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When You Realize No One Cares

When Loved Ones Are the Enemy

By Ginger DaviesPublished 6 years ago 13 min read
1
When Compassion Works Against You

Depression, anxiety, and self-harm.

It's enough of a struggle to deal with a mental illness, but then, you end up in a relationship with someone who's even more broken than you are after leaving a family that generally doesn't believe in mental illness.

I don't like to play the who's-had-it-worse game, but when you have an overactive mind, don't worry; your brain will force you to compare your situation to others, to constantly battle between your low-down opinions of yourself and your personally-manifested justifications for your own incompetence. Am I suffering, or am I whining? Am I in the wrong here, or am I justified? Am I truly sick, or am I simply weak? Why is it that people who have it 'worse' than me seem to get along in life better than I do? What's wrong with me?

This is a peek into the mind of someone with mental illness.

Roughly four years back, I hooked up with my best friend, a passionate artist who I related to on many levels. Both of us had been in and out of mental rehabilitation centers and we had our fair share of bad experiences with our dysfunctional families and our antidepressants. It was shortly after I graduated high school, and I was overjoyed to move into his house and get away from the all-consuming conflict in my family. I wasn't thinking about getting a job or supporting myself; all I cared about was living with my best friend (who just became my boyfriend) and getting away from it all. And for a while, it was fantastic, except the minor anger episodes sprinkled in here and there (which involved my boyfriend fighting other people, not me). I saw his explosive tendencies long before we ever dated, but stupid me thought; he's never done it to me, which means I must be something special to him. Maybe I can help him. We can help each other.

And we did, occasionally.

For four whole years, I lived comfortably in his house, living off of his family's money. After the first two years, I grew restless. I had never lived anywhere for longer than two years, and I was waiting for something to ruin it and force me away, because that's what usually happened. And, seeing as how I was a useless deadbeat who wasn't working, I was right to expect that his family would get tired of supporting me. I mean, he was mooching off of them too, but he's their family; they'd kick me out before they ever would him.

All that time wasted.

But I knew what it was like out there; people made fun of you, people hurt you, people called you names and stole your belongings. People on a budget (like my family) were constantly stressed, therefore angry, and they're all miserable. The moment I choose to abandon the free ride, the same thing would happen to me. I was convinced of that.

Still, I didn't feel it was right to mooch off of his family so much, so I started looking for a job. I was hired a couple of times, but I succumbed to panic attacks and walked out, which made me feel like a weakling. And I was one.

I knew what living on a budget was like. I grew up with my family, old school southerners who scraped by paycheck-to-paycheck. It made everyone furious. They all resorted to various forms of substance abuse, emotional and mental abuse, and occasionally, things would get physical. Maybe not all poor people really were so highly strung, but that's just what I perceived to be normal. I was weak; I preferred the new comfortable life, even though I knew, deep in the back of my head, that it couldn't last forever.

When my dad left for Florida, it started a domino-effect of drastic changes.

My mother was taking care of my little brother and sister (both of whom suffer from mental illness as well, my little sister with the same anxiety and depression, my brother with a severe form of Asperger's syndrome). After my father ran away with his new girlfriend, my mother needed help taking care of the kids while she was at work. So, I alternated between staying at my boyfriend's and staying at my mother's house. She paid me for cleaning, cooking, and babysitting, not to mention I got to swim at the apt complex and visit the flea market. It was something of a job, and I was finally getting out.

At the flea market, I met an Irishman. He and I became friends, and I found out he was stuck in a really tight situation; he was homeless, living in his van. So, I would meet him at the nearby laundromat and bring him food. After I cooked for myself and the kids, and after mom came home, I would leave and bring food to the Irishman, and we would watch movies together on my laptop. As I learned more and more about him, I began to wonder how someone with such a hard life could smile and crack jokes so much. My heart went out to him.

So, I decided to help him however I could. This is where I become stretched thin. I had to wake up at the crack of dawn to get my brother on the bus, and I had to periodically clean and cook (not to mention I was working on my own projects, books and comics I planned to publish). After the kids were gone, I would get a few hours of sleep (I hardly had time to sleep at night). In the afternoon, I would do a little more work and help my brother with his homework, and when mom came home, I would leave to take food to the Irishman. I would occasionally help him with things he was working on too (at the time, he had an odd job, but he was stiffed on his payment and ended up with nothing). It would be three in the morning before we were done. I would wander back to mom's apartment, sleep for a couple hours, then rinse and repeat. After selling a few art commissions and making my babysitting money, I started giving money to the Irishman too (perhaps a bit too much). I was finally doing something selfless again.

It felt fantastic to prioritize and help so many people. It felt like I finally had a reason to wake up in the morning.

That's when I found out my boyfriend had cancer.

Naturally, all the happiness melted into overwhelming worry. I dreamed about him dying, and I got even less sleep than before. Not to mention, my new best friend, the Irishman, had a long list of health problems, and his started acting up around the same time. I won't go into detail, but what I saw happen to him scared the hell out of me; and this was right after I saw my boyfriend come home from surgery, delirious and in pain.

Backtracking; I always had a problem with worrying too much. Worry kept me from finding or keeping a job. Worry caused me to have bad dreams. Worry causes me to see things that aren't really there, visions of whatever worst-case-scenario my mind could paint up.

Only now, it seemed like all the paranoid delusions were slowly becoming reality. My boyfriend had cancer, and the Irishman (someone who was there for me more than my own father) was suffering. I was convinced that they were both going to die.

All this worry and paranoia kept me from seeing reality clearly. For a while, I was a mess. I went to the bar nearby almost every night, indulging in the beers rednecks bought for me and drinking until my brain didn't have any room for worry anymore. God, it felt good. I still crave it now.

I guess I lost myself in my own mind. I started hurting myself again, which was something I hadn't done for years. After seeing the Irishman writhe in pain and after hearing that my boyfriend landed in the hospital again because his lungs weren't working right, I had a breakdown; luckily, by this time, it was winter, and I was so cold I couldn't feel my hands. So, in the dead of night, I left the house and cried like hell. I found a street sign and I punched it. I just punched and punched until I saw blood and bent the sign.

That felt good, too.

It was like I was my old self again; the broken girl who grew up in a backwards family, the one who expressed her anger the same way everyone else did; like a subhuman savage.

Half of me hated this. The other half missed it.

Half of me hated the drinking, as it was a trademark of my father earlier on in the good old divorce days. Half of me loved it, cherished how broken I was and loved how I abused the drink just the same way they all had. It meant I was more than just a spoiled loser who jumped at the chance to live rent and responsibility-free; I was something deeper than that, albeit broken and unstable, but still.

It meant I cared. It meant I wasn't hollow, like I perceived my father to be.

Good, the dark half whispered. Then keep doing it.

That dysfunctional demon was waking up in my subconscious after a four-year sleep.

I drank more. I hit things and cut my arms more. Every time I cried, every time I awoke from a nightmare, I'd do something stupid.

I was losing it completely. I guess that's what made it so easy for my boyfriend to manipulate me the way he did.

This is the climax to my story; when I returned home for a couple days, my boyfriend and I got into another argument. He and I started fighting more and more after I started helping my mother; he seemed to resent my family, and he certainly didn't like me spending so much time with the Irishman. He was becoming his old self too; only he was worse. He always struggled with his bipolar disorder, among others I can't remember off the top of my head. He was regressing back into the person who used to explode at our friends, who used to jump into fights and insult people in the most below-the-belt ways, ways that felt like the emotional equivalent of a knife twisting in one's heart. He turned cruel and unrestrained again.

This night, he called my family and the Irishman a colorful variety of names. He hated me for being gone so often, for prioritizing everyone else instead of him. For months, I didn't hold this against him; I wouldn't like it if he suddenly disappeared for days at a time either. But this was escalating, and it wasn't getting better. He resorted to jerking me around and yelling in my face, and when I tried to leave the house, he wouldn't let me. He slammed the door before I could get out, bashing his palm on the door's window and shattering it completely. He continued to rant, and amidst the screaming, he revealed that his cancer had come back after the doctors had removed it.

That was when I lost my passion to argue. It was also the beginning of a whole new problem; the lies.

He told me his cancer was stage three. He told me his mother died from the same cancer, and he told me he flatlined during the first surgery.

But I, mentally deranged and blinded by concern, didn't bother to fact-check his statements.

So, I made a huge mistake. I called my mother and told her I could no longer babysit. I had to spend more time with my boyfriend; now, I was worried sick that his death was right around the corner. I still made time to visit the Irishman occasionally and help him out, but for the most part, I had regressed back into being a home-body.

My mother was reasonably upset at this. She understood why I felt the need to stay with my boyfriend, but she was now in a bad spot; she had to work and she had no one to take care of the kids. My little sister (a teenager) looked after my brother instead of me, and then, my mother made plans to move back to her home, Texas. This was something she had been planning practically my entire life. I never figured she would go through with it; she never did before.

But this time, of course, she did.

She left right after I found out the truth from my friends.

My friends told me that they talked to my boyfriend's mother. He didn't have stage three cancer, and his mother hadn't died. I obtained his mother's number (had to hear it for myself) and I called her. Sure enough, she answered, unaware that anything was wrong.

At this point, reality seemed to fall apart. I really couldn't tell reality from fantasy anymore. Everything was changing far too fast, and I had wasted months having meaningless breakdowns over a terminal illness that never existed. My boyfriend and I ended our relationship, and naturally, I was left with nowhere to live because my mom had gone to Texas (stupid me; I told her I would be fine without her, just so she would go home like she always wanted to). Now, I live in the Irishman's broken-down van with nowhere to go and no way to get started with my life. Most of my friends either live out of state or don't have the means to take on another person, much less both of us. I had so many people, so much comfort, and in one fell swoop, I ended up with nothing.

Nothing but a variety of brand new scars up and down my arms and legs.

Things that used to scare me (like talking to people) don't faze me now. Things that used to bring me happiness, I have no interest in now. I feel as if I've died inside. I can't feel anything but overwhelming worry and anticipation of what the future will bring.

I'm not even cut out to handle regular life, but this? It's one hell of a ride. Yet, the Irishman has been through so much worse. How can you complain to someone whose always had it worse than you? You can't. That's when you realize that your problems don't matter, that you're imagining everything you're suffering through. Or, maybe it's when you realize that blind trust and compassion is the wrong route to take. Or, maybe it's when you realize that nobody really cares about you.

Then again, maybe I'm just whining. My family always gave me that impression. Maybe it's true.

Maybe no one really cares about you as much as you do them.

Or, maybe we should all just stop hurting each other.

depression
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About the Creator

Ginger Davies

I'm 24, homeless, draw comics, write books, and suffer from mental illness. I feel there's plenty to write about; I'll make use of the laundromat's WiFi and post all the stories that come to mind.

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