Good Luck Understanding This

I thought I knew myself pretty well. I mean, I had spent years in my own head, which should count for something, even if the place is badly managed. I knew how I got when things started slipping. I was already so used to doubting myself that I thought I would notice if someone else started joining in.

Well, safe to say - I didn’t.

I was nineteen when we met, twenty when the relationship started, and twenty-one when I left, which feels worth mentioning because apparently that still made me old enough to be blamed for not immediately understanding a man fifteen years older than me. I was not as impossible to influence as I wanted to believe. Being with him made that obvious in ways I only really understood after I got out.

At the time, though, I mistook having opinions for having boundaries. I knew what made me uncomfortable; I was just remarkably easy to convince that the discomfort was my problem. With no real experience to compare it to, whatever happened often became “normal” simply because he said it was.

Normal was him treating anything I objected to as proof that I was insecure, then presenting his own behaviour as some universal truth about men I was apparently too inexperienced to grasp. Normal was him asking why I’d lost interest while telling me my boobs would be sagging to my knees by the age I’m forty, then defending himself by pointing out that I had mentioned wanting a breast lift first, as though vulnerability came with a waiver. Normal was my body being discussed like an inconvenience whenever it failed to make him feel wanted, attractive, or in control.

Normal was being presented with a small jury of friends and relatives I had never spoken to, all somehow agreeing that I was the problem. Normal was him expecting reassurance from me while I was still trying to recover from whatever he had just said. Normal was all of that and more, and it left me stunned at the casualness of cruelty, wondering how someone could make your life feel like a set of examples in a lesson you didn’t ask to attend.

The hardest part wasn’t realising I’d been manipulated - it was how slowly it had happened. Nothing arrived all at once, no neon sign lit up “this is bad,” at least from where I was standing. It came as little comments, jokes I supposedly took the wrong way, “honesty” that somehow always landed on my body or my character, and conversations where every disagreement ended the same way: he was experienced, I was naive; he was rational, I was crazy.

To nobody’s surprise, other people saw what was happening to me before I did. The massive age gap was obvious, and so was the imbalance that came with it. Stress has never done especially elegant things to my grip on reality. During the relationship, I started having hallucinations I could still recognise as hallucinations, which sounds almost reassuring until you are sitting there fully aware that something is not real and still terrified of it anyway. A remarkably useless distinction.

That was when the fear changed. I wasn’t just having a hard time anymore. I could feel my mind getting less reliable, and I knew enough about my own diagnosis to understand where that could lead. The fear of becoming more unwell and slipping further along the schizophrenia spectrum didn’t feel dramatic - it felt uncomfortably realistic.

Somehow, even my illness became part of the cover story. The worse I got, the easier it was to point at my diagnosis instead of the relationship making me deteriorate. It’s a very convenient little trick: make someone less stable, then use the instability as proof that nothing they say can be trusted.

By that point, I was barely holding myself together, and my brother’s addiction was pulling at whatever was left. I wish I could say I responded to it with endless patience and concern, but I didn’t. Addiction in a family is not some noble exercise in empathy. It’s watching someone you love keep making life worse for everyone around them, and then feeling guilty because apparently saying that out loud makes you the cruel one.

My brother and I have never had some clean, sweet bond. It’s very complex. I resent the lies, the apologies nobody really believes anymore, and the same promises being wheeled out every time like this time is somehow going to be different. Then he makes another stupid decision, and the rest of us get stuck with the fallout. Suddenly everyone’s on the phone, plans are ruined, nobody sleeps, and the whole family is dragged into figuring out what the hell he’s done now. I love him, but I hate what his addiction has done to us, and sometimes I hate him for it too. That sounds awful because it is awful. None of this is noble or clean, and I’m not interested in making any of this easier to swallow for people who have never had to live through it.

That is exactly why I wanted to keep it private. Not because I was ashamed - but because privacy is not the same as stigma. It was none of anyone else’s damn business. It was my brother’s life, my family’s damage and my own grief, and I had no interest in handing any of it over so somebody else could isolate the least flattering parts of how I coped and use them to make himself easier to sympathise with.

On my brother’s birthday, I went to visit him because, no matter how angry I can be with him, I still loved him enough to go. He was in the worst state I had ever seen him in, and I had a panic attack and left. Before I had even processed any of it, I was expected to explain when I was coming back and reassure someone who had somehow found a way to need comforting too.

Of course, once you remove the brother, the birthday, the addiction, the panic attack and the fact that I had gone because I loved him, I suppose what remains afterwards can be arranged into a fairly tidy story about my selfishness. Context is wonderfully cooperative when you cut away enough of it. It takes a remarkable amount of confidence to pass moral judgement on the uglier parts of loving an addict when addiction has never even entered your own family and demanded anything from you, but confidence was never exactly in short supply, I guess.

By then, I was exhausted in a way that made everything very quiet. Not peaceful, just empty. I had put an embarrassing amount of effort into being fair to someone who treated fairness as an opening bid and my worst moments as future reference material. Every explanation became another surface for him to argue with. Every boundary became proof that I was cold, irrational, ungrateful, argumentative, or whatever word made him innocent that day.

At some point, you end up leaving not because you are angry. You leave because there’s nothing left to hand over. No more context, no more patience, no more translating yourself into simpler and simpler language for someone who understood perfectly well when it benefited him.

So it ended like a memo: packed my things, typed the text the next day, and sent it. A ridiculously long, overexplained text, because obviously it takes a novel to make someone hear what you’ve been saying for months.

Leaving did not make me instantly free. That would’ve been ideal, obviously, but not realistic, unfortunately. It was over, but I wasn’t magically fine. I would wake up from nightmares unable to catch my breath and then lie there replaying everything. I kept thinking of when I should’ve said no, walked out, refused to let him make me feel ashamed for falling apart after being pushed that far.

The more I remembered, the more I hated myself. I hated that I had stayed long enough to learn how to apologise while crying. I hated that I had become grateful when an argument finally ended, even if it ended with me agreeing that I was the problem. I hated how familiar it all became. I knew how every conversation would go and still kept thinking there had to be one where he would finally hear me properly. There never was.

For the longest time, I kept judging myself in his voice without realising I was doing it. I thought the relationship had simply exposed what I had always been: difficult, unstable, unattractive, and impossible to love. I was also made to believe, at some point, that I would never find better - which is hilarious in hindsight. The belief had very little to do with his actual desirability and quite a lot to do with the extraordinary talent for mistaking his opinion of himself for a widely shared one. Life has been rather educational since, I must say.

I can laugh at the arrogance now. I could not laugh at what believing him had done to me. Hearing my psychiatrist call it trauma was the first time I understood that the state I was in was not proof of my character. I was struggling because I had been hurt, not because he had finally uncovered some terrible truth about me.

This was especially interesting because, during the relationship, he had already begun treating my psychiatrist as a suspicious influence. Once therapy started helping me notice things he preferred I did not notice, the explanation was apparently that my psychiatrist was manipulating and brainwashing me. It seems my illness could be invoked whenever I disagreed with him, but the treatment for it became untrustworthy as soon as it gave me a little perspective.

So yes, therapy mattered. Shocking development: the place where I wasn’t being cross-examined turned out to be useful. It gave me somewhere to bring the whole mess without first preparing a defence, a timeline and several supporting documents.

The nightmares still come back sometimes, and so does the shame. The difference is that I don’t believe the shame as easily now. Somewhere in all of it, I found enough clarity to understand that the damage was not proof I deserved it. I feel proud I gave myself time to get there.

I know there's a much easier version of me to sell: selfish, dramatic, crazy, cold, etc. Whatever requires the least explanation. Remove the cause, keep the reaction, and apparently you have a complete psychological profile. He gets to be the endlessly patient man dealing with an impossible woman, which is a lovely story provided nobody asks what he was saying, doing, or demanding while I was becoming so impossible. It leaves out what I was reacting to, naturally, along with more time than he ever deserved spent trying to understand someone who treated returning the favour like an outrageous request. Still, I can see why he preferred that version. It asks almost nothing of him.

That version also tends to cast me as the one unable to move on, which creates a small practical problem: I left and did not come back. The messages that followed were not mine, although the mythology seems to have misplaced that detail somewhere along the way. It was never especially burdened by direction of travel.

I said nothing for a long time, mostly because I was still trying to understand it myself. Unfortunately, that gave his account plenty of room to settle in. Mine includes the parts before I reacted, which makes the whole thing slightly less flattering for him, but I can only apologise for the inconvenience of context.

Sadly, it turns out reclaiming your story doesn’t come with fireworks or applause. No one sends a parade, and the world mostly keeps scrolling. But somehow it still matters. It matters because silence is useful to people who rely on being the only narrator in the room.