Need to write
I don't want to write, but I need to write. Yes, it's certainly very painful to write about the implosion of my relationship with my boyfriend. The feelings that I am feeling now are so wounded and raw that I'm having trouble focusing on anything else. I need to move forward, but I'm still stuck in the past. I need to move on, but I continue to wish for reconciliation.
I need to write what I feel and what I'm doing to survive this.
I'm just having trouble typing this into the keyboard. Writing has never been such an effort for me as this. I'm struggling. It literally hurts my arms, hands and fingers to type these words. It feels as if there is a 50 pound weight hanging off of my arms and my fingers feel tight and stiff. When I put my hands into my lap, I feel better, when I bring them up to the keyboard, it all comes back.
My best friend, my ex-boyfriend and myself flew to Reno on the advice of a counselor in Raleigh, "Make the split as soon as possible. Make it a clean break, move your things out of the house." I was so conflicted, I wanted to get all of this over with, and I never wanted it to end because once it did, I knew it'd be forever over for him. After arriving in Reno Wednesday evening, much of the next three days were a blur. I don't remember much, but I do remember some key things. On Wednesday night we went to bed together, and slept together. He held me for a while as I cried, feeling the hair on his chest and smelling him was so calming. I laid on top of him as we used to do when we felt especially close, and I drifted off to sleep quickly. It was the first time I've been able to fall asleep fast in the past four months.
On Thursday we all went to see my doctor, and she told my ex-boyfriend to make a decision, to stop confusing me and her. And he did, from that moment on, he turned crueler and crueler. I know that he was hurting inside as much as me, but for him, that's what he needed to do in order to distance himself from me. From there we went to a psychiatric hospital, and it was determined again that I wasn't suicidal and therefor didn't meet criteria for intake. After the nurse had talked with me, then talked with my best friend and ex, she invited them to again take a seat in the waiting room so that she could talk to me privately again. She said that I need to let go, "It's obvious that he has let go of you. His body language and the things that he said show me that he is through with his relationship with you."
I looked at her, and told her how I'm not sure how I could do that, letting go was the last thing that I could accept.
"If you don't let go," she stated, "then you will suffer a long time. He doesn't love you. He appears to not have loved you for a very long time. I don't know why he stayed with you, but whatever it was, it is gone now."
I began to cry again, "I love him so much, I don't know how to do that!"
"If you don't, he will just hurt you more. He appears to be invested in another relationship now." She then went on to talk about how he should have done this or that, but I wasn't listening. I was crying too hard. When I calmed down, she looked at me, gave me a concerned look, and said, "You will have to do this. You have no choice. You come first, not him. Choose to love yourself, more than him. You have to, it has to come from within." And then she led me out to the waiting room with my best friend and ex.
Thursday night we slept apart, and I cried myself to sleep.
The next day, Friday is much a blur. I do remember going to see the psychiatrist. I remember that very vividly. He was an ass, and he didn't listen worth a damn. I remember sitting in the waiting room, watching as people were called upstairs in an old victorian house. His office was in this place, the same place that my ex-boyfriend and I had couples counseling two years before, counseling that ended disasterously. So I was already wary about that. The people called were upstairs and then back downstairs and leaving within approximately 15 min increments. I remember thinking that I hope that these people weren't all seeing the same person I was scheduled to see. I remember my ex mentioned the same thought.
I was then called and I met a middle eastern man named Abdollah Assad who was standing in the stairwell. He introduced himself and turned around, not proffering a hand or displaying any concern as to why I was there to see him. I stopped, and before I went up the stairs with him I said that I wanted to talk with him privately, but because I was having difficulties with my memory, I would also like him to talk with my best friend and ex-boyfriend also, so that he could get the bigger picture of what was happening. He thought a moment, and then asked. "So you think you are a woman?"
"No!" I said, appalled. "I'm gay. I have a boyfriend. We were in a relationship. It is ending now, and I'm having difficulties with that."
Without a beat, he then asked "So you want to be a woman?"
"No! I am a man. I like being a man, but I am losing a relationship with a man. I am gay. Do you understand that?"
I should have turned around and walked down the stairs at that point, canceling the evaluation. But I didn't. I was too fragile to think that far ahead. Instead, he shrugged, turned around and told me to follow him.
So I did. And after being offered a seat and closing the door he said, "This is what we are going to do. I am going to ask you a question. I want you to answer in one sentence. I will then write it down. I do not want you to speak while I am writing. I will then ask another question, and you will do the same thing."
I looked at him, and thought 'oh god, what have I gotten myself into?' But unfortunately I went along. He asked me eight questions and gave me two world puzzles before he diagnosed me. The first question was, "Why are you here?" The second question was, "Are you sure you don't think you are a woman?" Then he asked me to remember three words in order, 'pen, car, and orange'. He then asked me, "What do you think has brought you to this point?" He then asked me to spell world backwards, at which I admit I had trouble. It took me about thirty seconds to figure it out in my head. The fourth question was "Tell me the three words I asked you to remember," at which I did, without difficulty. The fifth question was a multifaceted, "Are you on any prescribed medications and do you use caffeine, smoke, drink alcohol, or use illicit drugs?" to which I told him that I have an inhaler for my asthma which I use very rarely, I drink caffeinated beverages extremely rarely, I've never smoked a thing in my life, I drink approximately an average of one to two drinks [alcohol] total a month, and I have never used illegal drugs (poppers are legal in Nevada, so I didn't mention that). The sixth question, "Do you hear voices, see things that are not there or are you afraid of things or people?" I told him no to all of the above, except the fact that I was afraid of being alone now that my boyfriend had left me for someone else. He pressed, asking if I was paranoid, and I told him no, because I wasn't and I'm not. He then asked the eighth and last question, "Do you have any family history of mental illness?"
To that question, I answered honestly, my mother has disassociative identity disorder and has also been diagnosed as bipolar.
He wrote that down, paused a moment, and then said, "Aha. You are bipolar. It is strongly genetically linked. From what I see of you, you are also bipolar like your mother."
I stared at him for a moment, then I quickly said that my friend and my boyfriend still need to talk to him. He told me dismissively to go get them, and then he'd talk to them. When I came back up the stairs with them, he looked at them and asked who they were. It was as if he had no idea, especially because he didn't write it down. He asked them a few questions, without any introduction of himself. Mostly he was trying to get at whether or not I was having paranoid episodes or exhibiting paranoid delusions. Both my best friend and ex said that I wasn't exhibiting such behavior, and as Dr. Assad asked further questions, it was clear that they were more and more uncomfortable, just as I was. He told them that I was bipolar, and then began to offer types of medication for the sleep issues, the anxiety, and then for mood stabilization.
At that point I said, "Look, you've only asked about the past two weeks in terms of what is going on. I should add the context of my childhood..."
He interrupted me, "If you want to talk about your childhood, you should talk to a therapist. I am a doctor, not a therapist, and I don't see how that would be important now." I then completely shut down. My childhood is very important context. I have weathered things that kill most people. I have suffered from 13 years of sexual abuse from the ages of 5 to 17 years old by eleven different people, both men and women. I have suffered from prolonged abandonment from my mother and my father. My mother, beginning at age 11 would leave me alone at home, taking my brother and sister with her, for up to two to three weeks at a time. I had to find my own food and my own way to school, or not go or eat because I lived one mile from my nearest neighbors (who we didn't get along with), and three miles from the closest school bus stop, and 17 miles out of the town's city limits. Often these were the times when I was most sexually abused, because I would have to call the abusers for help or food. I was beaten and raped by my step-father, who my mother would go back to over and over, because he was an alcoholic and I was his stepchild. Often when I was little, he'd pick me up by the neck and bang my head against the wall until I'd pass out. I survived all that. I always knew I would survive that. I was rational through all of that, I kept goals and reached them. I have been the stable nurturer for others for so many years though my adulthood, even after such a childhood. I stayed rational up until now, and finally breaking up with my boyfriend who I love so dearly is what has made me crack. I am not bipolar, I am devastated. I am in situational grief. The psychiatrist needed to know that, he needed context, but he didn't care.
My best friend asked him about the medications I was taking, what specifically the were and how to use them. He told us that if we wanted to know more, we should look them up on the Internet. She was pissed at that point, and I was drifting away and shutting down further.
After the psychiatrist, my best friend sat in the minivan with me and consoled me. As she turned around from the front seat, she put her hand on my knee. "Don't believe him. He's a quack," she said. "He didn't even listen to you. He had no idea who we were. He just wanted to prescribe meds to you, and the bi-polar diagnosis was the easiest way for him to do that." Meanwhile my ex-boyfriend called his colleague, a doctor, trying to find a way to get a second opinion.
I stared at my best friend, and I was sinking farther and farther into myself. Again, I no longer wanted to climb out and as she talked, her face became hazy. I remember her saying that everything was going to be okay, and I remember my ex-boyfriend taking my insurance card from me... and that is the last thing I really fully remember until Sunday afternoon.
I woke up from a nap on Sunday, and I thought it was Saturday. I was talking about things that needed to be done, and my best friend stared at me. I was confused, and I remember having these hazy dream like sequences about talking to my ex about our belongings, but I thought they were just dreams. Come to find out, that those dreams were reality, and I don't remember much at all. I remember talking about a globe that belonged to his aunt, I remember asking about the pictures of the two of us, and I remember briefly crying on the sidewalk, but beyond that, I have lost all memory of what happened. I don't remember him moving his belongings out. I don't remember negotiating what was his and what was mine. I don't remember saying goodbye to him.
According to the both of them, I had said goodbye, and the whole episode of that was supposed to be respectful and caring. I just don't remember it. I've lost that memory. I didn't have closure. I had nothing, and I was frightened by the implications of losing so much time. Apparently I had taken the two of the three meds that the psychiatrist gave me, seroquel for sleeping and xanax for panic attacks. The third drug, I have no idea what it was because it was nixed by my ex-boyfriend's colleague based on what he already knew of me, and it disappeared in the chaos.
I've never taken any kind of psychotic or mind-altering drug before, so this first attempt apparently left me confused and lost, because I literally lost the ability to formulate short-term memory when first using them. I can say that on top of feeling like I've lost all control, and already feeling the worst that I ever have in my life, I've never been so afraid in my life either. The thing that I hold most dear about myself, my mind and my memory, were interrupted. I lost even that, and I can say that I never want to ever experience that again. Especially hard hitting was the fact that this happened during my really last chance to say goodbye in person. I am still mourning that. I can't get over it. I've tried to gain that closure back using the telephone, but it's not the same. I lost that chance. It slipped away right in front of me and now it's gone.
I've never been so sad in my life.
Of all the things that have happened to me in my childhood, in my adulthood, this is the worst. This is the worst feeling I've ever had. I feel deserted, abandoned and betrayed. I lost him. I lost me. I lost the man I love.
And all I have now are words.
I'm a gay man in Reno, Nevada. I started blogging to keep a record of what I've been up to away from home. My boyfriend is
an unrepentant asexual, and celibacy through monogomy isn't an option (and I was celibate with him for over a year). I'd like to be monogamous,
but it just isn't working out.
