A trip down memory lane pt.2

It was not that long ago I was a 20-something not understanding where my life was going or how to fix it. I became involved with a woman that had clinical depression [in my early 20's] and there I was with bipolar and not doing anything to get it fixed and at the same time thinking I could fix everything if I was just a good enough person. I was, and still am loyal to a fault (though not so much these days as I used to be).

I had a skewed definition of love. I thought if I could take any amount of personal and emotional abuse I could prove my love. That standing up for myself was the last thing that really mattered and at times turning the other cheek was akin to slitting my own wrist and watching the life drain from me slowly. I was with this woman for 4 years and we had a beautiful daughter together. She meant the world to me and at the time I thought my live-in was my whole world. I didn't realize even through several hospitalizations, losing my daughter to her grandparents, several suicide attempts, and being homeless for 6 months how wrong I was. I know of 5 times that she cheated on me and I took her back each time because I thought that I would be lost if I didn't have her in my life. It was all very destructive and really began to break down my psyche. She was the personification of malignant tumor on my ego and I got worse with every passing day, every time she cheated on me, every time I took her back and every time I followed her into the depths of her own illness. It literally made me nuts and I lived like it to.

I was angry and hurt and hated myself for so many reasons because I couldn't make her see how much I really loved her or how much I thought I loved her through my own definition of what I though love was. I would get angry at myself and I would hurt myself as a way to break the tension that mounted in me and used it as a way to find the release that I needed.

I suffered at one time a shattered bone in my left wrist that I worked and lived with for 2 months because I got drunk one night and lost control of everything. I put holes in the walls and dented closet doors and came really close to punching out as many windows as I could before I have out. Fortunately for the car I hit a 4x4 post first and had done the damage to my wrist there. That didn't stop me from doing the damage to the apartment in the end though. I'm just glad that I didn't land those drunken punches on anyone that was there because I could have really hurt someone. Those actions left me with a bone graft from my left hip and 3 pins in my wrist for 6 months and wasn't able to walk properly for a month after the surgery. I didn't recover emotionally from that very well at all... It was the longest time in my working life that I had been out of work or without a job for any extended period of time.

This was how I lived my life during those 4 years she would cheat on me and I would take it out on myself. She would scream, yell and put me down and I would hurt myself. She would beat on me and throw shoes and various other objects at me and I would hurt myself, she would threaten to hurt me or my daughter and I would take it personally instead of running like I should have done to protect my child and that's when the big overdose came.

I hadn't been taking my meds right and I was on several at the time and I was drinking also, so that didn't help things along very well. My ex had told me several days prior to my suicide attempt that she had been fantasizing about killing me and my daughter. Somehow I thought that this was my fault. Somehow I didn't think I would be able to escape this. That nobody would be able to understand how bad a person I was for ending up with a person as destructive as she was to me and our daughter. I took 300 pills several days after she told me that. 150 of which were depakote and the Er doc didn't know how I was alive much less not in a coma.

I know that in this I have written a bit about my depressed parts and my codependency and enabling the person that I lived with to continue doing this to me. That didn't stop me from living through mixed episodes that while I was depressed. In my own right I would try to comfort myself in other ways through stealing and making bad money decisions, by drinking far too much and being promiscuous in my own right, looking for personal gratification to help ease my burdens when I wasn't trying to off myself. Racking up traffic tickets DUI's, PI's speeding tickets and the likes. I went 4 years driving without a license, didn't think anything wrong for doing it either. Got caught a couple of times also. That didn't matter though, I figured my life was shit anyways so what worse could I actually do to myself. This line of thinking though I rationalized it just wasn't right. Living the way that I lived wasn't right either. Staying in a destructive relationship didn't help me to get any better and it took me a long time of being out of it to start to get the cloud out of my mind that things could really be different but it was a long time before I really did anything to try to change that part in myself.