What Is It Like Loving A Person With Manic Depression?

 

Loving someone with Manic Depression is difficult but exciting; Manic Depression is a mental disorder marked by alternating periods of elation and depression more popularly known as Bi-Polar Disorder.

It’s difficult to stick with someone that suffers from Manic Depression but when you do you can have some of the most exciting moments in your life. It is important to tough it out for some real rough rides and understand it’s just a chemical imbalance something that can not be controlled but can be monitored.

Some days you will have to face it alone.

Manic Depression comes with days to weeks to months of extreme highs where you can be the happiest you have been in your life but then can come with days to weeks to months of extreme lows and that is where you find some difficulty.

The best thing you can do for someone who suffers from Manic Depression during the low days is let them be sad, they may not want to leave the comforts of their bed all day, they may not want to eat much all day or speak to you much. You must give them comfort during these times but leave them be when they see fit. Don’t take the rejection to heart sometimes we all need to face our demons alone.*

Just go with it, adventure is in your future.

During the months of extreme highs comes an impulsive behavior and although this also comes with not so smart actions it also comes with some amazing adventures. One day they may decide they want to go cliff jumping or go on a road trip to the middle of nowhere just to see what is there.

This will bring an excitement to your life you won’t get with just any other person.

Sometimes you have to protect them especially from themselves.

Both during highs and lows there can be times where you are needed to protect them from themselves, during highs the impulsivity can go too far or can cause them to do something dangerous to others and themselves. You are the only rational anchor they have during these times.

During extreme lows, they will spend a lot of their time not wanting to move or do anything at all but there could be times when they will find themselves in situations where they can hurt themselves physically or emotionally.*

They understand that what they are feeling is irrational

You don’t need to say crying over there not being any more peanut butter when we wanted a peanut butter sandwich is a silly reason to cry we know and we understand. You need to understand it is not our fault and not fully under our control.

They love harder than most

Because of the extreme highs love and caring is something we feel more than most, also because of the extreme lows being just around the corner some people who suffer from manic depression overcompensate in order to keep you.* These are the moments that you need to cherish.

*Symptoms vary from person to person this is just a general list that I have complied when looking back onto how my past relationships handled my manic depression.

 

I Dated The Boy Who Molested Me

When I was sixteen years old I was publicly sexually assaulted by a guy everyone called Chicago, I didn’t learn his real name till years later. It was spring and someone I met on Facebook decided it would be a good idea to take me out to the Indie rock night at the Local Theatre, it was quite awkward and I never actually went inside the building before I ran into an old friend Jane and got dragged into this life. There were some great times but it all led to the bad which is why I’m here today talking about it.

We smoked a blunt while the boys; Jane’s boyfriend his best friend, and my “date” went to buy alcohol for them to drink. After smoking Jane, her cousin and I went back to the venue it was there that we met Chicago.

He was sitting on the benches with a couple people standing around; one of those included a guy we called Tails. We ran over to say hi to him while we waited for the boys.

Chicago was tall and lanky; he was wear a black dress shirt, black jeans and a red tie. I spent the time talking to him about his devil assemble. I now find it ironic to me he looked like the devil and yet that is like what he became to me.

I thought he was cute and flirted a little but that all changed in one moment. Jane was standing next to Tails talking while I was on the other side of the bench with Chicago when he pulled me into his lap; I laughed it off even though I was already growing uncomfortable. He gripped my hips tight to keep me on him as he touched me; his hands made it to my chest and pulled them out of my shirt to show the rest of the group stating something along the lines of how big my breasts are and needed to be touched. I was horrified and tried to get off him; when he finally let go I went straight to Jane wanting to leave but someone had the bright idea to egg us on to make out. It all happened so fast especially when Chicago grabbed both of us by the back of our heads and pushed them together to force us to kiss for everyone watching.

Jane had gotten a text from her boyfriend to meet them in the graveyard so we left quickly.

After a few more hours I made it home and took a scalding hot shower trying to scrub away his touch. I had nail marks in my hips for a few days after; I wanted to forget but no one would let me do that. Not long after Chicago pressed charges against Jane’s boyfriend and his best friend who also happened to be my new boyfriend Sid’s friends, for an assault that never happened. Jane wanted me to press charges against Chicago to help the case. Police didn’t believe me. Months later, I became friends and confided in Chicago’s brother without knowing they were related. This led to what will forever haunt me, “I’ve never met you before today.”

It haunted me for years; caused riffs in my relationships including a fall out in my friendship with Tails when he defended him.

Flash forward 4 years later.

I am friends, still friends to this day, with Chicago’s brother Liam. He asked me to come over so he can check out what’s wrong with my laptop and it was there I came face to face with him for the first time since he claimed he never met me. I was afraid but for Liam I sucked it up; after some time I somehow casually confronted him on what he did to me. Chicago claimed he must have been very drunk at the time and apologized for his behavior; I forgave him.

After that we started hanging out casually which then turned into sleeping with each other, we spent a lot of our time with each other. He would meet me at my work, which at this time was hosting an Open Mic; we’d get coffee, go shopping, drive around with his friends, spend the night at his place; then I met Alice a seventeen year old Chicago slept with a few weeks before we started seeing each other. She hated him but I was seeing him so she was willing to give him another shot. He was so charismatic; hell I forgave him for what he did clearly he had some way of speaking that just made everything genuine and okay. We blamed it on him being a Leo.

Alice and I became pretty close. I have some fun stories about my couple months hanging with her but that’s beside the point of this one. She did everything with me but at one point it started to get distant, she wasn’t hanging with me as much and neither was Chicago. We were all going to Walmart one day when she pulled me to the side to let me know they started dating. I let her know that wasn’t cool considering she knew we were seeing each other and that I liked him; I told her honestly I was upset and it was him or me. She chose him of course; which was fine with me.

It was a short time only a few months but it sure was a crazy time of bad decisions. I was finally finding myself after years of abuse only to fall back into the cycle; that’s how I find myself dating someone who more or less destroyed me. It was that one decision to go out that night, his choice to humiliate me in such a way that caused the spiral effect that took over my world and judgement for eight years.

2/3/2020



The Boy Who Loved My Best Friend

My ex boyfriend left me for my best friend; that’s about the gist of that but let’s go through the whole story.

I met Charlie when I was eighteen and still with my long term boyfriend but that was okay cause he was currently dating my high school best friend Kira. He needed my help winning her over since she has so many walls up from past problems but instead of helping him with her I couldn’t help but develop a crush on him.

After a few weeks they broke up and I only ran into Charlie at our local hang outs; we never spoke and only hung out if we were with the same friends. It wasn’t until months later that we actually hung out for the first time; we were walking through town late at night with two other friends. We made our way to the the graveyard, the common smoking grounds for us. We laughed and joked, our friends left and we found ourselves laying in the grass looking up at the sky; I kissed him. I was quite bold at this time in my life. I made the first move and he followed for the second and the third, we ended up making out laying in the grass beside the mausoleum for a few more minutes before deciding it was probably time to go home. He walked me halfway back home to my boyfriends apartment; I kissed him again before leaving and that ended. I didn’t see him for months after that; my current boyfriend at the time and I talked and worked through my moment of dumb but that would only last a few more months before my relationship ended again.

I ran into him again a few months later and we started spending more time with each other before we decided to start a relationship a few weeks after my big ex and I broke up. At the time he was staying at a friends house with an old high school buddy of mine. Things were good for a few weeks; he helped me out of my eating disorder. We connected, he was the focus of my photography and I helped him with his music gigs. His roommates loved me, we had a healthy sex life to the point of his ex roommate to this day likes to make jokes about the time I fell out of bed during sex. But then out of nowhere it ended through text about two months in.

I was devastated by this development at this time to my young self; I thought I was in love with him and after fighting him over the break up, trying to fix it, finding out he slept with my friend it came to be he broke up with me because he was in love with my best friend at the time who lived next door to him.

Everything changed on my birthday; by now I had started dating my ex boyfriend and moved in with him. Charlie and I broke up around 2 months prior and I had only saw him here and there but he had to be there this night. I left to go hang out with friends for my birthday; I ended up spending the day with Charlie and his best friend Matt. After walking around and smoking in the woods, Matt left to drop off something and it was just us for a while to sit and talk. He said he wanted to make it work and wanted to move in together; we both agreed to get our shit together and try again. I came home that night to all my things packed and the doors locked because I came home late and my boyfriend was controlling; but nothing changed, Charles ignored me the next day and my boyfriend apologized.

I really didn’t know what to do. I was stuck in an abusive relationship, the guy I thought I was in love with was massaging my best friends feet while I sat a few feet away from them and still hadn’t spoke to me about what had happened the night prior. I tried to pretend it didn’t happen but he sure made it hard when he started asking me to hook up with him in secret so my best friend wouldn’t find out. That ended after a few times, he wrote a song about me; singing it at the open mic I hosted and I never saw him again.

I honestly don’t know how to end this, I fell for the quirky musician and got my whole mind warped; after this I fell into a pattern of being a substitute for my best friend and basically killed my sense of self worth. All I can take from that is simple; no one is second best cause we are all main characters in our story no matter how messed up some chapters can be.

 

How My First Love Shaped Me Into A Dysfunctional Human Being

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Story Time;

When I was sixteen I met a guy who I didn’t think would make much impact on my life at the time but turns out he made me who I was in my darkest of times.

Let’s call him Sid; at least that’s what some people called him. Sid and I were together on and off for three years starting about two months before my seventeenth birthday- my friend at the time introduced me to the idea of him on a night where I met a guy who didn’t make my life feel hopeful and I really needed something hopeful so I automatically agreed to meet him. After hanging out at the mall once maybe twice getting to know each other before we jumped into anything he decided to take me around his friends one night. This is where all my problems and confusion started.

On this particular night, I received a text from Sid asking me if I wanted to come and hang out with him- a night where they were simply drinking Jack Daniels and “fishing” by the creek a block away from Sid’s father’s home. I agreed and about twenty minutes later Sid was in my driveway in his beat up Chrysler that had only one working front door and a sticker on the dashboard that asked, “What’s Your Fantasy?”. In the passenger seat was James, my best friend’s boyfriend and Kevin, my other best friend’s boy toy aka, Sid’s best friends. He drove us back to his living quarters, while Kevin and James threw cassette tapes out the window and watched them travel down the road pulling behind the car.

Once we reached the secluded area of the woods Sid’s friends kept dropping hints that Sid’s birthday was coming up and I should give him a birthday blowjob, me only being sixteen at the time and not understanding how to perform sex acts just ignored them as they continued to tease me and steal my phone. Afterwards they left us alone to pick up James’s girlfriend, Jane. This left Sid and I alone which was not a problem before in till now, we made our way to his car and somehow ended up in the back seat together where he taught me for the first time how to perform oral sex, something I thought I would only do for someone I was dating but a pressure to keep him in my life caused me to mature faster than I wanted to especially after the trauma I endured only a month prior, where I was molested on the street in front of a crowd of people.

After that I found myself on his lap in the front seat of the car making out and smoking a cigarette till James tapped on the window and congratulated Sid.

This continued in a cycle for months later, about two weeks after he asked me out on my birthday, but even then our meetings consisted of meeting up in an abandoned building across the street from where he lived, me performing oral sex sometimes a few times and him taking me for pizza. About two months into our relationship Sid moved into his own apartment which started the cycle of him picking me up and bringing me to his apartment, not often leaving his bedroom due to his roommate and or friends, where I preformed oral sex and watched movies. A few times I tried to initiate sex but he only agreed once but it went wrong and ended up not happening.

Around Thanksgiving Sid broke up with me for the first time, the day after Thanksgiving I went to Jane’s to spend the night after having a difficult time after going on my first date after Sid. After a few breakdowns, she supported me in my journey to walk the few blocks over to Sid’s place to see him after I had been texting him that night. He invited me inside and talked to me for a few minutes before for reasons still unknown to me today I found myself performing oral sex on him only to leave crying because he said that’s all he wanted from me.

We got back together and this was the cycle I was stuck in for the next two and a half years where Sid and I would be happy till we get into a fight then we would break up. He would then call me for booty calls, have sex then not speak, have sex then get back together.

The winter of 2013 after Sid and I got back together I tried to commit suicide. I spent about a month in a mental hospital and during this time is when Sid started doing heroin again. A vice he has had since high school. He promised me he wasn’t going to do it again and I believed him, it wasn’t intill 2 years later that I realized every time we broke up he went back to it.

Time skip—

For about three months during the winter of 2014, he was having sex with a girl I went to high school with while calling me not long after her to come to me and stay half the night in my room having sex and watching TV. I had no idea how close together our meetings were till years later and how much he lied to his friends about seeing me.

Yet I still went back to him.

After that, I was broken and cheated on him multiple times and even cheated on another boyfriend with him; which he didn’t deserve at the time, although he did cheat on me and treat me badly as well later in our relationship. This sent me into a bad spiral where I was afraid to be away from Sid but he wouldn’t want to be with me- then he would. So to my own shame, I cheated on him three times.

When I was 19 I moved in with Sid. We had gotten back together and thought it was the best option for me since I was already there 24/7. During this time Sid started abusing drugs and became very abusive. He controlled my every move, I had to sneak out of the house while he was at work to see my friends and make sure I was home by the time he got home. The times I didn’t make it in time if I was too late or didn’t have a good excuse ready he would become angry. During the first few weeks of me living with him I found out I was pregnant and early on lost the baby due to the stress of the abusive relationship and the bumps and bruises I had endured.

The breaking point for me was my birthday. I had left the house to go see my friends for my birthday because Sid was working (even though also being our anniversary) but due to drama with an ex and not having a ride home I couldn’t get home till about 3 in the morning which to Sid was unacceptable so he had taken the liberty to pack everything I owned in our living room and lock the door not allowing me back in.

I left him 3 months after that.

My downfall started then where I finally broke up with him needing my independence and power back after being mentally abused for months and used this time to chase anyone who I felt I could have some kind of future with but not in the sense of going out on dates but in the sense of a long string of one night stands; at this time I believed that sex and love had a definitive correlation that meant if I had sex with a man and gave him pleasure it would make him want to stay; exactly what I thought made Sid stay with me for so long.

This caused multiple things to contribute to my status as a dysfunctional human being including being drugged and raped, being completely sober and raped, have sex with someone who molested me in the past, having a foursome, having sex with a guy who had a kid in turn creating baby mama drama that made me look like I was trying to be his new mom and having sex with as well as fall in love with a guy who (not to my knowledge) was in a relationship, which resulted in him giving me herpes. Even after knowing about the other woman I kept sleeping with him because I was convinced that if I did he would love me.

It took till after I was told what I was doing was not healthy by my current boyfriend that made me try to change my mindset but due to this, I still can not keep myself from freaking out and running away when we fight. I automatically feel like I am cheating if I think about someone else in a sexual way because of my past with cheating and Sid’s jealousy. I am so terrified of being in this kind of relationship again I always have an exit strategy even though my current relationship is actually very functional; I make reason to feel it isn’t so I can leave.