After my post yesterday, I got to thinking. Because in that post I said that Ex-Fiance and I couldn't make things work while I was still being ruled by the mental illnesses, and I realized that makes it sounds like it's all on me. Like it's just, Jessica is fucked up, Jessica needs to get better, blah blah blah.
But that's not really it. Sure that's part of it, but there's more to it, and I wanted to clarify, I guess.
A)Yes, from the beginning of our relationship, I was too mentally ill to be in a relationship. As the mental illness got worse (because for like 2 months after I met Ex-Fiance I was so giddy about it that my symptoms were ignoreable), I stopped being able to really relate to Ex-Fiance appropriately. I felt so much anxiety about him--this constant worry that he'd leave me, that he wasn't happy with me, that he wanted to be with his ex, and on and on and on. And while sometimes those feelings were manageable and he was able to reassure me, there were a lot of breakdowns where I'd totally lose it. And if I was breaking down Ex-Fiance could not win. He tried and tried to make me happy and assuage me during the breakdowns and I just . . . wouldn't let him win. Whatever he did, no matter how sweet or nice it was, I shot him down. I was horrible.
B)All those breakdowns were a drain on our relationship, and that was back when Ex-Fiancewas working part time as a sub in a different city so he had a lot of time to call or text me, and he visited whenever he could. When Ex-Fiance started teaching and had a full time, important job to focus on, my head took a bit of a hit (because I was selfish). I tried to be supportive of him but it was hard. And then when his job ended up being hellishly stressful, he started to detach, and then I broke down even more. So basically we were both unhappy and both not in a good place to support one another.
C)As a result, things got tense and uncomfortable between us. We were almost afraid to be around one another, it seemed like--I think because we were both worried about the other's mood but didn't really know what to do to help each other.
D)Communication between us became non-existent. So we couldn't do very basic things like budgeting. Or talk about what was wrong and figure out how to fix it.
E)Even once I was back on medication, we couldn't get back to what we'd had or wanted to have. I think there was just a lot of bad stuff blocking the good, if that makes sense. It got to a point that all we could see in each other and in our relationship were negatives.
Anyway, so that's that. I still hope (and think) that we'll be able to work things out. And even though this is hard it's nice to be able to figure these things out, to kind of look back and be like, oh, that's something that went wrong that we needed to fix. There are still more things on my part that I need to figure out that are all mental illness related (like why I thought such weird things about Ex-Fiance and whatever). That'll come with time, though.
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