurred vision.

That’s not even a complete list.

Now, before you say, “That’s a lot of side effects, aren’t those supposed to be rare?” Go look up the rates. Seriously, go look up the percentage of people who gain weight on anti-psychotics or anti-depressive meds. Look up the percentage of people on Saphris who get orthostatic syncope. Look up how many get tardive dyskinesia.

They’re not side effects in the traditional sense of, “may cause some heart problems in people over 50 who smoke and have six strokes in their history”. Please understand that Amoxicillin has a rare (1.2%) chance to cause rash or vomiting, whereas Haldol at a high dosage has a nearly 15% rate of causing tardive dyskinesia.

This is the part that bothers me. It’s permanent. No one told me that. I still rock a little now and then, two years after going off my meds.

Anti-psychotics are not medicine. They are poison that silence the mad and make them apathetic enough that they won’t care that they now actually “look” crazy. The rocking side to side that happens in every movie narrative about a crazy person? Yeah. That’s caused by medication, not madness.

If you’re really lucky, you retain enough of your care for your self and your person through your illness that you’re able to fight to get off the drugs that are quite literally destroying your brain. Well advised or not, I no longer take pharmaceuticals for my mental health. I have a daily regimen of herbals and foods I eat instead. Is it ideal? No.

But taking that shit is madness.

I spent some time watching a show with an adoptive child storyline in it. She dropped a plate and then ran away and hid, flinching under a table, and her two new parents were shocked and reassured her that she wouldn’t be punished for an accident.

My second month here, I went to cut something on a cutting board. It was bowed and flexed, from old water damage, and I thought it would just bend with me because it looked pretty well used. Instead it snapped clean in half just from the pressure of my hand on it (it was bowing upward.) I immediately called one of my new roommates and apologized in a panic, assuring her that I’d buy a replacement as soon as I had money to, and I was really sorry. She was confused, said it was no big deal, and those cutting boards were both old and a bit warped and annoying.

I realized that I wasn’t so different from the girl with the plate. I still flinch a lot.

My relationship with my family is very complicated. I don’t hate them, nor do I feel they’re necessarily bad for me all the time. I do feel they were bad for me growing up for a host of reasons. One of the foremost is that I didn’t know what unconditional love was like before I moved here.

I spent a lot of time defending my family and being told by everyone how great they were. What I didn’t realize was how little of that was really true at all. Love from my mother was and always has been conditional. I’ve based a lot of my mental health until my move on having her in my “corner” so to speak. I’ve come to realize she never really was, and how she talks about me and treats me in public sets me back. I’ve realized that there’s always been a threat of punishment, an assurance that I would suffer if I screwed up.

I can tell because I just keep flinching.

The thing is, it’s not random strangers or friends. It’s always the same people. My uncle-by-marriage, my stepfather, and once upon a time, my mother’s ex-boyfriend. Yeah. The one who molested me. That’s a great association.

So now and then, when I’m at Thanksgiving or Christmas and it comes up, I want to reply, “What hickey?” a few times. Then I want to say,

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about because I don’t have a hickey. I have a birthmark which you have been inappropriately teasing me about all my life. Let me tell you a few things about that, Dad. First off, you know who else teased me about it, poked fun at me for it, and never let up about it? Yeah. Him, the guy who molested me when I was eleven. And you know what has always been true for me, Dad? When you look at me and joke and pick on me for having a hickey on my neck that has never been a hickey and will never be a hickey, all I can remember is being eleven years old.

I remember being eleven, and having that scum ex of my mother’s in my room. I remember him teasing me about it in public, and then in private I remember him telling me that it looked like I let boys suck my neck. I lay there scared and terrified thinking, ‘My dad says the same thing.’ And when he went on to tell me it proved I wanted it, it was really hard not to think my dad was telling me that too. It was one among many many thoughts that went through my fucked up little head as he was jerking off onto my thigh, Dad. All the same, I’d really appreciate it if you’d stop fucking referencing sexual acts at family gatherings for the sake of humiliating me and making me feel like either a whore, or a prude.

Because, Dad, you shouldn’t have a goddamn thing to say about if I’m a whore or a prude. And I’d like it if you’d stop fucking crossing that line.”

When I sew, I can’t follow patterns. They’re right there, and easy to follow, in theory, but I can’t. I can’t see how they go together. Someone shows me, and I understand, and the pattern becomes “safe”. When I knit, I have to visualize how every step will go, or I won’t even try to follow a pattern. I’ll just make up my own.

The thing that none of those teachers or tutors ever got was that i was reading the goddamned directions. They just didn’t make sense. A paragraph of directions flew into my head and I barely picked out a few words. Sometimes, if they put carriage returns between each step, I could figure out what they wanted. But more often than not, I just didn’t think the same way they did. If I couldn’t understand the application, the purpose, I had no way of fulfilling the task. Made worse when the purpose was just to waste my fucking time and make me repeat memorized facts.

Sometimes I would read directions, and they would say, “Find the square of the hypotenuse.” If I was very lucky and had paid attention, I could do that. But the moment they said, “You have a triangular yard, and you know that it is 12 by 18 feet, but you have no idea what the third measurement is…” I wouldn’t know what equation to plug in there. It got worse in Statistics, which I passed with a D, because there were entire problems where not only did you have to solve them using 3 pages of formulaic bullshit, but you had to determine which totally fucking obnoxious three page formula to use – and it was subjective. Which formula is best to determine how many students in an exam will do better than a percentile of students from another school? Answer: You are over thinking this please stop torturing your students.

I am not a stupid person. I can knit, sew, make lovely photocollages, I’ve been published three times, and I have led choir sections. I have all sorts of talents. What I can’t do is get from someone else’s bullshit reasoning example to what problem they want me to solve.

I’ve thought a lot about what love means, and what I’ve concluded is that love isn’t the happy times. Infatuation and giddy Cloud 9 love affairs are easy. The giving, adoring feeling when you’d walk through fire for a person and want nothing more than to spend every moment with them is easy.

The moments of truth are in the rough times. Love isn’t two weeks of clingy bliss. It’s the helplessness of sitting outside someone’s room as they lie in bed miserable with depression and don’t want to see you. It’s the raw terrible feeling after a knock down drag out argument and whether you can make it back from that.

Loving someone is easy. Staying when they need you or being able to tell them you need them is hard.

I’ve come to the realization that it’s not that I’m unlovable, or undesirable. It’s that I’m complicated, and I’m going to need a very special person to love forever. I’m going to need someone with a well of patience that is near bottomless. I’m going to need someone with a depth of compassion, a thick skin, an ability to take care of themselves and their needs without putting pressures on me, and I’m going to need someone who can catch me if I fall and tolerate being vulnerable enough to be caught if they fall.

This is good. I’ve found some guidelines. I know what won’t work. It’s a start. When I want to date again, at least I have some ideas of what will work.

When I was sixteen, I screamed like that. I don’t remember all of the circumstances. I remember it was innocuous. I remember that the reasons I had for screaming should never have pushed me to that. I remember that something that didn’t really matter that much to me triggered some deep, abiding, primal cry in me that went on for hours until I was vomiting, and my mother almost brought me to the hospital with a nervous breakdown. In retrospect, I wish she had. I might’ve gotten help ten years sooner.

I remember a few years ago, we talked about that night, and my screaming, and my mother told me the first time she heard that scream.

When I was three, she remarried. I had never met my father, and it had been she and I and my grandparents, as long as I could remember. Then we moved in with Stepfather1, and he became “daddy” by force of will. If I didn’t call him dad, daddy, or father, I was disrespecting him. After a few months, he convinced my mother that she was far too soft with me and let me, “get away with murder”. Never minding the fact that I most definitely was the most well behaved child in many of our social circles. My mother wielded disappointment, not a belt. My “father” believed to spare the rod was to spoil the child.

Often, over some issue that I had transgressed, or some problem I had caused, he would corner me. He would confront me and demand I apologize. Then he would grab me and whip me with his wide leather belt as I tried to run away, walking me in a circle and dragging my arm. Sometimes I ran too much, and he would swing me into the arm of the couch and bend me over it to beat my ass with the belt, yelling that I was being disobedient again because I was trying to run away. I would cry and wail and beg my mother to come get me, help me, stop him. He had convinced her that any attempt at intervention, or even being where I could see her, would totally undermine his authority with his new daughter and forever mar our relationship as a family.

But, see, that’s not when she heard the scream.

The problem was that eventually, after letting him beat me for two years, she and he finally had a falling out and she finally found justification to leave him, because him beating her daughter wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough that he put me down constantly, because I think at that point she was just glad she wasn’t the target. I was a necessary target, so she could be a good wife and mother for a while. She could dry my tears and be the good mother who soothed me after, and his wrath was always mine first.

When he left, though, suddenly she was stuck with a child who had become used to being beaten, and I would act out, and dart away when she tried to correct me even gently. I was no longer impressed by her disappointment because I had been beaten instead, and disappointment was nothing in the face of a two inch leather strap whaling on my ass twenty or thirty times. I no longer looked to her with the gaze of, “Oh no, did I do wrong?” Instead, if I suspected I had done wrong, I ran away, which made her angry – where was her tractable daughter? So she would spank me.

It didn’t matter that she never beat me. It didn’t matter that she didn’t beat me with a leather belt until my ass was so bruised it stayed that way for five days. No, all that mattered was that my one bastion, my savior, the one person I could run to after the beating, was now the one administering a wallop, no matter how much more gentle.

That was when she first heard the scream. She would paddle me and flinch and cry as I screamed for her over and over again, because I had no one at all else left to scream for. My horrible dying cat scream, crying mommy until it was clear I had no idea what I was even crying for anymore.

My dying cat scream has never left me. And on some mornings, when I am trying to sleep after dawn (because I cannot sleep at night) when I cannot sleep and something snaps deep in my head, I scream.