For many years I loved someone who was mentally unwell. He’d loved me once, and passionately, but for a very long time he hasn’t been able to love himself or anyone else. But we were radiantly happy together, for a time, perfectly attuned to each other in intellect and emotion and the body. I saw the shining happiness that flowed through his being. He called it coming back from the dead. We were incredibly alive then, and incredibly productive too. I wouldn’t exchange a single day of those first 18 or so months we had — but later his emotional health kept plunging and plunging.In the beginning I truly believed that however mired he was in his soul’s darkness if I was strong for two he would surely come through. When you’re young you are simultaneously long and short sighted. Your whole life was still ahead of you and you thought you could outwait anything with courage and patience and grit. And so I tried to keep him (and us) going, through his black self-loathing, his despair and self-destructiveness. Now and then he turned sullen and inward and shut me out with silence, at times refusing to pick up the phone at our prearranged times. Other days he would be overcome with wild remorse and gratitude verging on bathos and ask why I’m being good to him. He was cagey and paranoid one day, petulant too, accusing me of putting him down over the slightest criticism (I learnt to scan every sentence ahead for landmines); on other days needing to be tactfully steered and wheedled, a child. He got over the alcoholism of his early years only to smoke too much in secret in his middle age. He lost his job but not without first falling out so viciously with his department, it was impossible to be rehired by a different college. (This was painful to me — he had been so brilliant once — still is, on some days — that intellect should be engaged on something — ashes and dust.) He behaved stupidly in his post-employment years — yes, stupidly, there isn’t any other word for it — and against common sense and advice — but thought himself heroic for his struggle, proud even. And he behaved very badly too, even in the presence of ‘safe’ friends, alienating them. But we could never have a real fight, because his weakness became a weapon. As soon as I got angry about something I have to rein it all back in quickly, afraid of the consequences if I lashed out. He wished for death and couldn’t kill himself, but he could look for accidents and call it fate. He went into streams in the dead of winter, moving rock and debris in the water, calling it a penance, half-hoping to slip and fall and drown (he broke a finger.). His general health was disastrous, his age caught up with him, his behaviour became more erratic, more unreasonable. There was a period of my life I woke up each morning and wondered — does he live today?
So little by little I was sapped of all my emotional energy and hope and will, and still he could not live, or love, or respond. I do know that my emotional presence has helped him through some of his darkest times, and some days his need almost feels like love. But eventually I stopped lying to myself that he is capable of love — that was difficult: for years I knew I was being drained of my love, but it was only much later I realised he’d starved me of his too. After some years we put an end to any residual expectation of formalising the relationship, so I went back to casual dating. But even then I could not really ‘leave’; to abandon someone means, well, that they will be abandonned. And part of me felt it was a matter of honour — I don’t want to be the kind of person who abandons people. It took years to leave — for a long time it felt like I had all the burdens of an ex-husband with whom one was still on speaking terms and who was always in crisis, always needing help — without the fun of ever having had the husband to begin with. I cannot be sorry I loved him — I don’t abjure that love or our time together — and I did love him, so much — but by the end I had no will to be near him anymore.
*
When I thought I was going to be an academic, it was between me and my writing. I could afford some emotional turbulence in my life, because only my work and my psychology suffered. Now my work is adversarial and draining emotionally. I don’t have room for additional conflict in my personal life. I don’t want it. And I can’t afford it because I’m so bad at compartmentalisation. My unhappiness about one thing seeps into eveyrthing else. I can’t think straight when I’m unhappy. And that has consequences, real ones. I mean, I’m not trying to make myself out to be important. A garden variety of a small firm hack is all. And I’m not even the kind of person who puts work and success and money before people, I’ve never, ever, been that and won’t be. But being hurt hurts my work, and more so because the people we see are not the important and the rich who expect we can be bought and sold, just as often they are the little people who trust us to take care of their interests. I don’t want to lightly throw aside my responsibilities for one destructive affair after another. I don’t want to lightly risk emotionally chaos again. And I’m heartsick with being the giver. If the next person I love isn’t able to work with me at jointly building that warm peace and strength and trust at the heart of our relationship, then maybe I’d rather go on with the casual dating I’ve stuck to these past few years, non-exclusive and uncommitted relationships that are yet not without laughter, not unaffectionate; interspersed with the occasional short and unsentimental fling (although I’m way too old to date like a college student anymore; hook-up culture never suited me even in college.)
And now I find I’m opening my heart to someone new — whose depth of honesty and patient understanding — and whose quickness to read my moods and anxieties astounds me and moves me. I am just — not yet — but almost just ready to take a step, another step, and another step beyond my wariness, to believe that this will be good, and true, and right, and to want – so much – to trust this feeling.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird