Protected: My Partner Suffers, Too, From My Mental Illness | The Fear That Accompanies Good Men

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Smother

I’ve been unfurled a few thousand times, 

and I know just how unattractive my spine must appear snapped and folded in such an inhuman manner. I am the same tenderness as in the womb, encapsulated in a life separate of mine. Both lost and nestled in some known spot, buried down deep with hums of my existence occasionally escaping as bubbles to the surface, so you are aware I’m still here.
“I’m still here“, I leak out and up to the very top.

Inside a Bowl of Grains

As if I wasn’t aware of just my slight weight, but a grain amongst grains with a baseless faith in some dividing line.

I toe it and grow nauseous at the homogenous 
scent of being a human alongside humans.

Flesh and doubt create a pungent concoction when fused with blood.

And I think another could set her eyes deep and shave her skin down to challenge my vulnerability, and suddenly she’s me. 
And you love me
love her 
love me.

An Honest Account of a Different Sort of Love Affair, Far, Far Off

What if I said I couldn’t anymore? If my stalky Reeds that swore a kind of forever snapped in some terrible tragedy and you’re the two of us standing, oblivious to my fall? At what point does the throbbing of the wound overwhelm the heart until a collapse and shut down?

 
I’ve required you as water, food and air and you couldn’t be seen, no matter how you willed it. And what if resentment grew as dandelions in those cracks of abandon and they’re much too vital to the entirety of the system to remove; like brain tumor too entwined in the important bits to touch?

 
You know of mercy. You condemn purposeful suffering. I’m suffering. I’m suffering for the years I haven’t been able to live inside of you and you inside of me, not merely beneath the stucco ceilings of man-made matter and within the confines of the gravity from our own 4-walled world.

 
“This is so very rare”, we reassure each other, and we believe it with the blind allegiance of a religion. Even upon a final departure, it’s a doctrine so tightly tangled with my tendons and spine, and every day factual assertions, that I’d carry it to the beginnings of forever. But what if we had begun with a stubborn disposition of brevity? Do we suffer together and apart or would true suffering only surface in a total absence?

 
Does the starving man that smells an apple pie bubbling in the stove before death suffer more than the starving man that smells nothing?

Compulsions

If I could describe the urge that sloshes around my insides before I carry out a compulsion, I’d describe it as needing to scream for help after your vocal chords have been extracted. Or the instinct to sway at fire ants covering your body, all the while knowing if you irritate them you’re doomed to face their fiery, stinging wrath. But you do, because you think they could kill you. Because you think the urge will drown you, or pull you under, or bury you alive in some shallow grave. It feels unavoidably necessary. Urgent, even. Then relief comes over me from the compulsions; the repetitive comfort; the question mark reassurances.
“You’d tell me if you wanted another?” “You’d tell me if you weren’t attracted to me anymore, wouldn’t you?” “Don’t you think you should be with another? But I’m not good enough. You deserve someone good enough.”

And I could make him the happiest he’s ever been, and I’m modest, not cocky, here when I say I do make him the happiest he’s ever been. His family has echoed this like a chorus to the things he said to me too many times to count.

Some of my compulsions include picking at things, but most are hidden. I’ve always been so ashamed of them, of the intrusive thoughts, the nature of my ruminations and themes. I’ve felt like a pervert, a monster, someone worthy of exile from society. Despite never doing anything wrong. Even that sentence, in all its confidence, is anxiety-inducing for me, because what if I do something wrong in the future? Because of the confidence, maybe I’m meant to fail such a statement. I feel the need to not only analyze everything, but to clarify all that which causes anxiety until I’m comfortable with the new arrangements of things.

I know this post isn’t very relatable to many, but it pays homage to the very real fact mental illness comes in such varying forms. Most are so good at concealing themselves from those around their “host”, that it’s devalued as any true struggle. And the stigma and the shame and the bottling back up of it, remains until some breaking point is arrived at; sometimes then it is the vehicle to drastic, permanent measures. And you can never get them back.
I think a huge misconception for loved ones of those battling mental illness is you have to understand. That’s not it. We don’t expect understanding — I speak widely and broadly when I say, more than that we need encouragement and an ear, every now and again, and support. Support to get better, to seek help, to desire help, to not feel….less than. We don’t expect you to understand because we are aware you might not have experienced it.
My fiance doesn’t completely comprehend my OCD. He’s had a form of Pure-O a few years back, coupled with agoraphobia and depression; but my particular themes and compulsions, he doesn’t understand. But I’ve never been upset by that. One of the most special things he’s ever done is he joined a few Facebook groups for OCD sufferers. I don’t know if he knows just how paramount that is in my mind, but seeing him try to understand and support me and want me to get help was all I needed to see.