Jyvur Entropy's Blog, page 20

My First Hospitalization: Part Three

An interesting quote from this lecture by Paula Caplan, PhD, “If upsetting things happen to you and you’re upset, that doesn’t make you mentally ill.”

Well, I was upset the first time I was taken to the ER. I was upset for so many reasons, but the most immediate was that my grandfather had just beat the fuck out of me. I had taken the first swing this time. Of course, that’s how everybody remembers it. Of course, that’s how it was explained to the police and the psych professionals.

“She attacked her grandfather.”

Nobody cared that I’d experienced violence my entire life. That my entire existence was watching the violent members of my family, my mom and grandfather, and being constantly on edge and trying to protect the vulnerable people in my family, my grandmother and my little sisters.

It doesn’t matter that I spent so many years scared, sad, angry, and trying one thing after another to stop the screaming and shoving and hitting, and sometimes worse-the time that my mom burned Mary’s arm, the time that she beat our dog with a chain and he screamed like I’ve never heard anything scream.

See, none of that matters.

Because I was the one in the emergency room covered in cuts, screaming, spitting mad, and barely able to put a sentence together.

There was no way to show the people responsible for intervening the 14 years that had led up to this.

I felt trapped.

I felt powerless.

I felt PISSED.

I was so pissed.

I was the one who was wrong and awful. I could see it in the way the cops talked to me, and the way their voices changed when they talked to my mom and grandfather. I was the one who was unreasonable.

So what would have been reasonable?

What should I have done to be the perfect victim?

Politely and reasonably told someone what was going on? I did this many times in the years leading up to this catalyst. Telling other people always made it worse.

Keeping my head down didn’t work.

Flight didn’t work.

I turned to fight.

And then I was the crazy one.

I’m so so so fucking mad still, even today, that anybody expected anything more from me, when I was 14 years old. That I was supposed to be so calm and reasonable, when I was 14 and not exactly at an age known for being calm and reasonable under the best circumstances. I was never given the chance to exist without a constant threat over me. I mean, I had that briefly when I was really little and lived with my grandparents. Until I was six. But after that, it was like so much screaming and fighting and you never NEVER knew when it was going to start. You never knew when a day would go bad and then you’d be getting dragged across the house by your hair, slapped in the face repeatedly, thrown into furniture, told what a mistake and a disappointment you are. You never knew, you never knew.

And like…WHAT? I was supposed to calmly and reasonably deal with that?

I’m not saying I don’t have psych issues. I’m saying my issues were greatly exacerbated by my toxic and unpredictable living situation. The doctors never asked about my living situation. When I told them, they ignored me.

My situation is not atypical.

Tell me where in the diagnosis procedure protocol clinicians are instructed to take the patient’s living situation into account. show me.

The doctors who initially evaluated me did so with my mom and her friend in the room.

Fucking assholes.

One male nurse in the ER came in and started fucking with me. The one thing he asked that stood out to me was, “What’s got you so down? Huh, what are you so upset about?”

And it was soo much! It was stuff that was painful to talk about. It was messy. I didn’t know where to start. And his tone told me there was no reason to go through the effort of explaining it to him. He didn’t care. He thought I was over-reacting or something. He didn’t believe I had a right to be upset. It was all over his face and the tone he used.

I shrugged and didn’t look at him.

“Come on, what?” he pressed. “World politics?”

This question made me nervous. I didn’t know anything about politics. I knew America might be about to go to war because of 9/11 and I knew most people didn’t like Bush. This guy was talking to me like I was a dumb teenage girl, which you know, I was.

I hated him for it.

I struggled to come up with a non-commital answer that didn’t make me sound like a complete idiot.

“World politics are in the toilet.”

He snickered and left.

After waiting for hours in the ER, I started to feel calm. I can’t explain why, but my mood picked up considerably. I’d already been told I was probably going to be taken to a children’s crisis unit. I’d been upset at first, but thinking about it for the many hours I had to wait (you ALWAYS spend hours in the ER waiting for a psych eval), I decided it was a good thing. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had the vague sense that help was coming. Someone would help me.

I stopped being angry. I started joking around and being goofy, which is basically my default state when I’m not incredibly depressed or agitated. When a nurse came in to say the doctor wouldn’t be able to see me until tomorrow and I’d have to spend the night in the ER, I pointed to a trash can that had a biohazard label on it and asked if that was where they kept the old body parts. She glared at me and removed the trash can from the room.

So, I slept in the ER.

And it was, weirdly enough, the best night’s sleep I’d had in a really long time.

I felt really, really safe.

I wasn’t. But I didn’t know that then.

I thought they were going to help me.

My First Hospitalization: Part Two

When the police came, the first thing they did was yell at me to calm down.

Before I get into all of this very private, very difficult to retell emotional trauma, there are a couple of points I want to make.

My experience is not atypical. Just because YOU had a positive experience with the psych industry, that does not mean your anecdotal evidence is more powerful than mine. You may notice, in my other posts, I’ve supplemented by anecdotal evidence by pointing out the many systemic issues in the psych field. But no…I get it. It worked for you, so my bad experiences should be minimized. I should be told, “That’s not usually what happens.” Funnily enough, this has never been said to me by another person who has psychosis symptoms (to my knowledge-but I’m aware people don’t always want to disclose that). It has never been said to me by someone else who has been in-patient. It has never said to me by someone who experienced the psych feild while living in a traumatic situation, such as homelessness or abuse. It’s the polished pretty little neat and tidy mentally ill who say this to me. And I’m sure you have good intentions, but I find that incredibly upsetting. You don’t know this side of the psych field. You haven’t experienced it. Yet, you want to defend the psych field because your 40 minutes a week sitting on a comfy sofa and talking about yourself made you feel warm and fuzzy.

So fuck my experiences of being treated like a criminal, being over-drugged until I couldn’t function and my symptoms were exacerbated, having my abuse ignored. Fuck my trauma. Right?

Would you ever walk into a Black Lives Matter protest and go, “But sometimes people are helped by cops.”

(I have my issues with how BLM operates, but obviously I’m in agreement that police brutality is a problem).

Would you walk into a class action lawsuit with female employees fighting systemic harassment and say, “But there are good men who work here. They help a lot of people.”

I feel like, you probably wouldn’t.

The fact that there are some good doctors and the fact that some people are helped by the mental health industry does not negate the fact that there are systemic issues. And frankly, I find it despicable that people are so defensive to having these systemic issues addressed. I can’t figure out the motivation to shut down the conversation.

If you are going to argue that my experience is atypical, you need some data. Or you’re talking out of your ass for reasons I can’t figure out.

I’m working on collecting some data right now. I’m starting with how many depressed people have committed suicide ON medication as opposed to off.

Even before I get that though, I’ve done a decent job of pointing out many of the issues in the psych field (see this post) and my argument is already a great deal stronger than “But MY experiences with the psych field were good!!”

And it’s an especially weak argument when you consider that it’s not the most severely mentally ill saying this. It’s not the lowest socioeconomic brackets. It’s not the unpolished, messy mentally ill with psychosis symptoms. It’s the little middle class white girls who cry about their parents divorce and then go home and write in a gratitude journal. Like…it’s fucking amazing to me with how much everybody screams about “lived experience” and “Own voices” that the one group it seems to be fine to talk over is the severely mentally ill. I’ll keep saying it until people get it: if you have not been in-patient, if you do not have psychosis symptoms, if you did not experience the psych field while homeless or while living in an abusive home situation, then you have not experienced the worst side of the psych field. Take a seat. For the love of God, take a seat.

I can not tell you how it feels to finally be opening up about this stuff, only to have people pipe up and tell me my perceptions are wrong. My experience was atypical. The psych field is good.

You read my story and think that;s the time to say “the psych field is good.”

You use me opening up about some of the most painful events in my life, and opening up about my single greatest insecurity-my mental health problems, and you use it to advocate FOR the very institution which harmed me.

Just…

Now that I’ve got that out of the way…I know people aren’t gonna stop.

Maybe when you’re done you could go find a black person to lecture someone who survived police brutality on how THEY had a good experience with cops.

(To be clear, what black people experience with the police is worse than anything I’ve experienced with the mental health industry. I’m not comparing the two, other than to say, you can’t negate systemic problems with anecdotes, and when dealing with a person who has been traumatized, it’s fucked up to use anecdotes to minimize or dismiss abuse at the hands of power structures.)

I guess, let’s keep going now.

I was a skinny middle-class white girl who was absolutely not threat to the police, and they came in yelling and hostile.

How do you think they treat a large black man having a mental health episode?

I’ll admit, being small and female and middle class and white, with everything I have seen, even I have not seen the very worst side of the mental health industry. I’ll never see it. But with things being as bad as they were, I can only imagine what it would be like for someone poorer, blacker, or crazier than me.

It was an emotionally-charged situation and the police came in yelling at me to calm down.

Well, they did get me to calm down.

They had me sit in the living room while we waited for the ambulance. I was in my pajamas. That was what I’d been in when the altercation with my grandfather happened. I had no bra or underwear on. I didn’t want to leave the house like that. I wanted to put clothes on. I asked if I could change my clothes. They wouldn’t let me go back to my bedroom.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal. It was though. I ended up in the emergency room in these pajamas, feeling incredibly conspicuous and uncomfortable. I was disheveled and gross looking. The whole process of a crisis intervention is a blow to your dignity. So going through it in pajamas without any bra or underwear on, it was an extra blow to my dignity. not to mention, I’d just had the crap beaten out of me and everybody was acting like I was wrong to be so upset about it.

I became agitated again after they wouldn’t let me change into jeans and a hoodie. So I was screaming and freaking out again by the time the ambulance came.

They didn’t have to restrain me in the ambulance, because I said I’d calm down if the cops weren’t riding with us.

The guy in the ambulance was actually nice. He talked to me like I was a person. He said things like “Having a rough one, huh?”

And I said, “I’m really having a rough one.”

He said, “They’ll help you feel a little better at the hospital. What grade are you in?”

And he just talked to me like I was a human being and had a conversation with me.

Problems with the psych industry

Over prescriptions of drugs. Drugs often make psych issues worse. Not every patient needs drugs to get betterrelated to issue one-the influence of the pharmaceutical companies. I’m currently compiling sources for this claim. Pharmaceutical companies fund academic papers, sometimes even ghostwriting them. They create course content for medical schools. They even astroturf to romanticize mental illness. There is a profit incentive. There should not be a profit incentive in mental health care for the same reasons a for-profit prison is a bad idea. It is asking for human rights violations. The deinstitutionalization of the 1980s happened with no sustainable plan in place, shifting the most severely mentally ill to the prison system. Crisis intervention happens in the emergency room with overworked and undertrained ER employees dealing euth the mentally ill at their most agitated. I was sedated against my will when the situation did not call for it. The mentally ill ate traumatzed and made sicker by current crisis intervention systems. The severely mentally ill are not treated with respect and dignity, nor are they encouraged to have autonomy or make choices about their own treatment. Doctors are authoritave and hostile. This is a systemic problem. The patient’s quality of life is not considered when patient is being evaluated. A person who is homeless or living in an a abusive situation Is going to be under extreme stress and therefore have exacerbated symptoms and erratic behavior. Personally i wntered The me mental healrh system at 14. There was a ton of violence in my family. I was vocal about this. I was given job help to escape the situation.

If you encourage ppl to go to therapy, you have an ethical obligation to advocate to correct these issues.

Every day, people are drugged into illnesses they go not have and traumatized by a broken system that fails to help or protect them.

I Found My New Cause

Since I finally figured out the whole manosphere/let me whiteknight for incels thing was stupid, I guess I’ve been trying to figure out what next thing to bang on about is. What’s my next cause. Everybody needs one. Everybody needs to feel like they’re doing some shit in life.

Anyway, it’s the psych field.

Like one change in my own character arc that overlapped with the whole manosphere obsession was I finally became comfortable talking about my own experiences with the psych industry.

I’m researching right now to put together a longform video essay.

But just to give you guys a glimpse of what I’m working on.

The psych industry is controlled by pharmaceutical companies-this is the SINGLE biggest issue

Next biggest issue: too few resources-because there are so few, care is poor and patients are not listened to

Next-behavior is always treated as something clinical, without environmental factors or life circumstances being considered

Lastly, patient autonomy-because the most vulnerable patients do not always have a firm grasp on reality, their autonomy is not respected. Now, obviously with people suffering from delusions or pyschosis, there will be times that autonomy can not be respected. There were times that I was sedated, that looking back, yeah, I needed to be sedated. But this was not always the case. Patients that do not always have a firm grasp on reality are treated as less than human, their needs, wants, and fears are not respected or listened to. This is usually not understood by psych patients who do not experience psychosis-they will not receive the same callous and disrespectful care. They can advocate for themselves. Just because a person has a severe mental illness, it does not mean they should not have the same patient-first care that we see in other corners of the medical field. Psych patients should be able to make choices and advocate for themselves whenever possible. There needs to be extensive training urging the importance of this (as someone who worked for hospice and an adult day center, I can tell you, they HAVE this kind of systemic training in elder care-esp for patients of Alzheimers and dementia-this is what psych patients need).

From the video: “the big pharmeceutical companies now fund scientific and academic papers….they fund the FDA boards in the states that are responsible for approving them” just past the 11 minute mark

“The new edition of DSM-DSM 5-contains a lot of diseases that are collections of symptoms that have proven to caused by different psychopharmalogical compounds.”-mental illness caused by the mental illness drugs, basically

“the pathos of somebody with a non-existent disease being treated by a drug that makes them feel sick”

My First Hospitalization

I guess it’s time for me to talk in more detail about the mental hospital stays.

Before I get started, I want to reiterate my position: if you are not severely mentally ill and have never been in-patient, if you have much more manageable mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety, then I’d like you to keep your advice to yourself.

It’s like this: I wouldn’t go giving a schizophrenic advice. Because they are (usually) much more severely mentally ill than I am. It just does more harm than good to go around believing you can give advice to people who have lived a totally a different life than you and manage a much more severe chronic illness than you do.

That being said, if you’ve been in-patient AND you have delusions or BPD, go ahead and pop off to your heart’s content.

I just can’t stand that smug shit from people who have never seen the side of the psych industry that I have.

Like really, Becky? HAVE you had good experiences in therapy? Did they teach you all about gratitude and mindfulness to help you manage your Seasonal Affective Disorder? I’m so fucking happy for you. I’ll be over here reeling from my last delusion. NO, 40 minutes of chatting with a counselor and an adult coloring book aren’t gonna fucking cut it for me. So, if you’re not at my level of crazy, please keep your opinions to yourself. They irritate the hell out of me. If I was gonna do a woke, I might call it a “microaggression.” You know how damn tiring it is being told you don’t know what’s best for yourself? Being talked down to for attempting to advocate for yourself and have a say in your own treatment? First by doctors, then by your family, and then by random assholes on the internet?

Like, I have a dozen in-patient stays under my belt. Years of drugs and therapy and DBT and AA and everything else you can think of.

If you think YOU are gonna be the one to fix me with a comment on a wordpress blog, that’s just a level of self-important fuckery I’m not prepared to deal with. Same with the people who pipe up on Twitter. I’m not on Twitter anymore, but still. You think you can give any substantial help in 140 characters then you’ve really been sniffing your own farts too hard and should probably go get some fresh air.

I’m tired, y’all.

I think a lot of mentally ill people get tired of other people talking over them, pressuring them to be okay (even though it’s a chronic illness), and pushing them to get better the “right” way. It’s exhausting.

Be a decent human being. Keep it to yourself.

As wild as I act, there are actually people in my life who look out for me. Nobody on the internet has the responsibility or the ability to give me real help. So save me the frustration of dealing with the weird attempts.

Okay, first hospitalization ever.

I was 14.

My grandfather had been getting physical with me for years. He’d hit my grandmother in front of me several times. At this point in my life, I think I hated him more than any other human on the planet. My mom was always more violent. Her violence was always more serious. He rarely actually injured anybody. But, he’d taken away from me the one safe place in my life. Nan and Papa’s house had been the safe and happy part of my life. Until he let the mask slip. He hit Nan in front of me and my sisters. He started hitting me after this, because I started snapping at him and calling him names all the time. I hated him for making Nan look so ashamed in front of us.

Before that, I was actually pretty close with my grandfather. When I was really little, he used to tell me ‘Princess Jennifer’ stories. These were stories about an alternate version of me, who was, you guessed it, a princess. Sometimes the Princess Jennifer stories would continue from one night to the next, like a serial fiction. When he put me in bed at night, he did this thing he called a ‘1-2-3.’ He would pick me up and swing me back and forth over the bed and go “One! Two! Three!” and on three he would drop me in the bed.

When I was seven or eight, I sat on his lap and he pulled out this photo album. He showed me pictures of himself when he was in the army and he told me a lot of (kid friendly) stories about the army.

He played Barbies with me and Carly.

He took us for long walks in the woods by his house.

He brought us to Castle Park after school.

He taught me how to ride a bike when I was 4. It was a bike with training wheels, but I was still super proud that my papa had taught me to ride a ‘big girl bike.’

He was this fun, loving grandpa.

Until he wasn’t.

Until he hit Nan in front of me, and I never never stopped hating him for it.

And then he started hitting me.

And then both the little gray house and the big gray house were full of fighting and screaming and hitting. Before that day when I was eleven, the big gray house was safe.

Then it wasn’t safe.

It was like a switch flipped. I became so angry. It bubbled and bubbled for a long time.

I don’t know why that day when I was 14 was so different from every other day. By that point in time, he was in the habit of getting right up in my face to scream at me and intimidate me. Usually if I shut up and “didn’t say anything smart” he wouldn’t hit me.

I couldn’t fall in line that day.

I was so angry. It wasn’t right that he tried to keep me quiet by keeping me scared. I was so sick of being scared.

In this flash, before I really had time to think about it, there he was shouting and implying potential violence with is body language and I just felt this decision zap though me like, “I’d rather get hit than stand here scared.”

And I fucking attacked him.

I barely got in one swing.

My grandfather is a big man, and we’re not talking a guy in his 80s. My mom was barely out of high school when I was born. My grandfather was in his 50s then. He wasn’t a feeble old grandfather. He was still young(for a grandfather) and still very able-bodied. He’s over six feet and even in his 50s, he was in-shape. He isn’t any more. But back then he was.

I threw my entire body at him, a whirlwind of fists and limbs, and I barely connected even one time, before I was up in the air. He ripped me off the ground and slammed me into the floor. Then he kicked me as hard as could (or at least that was what it felt like) a number of times. I didn’t go down easily. I got up once during this and tried to hurl myself at him again. There was a soda on the table. I threw it at his face and he ended up doused in coke. This prolonged the entire ordeal, because obviously it pissed him off. It was worth it though. Knowing that he had to drive home sticky and wash all that soda off himself was a victory that I held onto.

Eventually, he stopped attacking me and my whole body hurt, so I didn’t lunge at him again.

He went outside. I went to my room. I put the mattress in front of the door.

And I broke every fucking thing in my room.

When the police came, I was the one who was screaming and hysterical.

And the adults were so calm and reasonable.

I hated them so fucking much for being so calm and reasonable.

I hated how trapped I felt. How I had to constantly be on alert, and everything I did was wrong.

I tried to protect my nan and then she was mad at me and blamed me for how angry papa was. I tried to protect my sisters and I never really could. I could distract my mom. I did a lot of the time.

But I’ll tell you truth.

I didn’t always send them away and distract her.

Sometimes I let her go for them and was just glad it wasn’t me. I’d think “I always distract her from you guys. You can take it this time.”

When other adults weren’t around, everyone in my family was screaming, hysterical, shrieking, throwing, breaking, threatening. One wrong word and a bad moment would happen. Everything always felt so taut, like a guitar strong about to snap. So that even when things were okay, my heart was always pounding hard. I was always on alert.

Then this day came and I was the snapped guitar string. I was hysterical, and they were so calm and reasonable.

My grandfather knew the cop.

A poker buddy.

The way they talked to each other made me sick. It made me want to rip my eyeballs out of my skull. I couldn’t believe I was the one who was wrong. I tried so hard so hard so hard to deal with them. And then I was the crazy one. I was the crazy one.

I’m still so angry about it sometimes. The way nobody in the hospital listened to me.

“I have the bruises here. Look! It’s always like this! My family is crazy!”

But I was the one the police found in a pile of broken glass from the mirror I’d broken, with all my stuffed animals torn apart with my bare hands. There was cotton balls and shredded stuffed animal skin and little beaded eyes everywhere. I was the one covered in cuts and I was the one put screaming into an ambulance. I couldn’t stop screaming. I was so SO angry. It wasn’t even an emotion. It was like this FORCE ripping through me. I felt like a firehose or something. Just this thing this incredible burst of anger was tearing through. I couldn’t stop it. I felt like I’d tear my skin off or something if I didn’t keep screaming.

I wasn’t the perfect, polished little victim.

But do you think I didn’t try to be? Do you think I’d never told anyone what was going on in my house? CPS, well DYFS is what it’s called in Jersey, they had reports on us.

None of that mattered once I stopped being calm, even though nobody else was calm.

So I had my first psych eval in the ER. the first of many. It was horrible.

Our First Apartment

So, I stopped going to the doctor. I started working on putting weight back on. I stopped letting my family see when I was upset or struggling.

And Ernie and I started planning to move in together.

The most difficult aspect of us planning this move was the distance. We lived over three hours away from each other. We both had shitty low-paid jobs at the time. So we were like, how does one of us move to the other without finding a new job? How does one of us find a new job BEFORE the move? Neither of us had careers yet. We couldn’t apply to a job and be like “cool, I’ll start in a month or two. I just have to move first.”

We started trying to figure out a halfway point that each of us could theoretically travel to while we ironed out the moving details. One of these halfway points was a rural town in Massachusetts that was only an hour bus ride from him and two hours from me, BUT only forty minutes from my mom’s house. I asked her if I could stay in her spare apartment until the move. That way I wouldn’t be driving over four hours every day until then (my plan was to find a job in this new town). She said yes, with the agreement that I helped her out with her farm.

Yeah, the woman had a farm by then. She always was one to just up and do whatever struck her fancy in the moment, throw a bunch of money and time into it and then get bored with the whole operation. That was what was happening with this farm. She had a whole chicken coop, a bunch of ducks and geese, some turkeys, and two goats. My younger sisters were both teenagers at this point and still living with her, so after Mom had gotten bored with the farm, they’d taken over the chores. The month that I wanted to move into her place would coincide perfectly with my younger sisters leaving for New Jersey for the summer to see their dad. So my mom acted like this was perfect. If I would help out with the chores on her farm, she was happy to have me stay there.

My sister Mary and I were very close around this time period. So much so, that she came to Boston with me and hung out with me and Ernie several times (one of my favorite memories here is one day we’d been walking around for ages and I was tired of carrying my massive purse, so I asked Ernie to carry it. Then Mary asked he’d carry hers too. And Ernie did because he’s the biggest pushover sweetheart. So Ernie just spent the rest of the day carrying around two giant purses).

Mary told me that Mom was acting happy about the idea to my face, but behind my back was ranting about how I’d pressured her into letting me stay and how she didn’t know how she was going to deal with having me around again. She was saying stuff like, “The second she gives me a problem, I’m putting her out! I’m not dealing with her again!”

And to my face, she had voiced none of these concerns. And I definitely hadn’t pressured her. I’d been embarrassed to ask in the first place. I couldn’t believe she was acting like this. I had thought we were finally in a good place…

That situation was the beginning of the end for my relationship with my mom. I realized she and I would never be in a good place.

I was angry and wanted to confront her. I realized I couldn’t. Any emotion I showed her, she would use against me.

She and my sisters came over to my grandparents house for brunch not long after this.

I didn’t talk much to my mom. But as I passed her in the kitchen, I flippantly said, “Never mind about me staying at your house for a few months. I’ve thought about it and don’t think that would be a good idea.”

She stared at me like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t.

Eventually Ernie and I found a place that worked. I had switched jobs and started cashiering at a Home Depot in Nashua (right on the mass border). 40 minutes from Nashua was a little rural Massachusetts town. This town had a commuter rail that went straight to Boston. It was perfect. It was affordable. Neither of us would have to switch jobs.

Ernie and I moved into this little studio apartment about a year after we’d started dating. The bed was next to the front door. There was a tiny half wall separating the kitchen from the bedroom/living space. It was certainly cozy.

The town was beautiful and our landlord was great. He was very proud of keeping the lawn looking beautiful. There was a giant bush covered in flowers outside the door. We were allowed to grill in the little patio area outside. Ernie got really into grilling. He got his friends into it too and they would all have a blast outside in the summer dousing the charcoal in lighter fluid and then cooking burgers over the roaring flames.

I applied to a four-year school. I’d decided against a career in Human Services. I was going to be a journalist.

I started at Bridgewater State University.

I was so proud of myself. I hadn’t been hospitalized in years. I was completely off all medications. I had a nice man who loved me and we were paying for an apartment together. I was two years away from getting a Bachelor’s degree.

But this is when I lost it again. This is when my emotions went haywire and poor Ernie had to deal with so much more than a kind person like him should ever have to.

Still, there were good times too. Like I bought us a tiny little desk Christmas tree because it was all we had room for. We hung lights around it and that was our first Christmas together. We went for walks. We drove past the horse farm down he road and Ernie would wave at the horses and once one of the horses whipped his head back and forth and neighed and that made Ernie laugh a lot.

We lived there until Ernie got a job at the same Home Depot as me, and then we moved to Nashua.

Why I started writing about my mental health history

So, like I covered in my last essay, that visit to the ER with heart palpaltations was my final straw that killed my trust in doctors.

After being forcibly drugged in the emergency room when I KNEW I wasn’t erratic or upset enough to warrant it, I made a decision.

Fuck help.

I would help myself.

I would lean on nobody. I would not let anybody see me struggle.

And I would not admit I had mental health issues to anyone ever again.

I stuck to that until this past summer. I stuck to that for an entire decade.

Until a guy online caught my attention, and I admired the fuck out of him. I thought he was so brave to talk so openly about his mental health struggles.

He was outspokenly anti-psychiatry and I’d never seen anybody express the same sentiments I’d held for so long and, I have to admit, been too afraid to openly talk about. And he was severely mentally ill, like me. I count severe as anyone who has been in-patient. I have no patience for the basic bitch ‘I have depression and anxiety’ noise. The whiney little white girls crying about seasonal depression, all while spewing platitudes like ‘mental health is SOO important!’ Bitch, you could swap out therapy with an extra yoga class and be fucking fine. If you’ve never detached from reality, GTFO with your ‘Therapy UWU!! i’m quirky because I have mental health problems! But only the manageable mental health problems. It doesn’t affect me except for when I’m in a down mood every once in awhile’

Of course, the middle class, totally together, just sad every once in awhile, bitches love therapy. The therapists treat them like actual people.

I don’t want to hear fuck about the psychiatric industry unless you’ve been committed against your will. Then I might give a fuck what you have to say. When people talk about mental health awareness, they aren’t talking about me.

If you give a fuck about mental health, advocate for Big Pharma to NOT have any hand in the education of doctors. The pharmeceutical industry has too much influence. Like the main manufacturer of opioid drugs, Purdue, they make course content for medical schools. Course content on pain management.

Usually it’s the hippy-dippy lefties jerking themselves off over mental health awareness. And y’all supposed to be so suspicious of corporations and capitalism. Now, I’m a mixed bag politically. I’m pro capitalism, but anti-corporatism. Capitalism, were it all small businesses, would work wonderfully. Corporations, on the other hand, are powerful and dangerous.

Why aren’t the lefties freaked out about how much power the drug companies have in influencing how patients are treated?

Guys, get the fuck on that. NOW.

And if you aren’t going to, then shut the fuck up about mental health awareness.

Here is the issue that I have. I can not always tell what is real and what isn’t.

I have a delusional disorder. It’s fucking horrible.

I don’t hallucinate. That might actually makes things simpler. Because I could say, “hey do you see X-thing over there?” and people could go “Nah” and I could go “cool, that shit ain’t real.”

A delusional disorder means everything I perceive is there, but I add it up to conclusions that do not make sense.

I probably need to be on drugs.

The problem is, I let doctors try to drug me for almost ten years. From the time I was 14 until I was in my early 20s. As nuts as I still am, I was a LOT worse when they had me on drugs.

Even at my worse, I have more lucid moments. I can talk myself down. Mid-delusion, I can tell myself, “Bitch, that isn’t real. Your feelings are bullshit. Go do something else. This is imaginary.”

I could not do that on drugs.

I also didn’t break the revolving door of in and out of in-patient stays until I insisted on coming off all the drugs.

Everybody spouts therapy like it’s some magic cure. Nobody is suspicious of it. And if you do not have severe mental health issues, I don’t give a fuck what your experience in therapy was like. I just fucking don’t.

I want to hear from the bitches who have choked down tubes of charcoal in the ER. I want to hear from the people who have seen the inside of the ‘quiet room’ (pssst…this is the infamous padded cell). I want to hear from my fellow crazies who know you can’t have shoelaces inside.

You need to be on my level of mentally ill for me to give a single fuck what your opinion of the mental health industry is.

All you ‘oh, I have seasonal depression and I’m taking time for myself, self-care, decompress, pintrest, and bladdy-blah’ basic bitches. I’m so sick of you assholes acting like you know what’s best for me. None of you assholes advocate for the severely mentally ill. None of you ever pipe up about how few resources there are, since the deinstitutionalization of the 1980s. I never see y’all pipe up about how the vast majority of the homeless are mentally ill. I never see y’all advocating to stop the over-drugging of the people who can NOT effectively advocate for themselves.

I don’t see that. I see ‘self care! UwU!’ because it’s about feeling quirky and special for you.

And that shit pisses me off.

Well, as mad as all that shit made me, I kept it all to myself for a long time. For ten years, I stopped telling people about my mental health problems. I was sick of being judged for it.

When you basic bitches with your self care and depression talk about destigmatizing mental health, you aren’t talking about people like me. You aren’t talking about people who have landed in the ER because they convinced themselves they were living inside of a movie and being followed by a talking rabbit. That shit isn’t cute or quirky. That shit isn’t pretty. That’s the messy ugly side of mental health and nobody wants to destigmatize that.

So, now here I am, talking about it. Because I saw some guy online doing it and I thought it was brave and I thought somebody else should say they agree, and I wanted to be brave like him.

My opinion of that guy has since changed. Actually interacting with him was fucking awful. Stuck two fucking sock accounts in my discord and then called me “crazy” for wanting to know what the fuck he was doing. I didn’t even suspect account number two. That information was just volunteered to me. Criminey.

As awful as that experience was, I’m still kind of glad I was inspired to pipe up and start talking about this stuff.

When I first wrote about it on this blog, I didn’t tell the whole truth. Maybe that’s something you guys should know about me. I usually don’t lie (I won’t say I never do). But I find ways to tell only part of the truth. Usually because I’m embarrassed.

I first wrote about my experiences with the mental health industry and framed it as “My family was abusive and that’s the only reason I had emotional difficulties and the mental health industry never empowered me or helped me to escape that toxic environment.’ Well, the whole truth is my family is terribly dysfunctional and there is a lot of abuse. But I also can’t always tell what’s real and what isn’t.

I kept my mental health problems to myself for so long, because I wanted to get better.

I needed people to believe in me for that to happen. My family didn’t believe in me. The doctors didn’t believe in me.

Ernie did. He has always believed in me, probably even when he shouldn’t.

My experience being a severely mentally ill person is that people are upset and frustrated when you behave erratically. There is little understanding that you just don’t know how to manage your emotions effectively.

My experience as a severely mentally ill person is one of having toxic positivity constantly thrust on me. Nothing sends me into a spiral of trying to talk myself into obtaining a firearm and blowing my brains out than some toxic positivity condescending bullshit.

When you feel so low and you feel like you can never just BE how you are, like you have to walk around the world with a big stupid smile pasted on your face, and then people pipe up to say stuff like…Well, if you read enough of this essay series of mine, you’ll see some of it in the comments of earlier posts. “Enough is enough” “stop wallowing” etc.

There is so much pressure to be happy.

Mental illness is only okay if you are the perfect neat and tidy little mentally ill person. If you do all the right steps and in just the right time frame.

Nothing makes me feel lonelier than the pressure to be happy and get better.

Nobody knows how long I’ve been trying.

And I’m getting there. Really really slowly.

And people have to pipe up and act like you aren’t getting there fast enough.

It makes me hate being alive. It makes me feel so much worse.

I guess all of this is to say, I’m so much better than I used to be, but I am still very messy.

I will keep writing about my experiences as a severely mentally ill person anyway. Even though I’m not being mentally ill “right.” Even though I’m not the perfect polished mentally ill person.

I’m messy and I have disregulated emotions and erratic behavior.

And I’m not shutting up.

Mental health awareness is never meant for people like me. I’m making it about people like me.

I’m not going to take drugs. I’m not going to therapy. I’m not doing DBT or mindfulness or buying a goddamned adult coloring book or keeping a retarded gratitude journal.

I’m doing none of that. Fuck anybody who wants to tell me I should.

Stop pushing therapy on people. And if you ARE pushing therapy, you have a responsibility to SERIOUSLY advocate to make therapy less predatory and harmful. If you recommend therapy, you have an ethical obligation to research the pharmaceutical industry’s influence in patient care, and THEN start lobbying-actual writing to your congressman lobbying, to change things.

Am I gonna do all of that?

No. But I’m also not a self-important fuck telling other people to go to therapy.

Let Me Get Better

My eating disorder, for whatever reason, got worse after Ernie and I started dating. I ended up in the emergency room with heart palpitations. The doctor was incredibly mean to me. She took one look at me and said and snapped, “You’re underweight and malnourished. Do you have a drug problem?”

I told her, “No, I don’t do drugs.”

“Is there a reason you’re so thin?”

“I don’t know…I’m never hungry.”

“Eat anyway,” she snapped.

“I try to. My stomach hurts when I eat anything. It hurts when I drink water.”

“I pulled your records. You’re a psych patient. You being treated for the psych issues?”

I tried to explain that I’d stopped going to psych doctors because they made me feel worse.

“I’m doing better now that I’m off all the drugs,” I explained.

“You don’t look like you’re doing better.”

I was so frustrated. I felt so trapped. I started to cry. “I know what’s real and what isn’t now,” I sobbed. “I’m not on edge all the time. I can think things through. I’m only like this right now because I’m so stressed out all the time.”

“And what are you stressed over?” this woman was so irritable with me, like I was wasting her time.

I put my head in my hands and cried harder. “My family,” I cried. “They fight all the time. With me, with each other. Nobody is ever just calm.”

She wasn’t listening. Nobody was listening.

Now, I have admitted to you all the times that I flew off the handle and behaved outrageously. If I had lost my shit in this emergency room, I would admit it.

But I didn’t. I cried very hard and asked her to please listen to me. But I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t trying to get up out of the bed. They still had a bunch of wires on me, checking my heart.

She told me she was going to sedate me.

“No! For what? I’m not doing anything! I’m talking to you.”

“You’re hysterical.”

“I’m not! I’m sad and frustrated. Everybody acts like I’m so crazy. I’m trying to get better. I’m trying to do the right thing.”

Two nurses came in. One held me down and the other inserted an IV into me.

It didn’t take long before the effects of the IV hit me. While the world was so slow and my body was so heavy, they brought a clipboard to me with a piece of paper.

“Sign this.”

“No.” I heard the way my words slurred. “I’m not signing anything. You…wrong.”

A nurse put a pen in my hand, held it, and hastily scribbled on the paper.

“You can’t..”

I stopped fighting.

Just like with my grandparents, I stopped fighting.

I had to stop talking so much. I had to stop letting people see I was struggling. Because they wanted me to fail. They wanted me to stay messy. They didn’t want to hear me.

I was going to withdraw as much as I could. From my family, from the people around me.

The more open and genuine I was, the more power they had to hurt me.

This doctor didn’t want to hear me.

I was powerless. I couldn’t admit I was struggling, because they would use it to hurt me, to keep me in the house with my grandparents who fought and picked at me, and my grandfather who shoved me and hit me. They would put me back on the drugs that made it so I hardly knew what I was doing and everything felt like it was moving so fast all the time. They would keep me in this place where I felt so out of control.

If I let them see that I was struggling, I would never stop struggling.

Because they wouldn’t let me.

Therapy is not the answer.

Doctors are not the answer.

They will hurt you. They will not help you get better.

Not if you are severely mentally ill like me.

They will make you feel small. They will not allow you a say in your own treatment. If your family abuses you, they will assume everything you say is a delusion-a symptom of your illness. They will not help you become independent so you can escape them. They will do the opposite. They will push you to be more dependent on them. They will talk to your abusers as if they are so reasonable, and you are so horrid and small.

Therapy and drugs kept me sick. It kept me small.

I will never ever go to a psychiatrist again. I would kill myself before that happened, and I mean that quite literally.

Being alive and at the mercy of psych doctors, being pumped full of drugs, is no life worth living.

If I’m ever so sick that I’m a danger to myself, I’d much rather be a danger to myself and never EVER go through any of that again.

One thing I learned from this ER visit, was that I had to stop seeing doctors for physical reasons too. I still avoid the doctor. I don’t trust any of them for a second.

The next time that I had heart palpitations, I crawled into my closet, held my chest and waited for it to stop.

I told myself, I’d rather die on the floor of this closet than keep being treated like I’m so evil and wrong. I’m trying to get better. I wish everyone would let me get better.

Tony: Part One

The very first boyfriend I had was in 8th grade, my second year of 8th grade to be exact. He was in 7th grade. I was 14 and he was 12.

His name was Tony. Okay, it wasn’t Tony. I’m the only character in these stories going by my actual name. The thing is his name was VERY Italian. I’m talking the combination of first and last name couldn’t get any more Italian if you covered it in pizza and set it to the Super Mario theme song. I can’t even imagine a more Italian name. We’ll just call him Anthony Piccolini. Even that made up silliness doesn’t sound AS Italian as this boy’s actual name. This is the best I could come up with though.

When I told my grandmother I had a boyfriend, she asked, “What’s his name?” I told her and she got this disgusted look on her face.

“He’s Italian?” she demanded.

I was dumbfounded. Of course he was Italian. This was when we still lived in New Jersey. Almost everybody in my high school was Italian.

“Yeah,” I said. “So what?’

She rolled her eyes and said, “I’d almost rather you date a black.”

I know that conversation was icky. Maybe it was hard to read. It felt important to include though. It had an effect on 14-year-old me. I don’t think I knew my grandparents were racist until then.

Do you remember that I called my stepdad Jose? Yes, my younger sisters are biracial. My grandparents love my sisters and are not racist towards them. However, if you were to ask them about Mexican people in general….

I don’t know what to say. Everyone has ugly things inside of them. Racism is an ugly thing inside of both of grandparents.

One thing about this conversation that really fucked me up was like…she was being racist against another type of white person. Italians. I didn’t even know that was a thing back then. I knew that some white people were racist and said awful things about black people and other groups of people that weren’t white. But this left me like…wait…white people have racist problems with other white people sometimes?

I tried asking her what was wrong with Italians, but she never told me. She just clicked her tongue and made vague statements like, “You’ll see what I mean, if you keep messing around with those Italians. They’re full of it. All of them.”

And I don’t know what exactly they were supposed to be full of.

It also confused me the way she said, “I’d almost rather you date a black.” Like there would be something wrong with that. I hadn’t seen my grandmother interact with many black people, but there was my dance teacher, Miss Cheryl. She was my jazz and Irish Step Dancing teacher. She was a major part of my childhood. She was in my life for years. Not only was she my dance teacher, seeing me several nights a week, but her stepdaughter Inez went to elementary school with me. Miss Cheryl and my grandmother would see each other at school functions and they always chatted and sat together. My grandmother was very friendly with her. Yet….the way she had said that, it was like she thought black people were bad. Even though she treated Miss Cheryl like anyone else.

“You’d better get out in that garage and practice, Jennifer. You want to disappoint Miss Cheryl? She works so hard to teach you the steps and you can’t even practice?”

“You give Miss Cheryl a hard time in class again today and we aren’t stopping for TCBY after. You’re gonna turn her hair gray if you don’t start acting like a decent child.”

“Go and give Miss Cheryl a hug. You aren’t going to see her until the end of the summer! Tell her thank you for the year of dance.”

So…yeah, I guess I didn’t understand cognitive dissonance back then, and that first time I heard my grandmother talk badly about black people and Italians, it fucked with my head a little. I didn’t really know what to make of it.

Well, let’s get back to Tony.

Not only was Tony very stereotypically Italian, but he was very stereotypically gay. He was incredibly flamboyant. He had the trademark lisp and everything.

So why was he dating me?

Because this was 2003. Kids still got bullied a fuck ton for being gay. Especially gay boys.

He surrounded himself with mean girls who would tell the boys to fuck off. Although I’m sure it didn’t save him entirely. I can’t imagine what the locker room must have been like for him.

In addition to having only female friends, he told people he was straight (when he was in a mood to gush about how hot a guy was, he’d pivot to calling himself bisexual) and he had girlfriends. He asked girls out and they said yes. I was girlfriend number two.

The first was a girl named Lauren. She got tired of being a beard.

Then he asked me out. He came over to me at lunch. To the first group of girls I’d declared myself in charge of. This was before I’d banished Katie from the group. It was before I turned all her friends against her. But it was after I’d started the campaign against her. So Katie was there, but no longer chatty and the other girls didn’t look to her for direction. They looked to me. Poor Katie. Her 8th grade year was hell and all she really did was try to befriend me. She didn’t deserve that.

Anyway. Tony came over and I was flipping through this astrology book. I was telling Courtney, Megan, and Nicole all about the sun sign and what it meant about their personalities. Katie was writing a Harry Potter fanfiction in her notebook and astutely ignoring all of us.

Tony asked me out in front of all my friends. I was thrilled. My first boyfriend! YES. I gave him a resounding yes.

He went back to the group of girls that he was friends with. It might be important to note that his group semi-overlapped with my group at times. You know in school how there are these core groups, but then sometimes those groups socialize with each other, almost like you put the core groups into these little VennDiagram clusters? It was like that. I think Tony wanted a girlfriend outside of his core group to keep things from getting messy.

Tony started calling me a lot. We talked all the time.

At lunch, we would each go to a different teacher and get a hall pass to go to the bathroom. Then we’d meet in a stairwell and make out.

Before getting to that, I should tell you about my first kiss with him.

A couple of days after he asked me to be his girlfriend, I was getting off the bus in the morning and there he was, standing on the sidewalk waiting for me. This was a HUGE middle school. Almost 2000 kids in 2 grades. There were at least 40 buses. They parked in two u-shaped bus circles in front of the school. How he knew where my bus was going to park, I don’t know. There were two that came from South Toms River.

So there we were, on the sidewalk at 6:45 in the morning, with SWARMS of kids all around us. He gave me a stuffed Betty Boop. It was dressed as a Playboy bunny. Even back then, I found this very weird. I didn’t know why he’d give me such a thing. A small teddy bear or something cute, sure. This was a Betty Boop….with fishnets and little onesie with bunny ears and a little cotton tail. I was immediately embarrassed to be holding it.

After he gave it to me, he moved in to kiss me. He was a good deal shorter than me. I bent down and let him press his lips to mine.

It was like an electric shock of sensation. Although, looking back, I think it’s just because I’d never kissed anybody. It wasn’t anything special to do with him. I liked him well enough, but he didn’t really give me butterflies or anything. Also, looking back, I think he was kissing me on the sidewalk like that to be seen by the other boys. And I’m not mad at him for it. I have no idea what it’s like to be a short chubby flamboyantly gay kid in middle school in 2003. I’m sure it fucking sucked.

Ernie: Part 4

I don’t remember how long Ernie and I were dating when I started being mean to him. And I definitely didn’t think of it as being mean at first. I just always found a way to blame him for everything.

Poor man.

22-year-old me was not easy. I was difficult. And I was more difficult with Ernie than I ever was with any other man. I’d never been more difficult with anyone.

All he wanted to do was make me happy and he hardly ever could. I complained, I blamed, I yelled. I threw hissy fits.

This continued until we moved in together. Why did the man stay with me?

I asked him and he says he always knew I was going through something and would work my way out of it. I think the poor man is just one of those guys that gets goofy around women. He makes too many excuses for me. I don’t think men can stand to be in love with somebody who is just an asshole. Not the way that women can.

This awful portion of out relationship happened early on and lasted about a year.

I made him cry once. I yelled at him until he started crying and then it hit me: I’m doing to him what Joe did to me. I was pushing him around and being mean just because I could. Just because he was the sort of person who would put up with it.

After that, I started trying to bite my tongue more. I started doing this thing where I would say, “I’m so angry right now. I’m gonna be mean. Please leave me alone.” And he did.

I was in a bookstore with him once and in the non-fiction section I happened upon a book about emotionally abusive partners. I opened it up and read a great deal. ‘This is me,’ I thought. ‘I’m the abusive partner they’re describing. I’m creating a toxic relationship and putting him through something awful.’ So much of what the book described was exactly how I behaved with Ernie. I had to stop. I had to. I told myself I couldn’t stay with him if I couldn’t stop.

I talked to Ernie about what I’d read. ‘I’m emotionally abusive,’ I told him. ‘I verbally abuse you. I need to stop.’

‘You aren’t abusive,’ he argued. ‘Although, I would like it if you were nicer sometimes.’

So I started working much harder on managing my emotions. I would still get really angry and want to fly off the handle, but I made myself walk away. I didn’t want to do to Ernie what Joe had done to me. I remembered how through everything bad with Joe, I had always thought back on the very beginning of our relationship, how sweet he’d been at first. I thought, ‘this is what it must be like for Ernie. He’s remembering our first date, kissing in the train station and the way I was so shy, and how we talked about books. He’s remembering that and waiting for it to get good like that again.’

I had to make it good for him again. He was a really good man. He was so good to me. He still is. I tried very very hard to manage my emotions better and be better for him.

2019- 2020, I took Ernie for granted again. I didn’t go back to yelling or any of the awful stuff that I did ten years ago. I’m not the same person and neither is he. Ernie REALLY knows how to manage me now and he isn’t the sort of person who would put up with that anymore. But I did take him for granted. I drifted away from him and he drifted away from me, and we were just off doing our own things, for what felt like a very long time. And then there was this catalyst and we talked about separating. He was the one to say he wanted to reconcile. I fought it hard. Because this poor man doesn’t need any more headaches from me. Since we’d had such a big (what felt like) final blowout, it seemed like a good time to finally cut the poor guy loose. This whole thing coincided with him getting a job offer for a MUCH more lucrative position in his field. This was a major step up in his career. It was a life-changing difference in income. “You make very good money now,” I told him. “You could easily find another woman who will be a lot less trouble.” And he just cried and held me and said, “you’re the one I want. Always. Stop it. You’re mine.”

Ernie is a good man. Ernie has put up with way more bullshit than any human being on the planet should have to. The man’s bullshit quota has been filled and then some.

I am going to try very very hard to give the guy no future bullshit. None. He’s had enough and he’s been really patient and nice about it.

Let me tell you a little about how Ernie learned to deal with the angry version of myself I was in my early 20s. So, like I said, I did a lot of work to keep my disregulated emotions in check. Remember I said that when I met Ernie I wasn’t feeling angry or sad anymore, just stressed? Well….that didn’t last long. In fact, it’s like the second I was out of my grandparents’ house and living in this studio apartment with Ernie, this fucking emotional bomb went off. BAM! And Ernie had to deal with a lot of the fallout. I’d been mostly just stressed and scared all the time with my grandparents. Then I was safe and loved and I had Ernie, a man who tried to give me everything I wanted and treated me like I was so special and precious. Did I react like a normal human being and just enjoy this? Of course not. That would make too much sense. No, I flew off the handle and had one emotional episode after another. So, once I realized how horrible I was being to Ernie, I set out to change things. And, so did he.

Progress is never perfectly linear. You’re doing fine and then you relapse.

When I relapsed and flew off the handle at him, Ernie started doing this like putting his foot down thing.

He wasn’t mean. He would just very seriously tell me that I was done and then refuse to engage with me further.

I couldn’t believe it the first time he did it.

Or the second time.

But by the third time that he was like, “You’re done” I was like “Oh…okay, I guess I am.”

And afterwards he was ready to hug me and act like nothing happened. He just told me I was done and then I was and then we were okay.

This became a thing in our relationship and it still is even today. He has a putting his foot down voice. When he puts it on, I’m done.

He doesn’t do it very often. Especially since I don’t yell at him anymore. I’m proud to say I haven’t yelled at him in years. I haven’t had that kind of energy with him since I was 24. Not even a little. I get irritated and we have disagreements. But I don’t raise my voice at him. I’m so so happy we aren’t like that anymore.

So since I don’t yell or act like an unhinged asshole anymore, there isn’t a lot that brings out the putting his foot down voice.

One thing that brought it out was when I wanted to use 4chan to research for a book I was writing (that book has since been scrapped.)

“You’re not using 4chan.”

“Ernie, I’m doing research-“

“No, you’re not. You’re done.”

“Wait but listen-“

“Jen, I’ll block it from the network, along with all the other weird places you lurk. If you make me go through the trouble of blocking sites from the network, I’ll really go to work.”

“Oh my god, Ernie-“

“We’re done. End of discussion.”

And I was like, well…okay, I guess we are done. I guess that is the end of the discussion.

This probably all sounds pretty weird. Like I said, he doesn’t do it often. I’m only retarded enough to warrant the putting his foot down voice maybe a few times a year. Mostly he leaves me alone to do whatever I feel like.

Also, I sort of need that. I have moments where I really start spinning around like a top and then Ernie is there to just firmly tell me to knock it off. Then I do knock it off. And he never makes me feel bad about whatever it was.

My family used to be so angry at me when I’d spin around like a top. They talked to me like I was a bad person or something was wrong with me.

Not Ernie. He never makes me feel like something is wrong with me.

He’s also just not afraid to tell me when a behavior is unacceptable to him. I like that he does that now. I like always feeling like there’s somebody else with me who will check me when I get too wild, and do it without making me feel like I’m awful.

He’s great.

So, with me working hard on managing my anger, and Ernie starting to put his foot down the times I failed, we moved through that rocky period of our relationship.

We passed the ten year mark in 2020. We’re now in year 11 together.

Year ten was almost as bad as year one, only in a different way. No screaming or mean-ness, just two people living in the same house but not connecting at all. Just me feeling like it was time to throw in the towel and really trying to get him to feel the same way.

Year 11 though?

It’s like we finally hit our stride. Things are so good with us right now. They have never been this good.

And I’m going to try so so hard to never have such a bad year again. I want to be so much better for him.