THE POST I DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE

There’s a subject that’s been mulling around in my head for some time now. It’s not an easy one to write about by any means. It’s a touchy subject, a private subject, and it’s important.

My marriage.

I haven’t written it because I never know how to get the words out. Call it respect, call it privacy, call it whatever the hell you want to call it; the words get stuck in my head and won’t come out no matter how hard I try to rattle them out.

Loving someone with a mental illness when you have a mental illness is all kinds of hard. Their mood and actions effect your mood, and vice versa. It is a struggle of momentum volumes, and sometimes…it damn right feels impossible to carry on with them, but the thought of not being with them is even worse. It’s almost…suffocating.

How do you help someone who won’t see or admit that they need help? How do you help them when they turn the tables on you every time you try to talk to them? You have a mental illness too, you need help too. You don’t handle stressful situations well either. It’s the pot calling the kettle black, over and over again seven ways through yesterday.

On the other hand…you have someone who gets it. They fucking get it without you trying to break it down for them. Explaining your thoughts and emotions is easier because they just get fucking get it. Unless they’re having a rough go, then…well, you’re both left stewing about how hard it is until someone decides to do something about it to rectify the situation.

Each and every relationship comes with struggles and bad days…days when your communication is shit and your attitude is worse. Days when you’re left wondering why in the fuck you’re struggling so hard…do other people struggle this hard? It doesn’t seem like it, because it never does…but they do. Everyone struggles and relationships are fucking hard. Relationships when you introduce mental illness and a bunch of other health problems are even harder to balance out.

Sometimes, there’s just so much goddamn stress that I don’t know what to do. I feel alone because we’re at odds with one another, or he’s telling me not to stress about it because “he’ll handle it”, but he doesn’t because he doesn’t know how to handle it and his mental illnesses make handling emotions incredibly difficult…especially my emotions.

Literature and society as a whole has me so confused. Like, every great relationship has struggles but not like ours. Things don’t feel so fucking heavy when they’re not going good. Those people can rationally talk it out.

We fight. We rip into each others hearts and souls and claw with sharp nails to draw blood. We’ve been trained to fight dirty, or maybe it’s the depression, the anxiety, or the rage disorder…or maybe it’s the fact that we’re also fucking Geminis.

I keep trying to look at this situation with unbiased eyes. I try to see where he’s coming from, and I won’t lie…it’s fucking hard and I struggle with that. I know what I know, I feel what I feel. I can empathize what he feels, but it doesn’t take away my reaction to it.

I am doing all that I can to try and fix things…to try and elevate stress. I feel broken…twisted and ugly. A voice in my head tells me things shouldn’t be this hard…life shouldn’t be this hard. We should struggle to the degree that we’ve been struggling. They say money can’t buy happiness, but it buys security and that’s close.

This post makes everything seem so dark and horrible, and that’s really not it. The amount of love I have for this man is unexplainable. The passion I feel for him keeps me pushing through all this fucking sludge that life throws our way.

But it’s hard, and some days are harder than ever and sometimes my heart is bruised and sometimes I just want things to be easy and calm.

But neither one of us is easy or calm, and that’s what makes it so hard. We are both reactive and damaged.

We are both living — and loving — with mental illness.

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