NINETEEN YEAR OLDS ARE IDIOTS - #4

           Dear Reader,

​           ​Here we are again. Picking up where I left off, just after my wedding. Once again, pretty big trigger warning here for anyone who is sensitive to topics surrounding toxic relationships, abuse, mental health, self-harm, suicide and all that jazz…
​           Obviously, you don’t have to read all this stuff. If you’re still here with me as I trudge through this cesspool of ‘wow, that was so much more fucked up than I remember’, thanks for sticking around. I appreciate you!
 
​           THERAPY
 
​           ​So, there I was. Nineteen years old, barely of age, and within the span of three months I’d moved out of my family home, shacked up with Ben and taken his name. Hyphenated with my own surname of course, because I was emancipated like that. I was supposed to be living the dream, but I found myself stuck in a nightmare that nobody else could see and I felt completely and utterly alone.
It seemed that in my rush to escape one shitty situation, yearning to leave behind my past, my own demons and my dysfunctional family…I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. Great!
 
                By the time I moved in with Ben, I’d been struggling with my mental health for a hot minute.
To me, my descent into depression came out of the blue – pun intended – but looking back, it was a storm just waiting to happen. Just imagine holding a beachball under water. It’s quite a struggle. The harder you push it down, the harder the ball pushes back and the more tired you get. Inevitably, the moment will come when the ball slips your hands and comes shooting up through the surface. And if you’re unlucky, it’ll smack you right in the face on its way out. The same thing was going on with me.
​           I wasn’t exactly aware of it, but I’d been holding multiple beachballs underwater for longer than I could remember. Second thought, maybe they weren’t beachballs, maybe they were turds. Swimming around in the sewer of my subconscious, was all the shit I’d experienced throughout my short life. And it was fine down there, so long as I had enough structure and control in my life to keep it all under the water. But when I left school and I no longer had the structure and the security of timetables, expectations, study careers and grades to focus on, everything suddenly blew wide open and the turd shaped beachballs slipped my grasp, blasting through the surface and smacking me in the fece-…face. And as if that wasn’t enough, I’d just gotten myself tangled up in yet another shitty situation. That just made everything infinitely worse.
 
​           As I mentioned, when I first stated showing symptoms, Ben was really understanding and supportive. But as time went on, it seemed that Ben saw my depression mainly as an inconvenience to him and an insult to his ego. If I loved him enough, I wouldn’t be depressed. He saw it as his job to save me, or fix me and the fact that he couldn’t manage that, humiliated him. Which would explain why, after our divorce, he told people that I was crazy and that I’d caused my own illness by reading too many books on the subject. He was trying to cover his own ass.
 
​           I had seen my GP a few months earlier, but when he offered to refer me to a therapist, I told him that I wanted to wait until I’d moved out because I didn’t want my parents to know. I did tell Ben that I intended to go into therapy, and he wasn’t as supportive as I thought he’d be. Reluctantly, he asked me if it was really was necessary. He didn’t think depression was a real thing; I just had to get out and do more fun things. The fact that I didn’t enjoy anything anymore, didn’t occur to him.
​           Ben also admitted that he was afraid therapy would change me, and that it would cause us to grow apart. I assured him that wouldn’t happen, but deep down I hoped that it would. Maybe, if I changed enough for Ben to fall out of love with me, he wouldn’t mind if I left him. Or maybe, he would leave me first and I wouldn’t even have to be the one to make the decision. Wouldn’t that be grand.
​           So, once I moved out, I gave my GP the go ahead. I ended up being referred to the GGZ, because that’s all I could afford under my insurance. In retrospect, they were far from equipped to recognize what was going on with me, let alone treat it. And honestly, I wasn’t ready either.
​           When I started therapy, Ben was asked to take part in a support group for people who had a loved one dealing with depression. They wanted to provide him with support, tools and information.
​           He went to one session and read through the first chapter of the information packet they gave him, before deciding that depression was bullshit and this course just turned you into an enabler. He quit the course and instead, he pushed me into booking a Centre Parks vacation with him, made me pay for half of it and dragged me on a trip that I didn’t want to go on. Then, when we got back, he asked me if I’d had fun, and when I replied with an honest ‘not really’, he got very upset with me and told me that I wasn’t even trying to get better.

                I remember another situation in which Ben and I had been invited over to hang out with some of his friends In Utrecht. I didn’t really feel up to it and I asked Ben if he could go alone so that I could get some rest, but he pressured me until I agreed. I was studying nursing in Amsterdam at the time, and Ben planned to come to Amsterdam after my classes so that we could catch a train to Utrecht from there. However, fate had it that I felt really sick that day and when I got on the train to the central station, I ended up running to the rancid train bathroom and throwing up. I then called Ben and hesitantly told him that I was going home because I was sick. His reply was a curt: “How do you know?”
​           When I told him that I’d just thrown up, he said “Ok” in the way that you’d say ‘fine’ when it’s clearly anything but fine, and then he hung up on me. When he came home late that night and climbed into bed with me, he didn’t check in or ask how I was feeling. Instead, he turned his back and ignored me until he fell asleep. So yeah, very, very supportive and understanding, as you can tell.
 
​           I didn’t click with my first therapist; I didn’t feel seen or heard, she didn’t seem to like her job and we didn’t agree on the course of action. She wanted me to work on my social skills, and I didn’t see the point of social skills in the afterlife. She convinced me to join her CBT group, which I thought was utterly pointless, but I was too much of a push-over to decline. I have a lot to say about CBT, but it’s not relevant to this blog so I’ll just hold back. Suffice to say, it made my predicament worsen, very rapidly. I sank deeper and deeper, and my suicidal thoughts ran rampant. The fact that the very thing that was supposed to be helping me, was not, made me feel so desperate, frustrated and hopeless that I quickly developed a new coping mechanism: self-injury.
​           I kept this hidden from everyone, including Ben. The only person I told, was my therapist. During out last CBT group session, I handed her a letter in which I explained that I was doing worse, and requested to try medication and switch to a different therapist. She didn’t respond to any of it. It wasn’t until two talking sessions later that I finally had the guts to confront her, and have her refer me to someone else. Thankfully, my next therapist was awesome. Looking back, she couldn’t really help me either, her limited training was no match for the CPTSD I didn’t know I had, but at the very least, I felt like I had someone I could turn to. And I clung to her for dear life.
​           I never really said much in those sessions, and when I did, I kept secrets and spoke in riddles. To be fair, I didn’t really have the self-awareness or the vocabulary to express everything that was going on inside me either. I’m sure that all this made it really hard for her to help me in any way, but to be honest, I think she did the most important thing she could have done for me in that time: she was there. She was my safe space, only for me, holding no connections to anyone I knew. I savoured those sessions. She was an oasis in the desert. And after months of feeding her titbits of information and beating around the bush, I finally trusted her enough to confess the secret that was weighing me down: I didn’t love Ben. I immediately followed up that statement by telling her that there was nothing she or I could do, I’d resigned to my fate. There was no way in hell that I was breaking his heart, and I had no place else to go anyway. I mean, what has I supposed to do, go back to living with my dysfunctional family?
​           ​It didn’t seem so big once I’d said it out loud, but it still didn’t take away from the fact that I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and I needed help to get out.
 
​           In the meantime, Ben and I were long out of our honeymoon phase and things were getting more miserable and toxic by the day. I’d stopped talking to him about how I felt or what I was going through, because I couldn’t cope with way he dismissed and guilt-tripped me over it. Whenever Ben caught wind of my struggles, he somehow always managed to make it about him. And I simply didn’t have the energy to placate and console him, when I was already fighting battles of my own. So, I just tried to act normal and keep a smile in my face. The only times that I could drop the mask and gasp for air, were when I was home alone, or when I escaped the house, taking my car our for a drive and pulling into an empty parking lot for some time alone. That’s when I could let my demons out.
​           Only a few months into our marriage, things were getting out of hand. I was swallowing my feelings down with food and resorting to self-harm more and more often just to cope. It still baffles me to this day, how it could have gone unnoticed for so long considering the extremes that I went to. But then again, I know how insidious these things can be, and how sneaky people get when they’re desperate. And boy, I was desperate.
​           Ben worked evenings and often didn’t get home until midnight, so that explains how I could get away with multiple A&E visits a week. And I was very inventive when it came to hiding the scars, bandages and stitches. For instance, coming out of the shower, I would drape a towel over my arm and nonchalantly get dressed behind our big red fauteuil, making a point out of casually flashing as much clean skin as I could, so as not to raise suspicion. I also put our silly cat obsession to use, by acquiring a pair of sweatbands with cats stitched on them and refusing to take them off, because “meow”. Which is perfectly sound reasoning, I you ask Ben. And whenever we were intimate, I made sure the lights were off and tried to keep my long-sleeved pyjama top on. I killed two birds with one stone with that one, because by making sure that he got off quickly, it didn’t have to go any further than that and I got to keep my clothes on, thus hiding my body. Obviously, that didn’t always work, in which case I had to make sure that the bandages and the prickly stitches stayed under the covers and didn’t touch his skin. It took some acrobatics, but I made it work.
 
​           I don’t remember how or when Ben eventually found out, but when he did, he was horrified. He hadn’t realized that I was doing so badly, which makes sense given the happy act I always put on around him, and he asked me why I didn’t just talk to him, as though he’d forgotten how he shut me down in the past. But he wasn’t so much empathetic as he was pissed and humiliated. Angry that I was putting him through this, doing such a horrendous thing instead of just trying to get better. And humiliated because my apparent craziness would make people think he wasn’t a good husband. He demanded that I stop, which was obviously a promise that I couldn’t make.
​           If you know anything about self-injury, you hopefully understand it’s a coping mechanism. Unfortunately, Ben didn’t see it that way. He seemed to think that it was something I could control; something that I was doing on purpose, just to get to him or to make him look bad. It was the most bizarre situation, because I was the one going through it, but somehow, I always ended up being the one to console and comfort him in the midst of my own crisis. And it was like that every single time. Ben kept a close eye on me, but my need for release inevitably always built up to a point where I could no longer avoid it, and so I just learned to accept Ben’s reaction as a part of the deal.
​           Once Ben found out about my habit, we ended up in what I can only describe as a game of cat and mouse. Ben eventually began to recognize the hospital smell on me after I’d been to A&E, so I would race home to shower and re-bandage my wounds before he got home. That worked until he started subtly touching my arm every night after getting into bed, checking it for bandages.

​           I clearly remember the last time I went to the A&E, as it was…traumatic. It wasn’t the last time I ever hurt myself, but it was the last big incident like that. I’m not going to go into too much detail, but I spent over three hours in the waiting room only to be treated by someone who clearly felt that people with self-inflicted injuries don’t deserve compassion, humane care or proper pain relief. That’s all I’m going to say about that. I left the place in pain and in tears, which was a rude awakening from my usual numbness and the endorphin high that self-injury brought me. When I looked at my watch, I realized that Ben would be home before I got back, and I panicked. If he came home and saw that I wasn’t there, he’d freak out. And if I came waltzing in, all bandaged up like that, he would have my head. We were already at our breaking point. This would surely send him over the edge, and I didn’t want to find out what he would do. I was terrified that he’d explode, and I was equally scared that he’d tell my parents which would open a whole other can of worms. There was only one thing left for me to do: get down on my knees and submit to him. Metaphorically speaking, of course. And so, before he could get home and find me gone, I called him. I called him in tears and told him everything, promising him that I didn’t want to do this anymore. And he forgave me.
​           I never went to the A&E again after that. But as I said before, it wasn’t the last time I self-harmed. Because, well, I still had to survive. So, I just had to get more creative. I turned to blood-letting, the needles leaving little to no visible evidence but still providing me with the physical effects that helped to distract from the emotional pain I was in. I started overdosing on over the counter medication that made me drowsy, but they also caused muscle spasms which resulted in me kicking Ben in my sleep. That was a little too obvious, so again, I had to come up with something else.
 
​           Whenever Ben discovered I’d hurt myself again, he would get so mad at me that I’d have to placate him until he finally dissolved into tears. Then, I would hold him, stroke his hair and whisper it-will-be-okays in his ear until he eventually fell asleep and I could breathe a sigh of relief, letting the mask slip from my face and falling back into my own pit of despair. It was an exhausting game, and I wished that I didn’t have to play it. Quite frankly, I wished that everyone -but mostly Ben- would just leave me alone and let me go. I couldn’t take it anymore. I fantasised about death on the daily, and those suicidal thoughts took me to the brink on several occasions. Somehow, I had myself convinced that if I could just make everyone understand that I really didn’t mind being dead, they’d all be fine with it. They might be sad for a while, but surely, they’d eventually move on with their lives. I carried a suicide note around with me for that exact reason. But whenever it came down to it, it was always the thought of the pain I’d be causing my loved ones that pulled me back off the ledge and pushed me to call my therapist. This resulted in my being committed to the psych ward on several occasions, to keep me safe and give me some space to breathe. It didn’t fix anything, but at least I was alive.
​           Need I further clarify that I was very, very ill?
 
​           While all this was happening, I was slowly beginning to open up to my therapist. I still had a hard time vocalizing whatever was going on inside, so we had this agreement where I’d write things down throughout the week, then she’d read them during the session and ask me questions about it to get a conversation going. It was in one of those letters that I first opened up about my marriage, disclosing the fact that I was unhappy and immediately backpedaling with a long list of reasons why I couldn’t possibly leave. I did my best to convince her that discussing it further would be a pointless waste of time, because as far as I was concerned my fate was sealed and we’d have to work around it. Surprise, surprise, she did not agree. She didn’t push the matter though, yet. We just kept going about our sessions the way we always had. Even without the marital issues, lord knows that there was plenty of shit floating around in the cesspool of my subconscious that also needed addressing, so we had enough to do anyway. But somehow, along the way, the sneaky little shrew of a therapist figured out exactly which issues to work through in order to create some wiggle room in my mind. And eventually, I hesitantly admitted out loud that I wanted out. But I didn’t know how, so I’d need her help.
​           Once I’d said it out loud, there was no taking it back. And although I wasn’t ready or able to just up and leave, it did open up space to imagine a future different from the one I was currently facing. Slowly but surely, I began to take small steps to untangle and distance myself from Ben. It started inside my head, just by daring to acknowledge that I had thoughts of my own that weren’t necessarily in line with his. And after a while, I began to say some of them out loud. I started to push back and allow myself to be annoyed or frustrated with him. I acknowledged to myself that I was not in love with him, and that he often disgusted me. I acknowledged that I didn’t like who I was when I was with him. I entered a phase that can only be described as some kind of belated puberty, or a rebellion. This pushback didn’t go unnoticed by Ben, our arguments becoming more frequent by the day. I suppose his fear that my going into therapy would drive us apart, was coming true.
                I remember my turning point as clear as day. In true rebellious adolescent form, it involved a piercing. A labret, to be exact. I’d wanted it for ages, but Ben wouldn’t let me get it and he told me that he thought it would look like a wart on my chin. Weeks passed and I guess he got tired of how much I talked about it, because he eventually proposed a compromise where I could show him a list of piercings I liked, and he’d tell me which one I could get. He didn’t mind a simple ear piercing, so I ended up getting a tragus. But although I liked it just fine, it just didn’t hit the spot. No shit: it wasn’t what I really wanted. It’s like when you’re craving chocolate and you try to avoid it by substituting a whole bunch of other stuff, only to eventually cave and have the chocolate anyway. You would’ve eaten less if you’d just had the chocolate in the first place and been satisfied. That labret was my chocolate, it just kept calling to me and I couldn’t let it go. ​           And so, one day when I was in town with a friend, we passed the piercing studio a couple of times until my brain finally went: you know what? Fuck it! Ben already controlled so many aspects of my life. He influenced my thoughts and actions, decided who I spent time with, how I spent my money…and I was sick of it. It was time that I took back my body, and my life. So, I went in. I got the piercing. I dealt with the fallout afterwards, and I ignored the way Ben constantly referred to my ‘wart’. In fact, he didn’t realise it, but every time he said that, he was only reminding me of how I was taking back my power, and that ‘wart on my face’ was proof.
 
                Planning to leave someone isn’t easy, especially when you’re trying to keep it all secret while you’re making the necessary preparations. Although I hadn’t decided on a date or anything, there was a lot that I had to figure out beforehand as I waited for the right moment. Not that there is ever a right moment for such a thing, but I guess some moments are the lesser evil in this situation.
                In the meantime, my therapist had come to the conclusion that she didn’t have the tools to help me any further, and she referred me to a day treatment facility with a group for young adults. It was a multi-disciplinary out-patient treatment that spanned two full days a week. Yeah, it was pretty intense. If brains had bandwidth, therapy alone hogged the majority of mine. Dealing with struggles and tension in my relationship along with the ongoing battles in my mind took up the rest, so energy and time were a scarcity. That raised the first of many speedbumps in plotting my escape, as my own part-time minimum-wage supermarket job wasn’t going to pay for my divorce, let alone allow me to move out and support myself financially.
​           Unfortunately, it wasn’t as simple as increasing my hours, as I was already out of bandwidth with everything else that was going on. Thankfully, we had a module in therapy that was dedicated solely to practical matters, and with input from my therapists and group members I found out that I was likely to be eligible for health benefits. They also told me that there were probably certain things that I needed to keep in mind legally, and they advised me to seek out a specific free legal office that could take me through the steps. The problem there was the that Ben hardly ever left my side and I didn’t want to raise suspicions, especially if there were going to be letters or phone-calls coming in that could trigger him to ask questions.
In order to keep everything inconspicuous, I involved Ben in as many steps as possible. You know, “the closer you are to danger, the further you are from harm”, for us LOTR nerds out there. I figured that if I was open about big stuff, it would divert his attention from the details. And so, I was very open with Ben about my wanting to apply for health benefits, and I explained it to him in a way that made perfect sense to him. I mean, why wouldn’t you take money that you were entitled to?
​           It was such an odd feeling, sitting in a cubicle at the legal office, explaining my situation to the lady across from me as I occasionally glanced over at Ben in the waiting area and hoped that he didn’t realize we were talking about him. It was nerve wracking and I felt guilt tugging at my heart, but at the same time, I felt strangely…defiant. He didn’t know it yet, but there was an uprising underway. And this time, there wasn’t anything he could do to tie me back down.
 
​           I eventually did put in my application for benefits, but things like that take a long time to be processed. That was a bummer, but an even bigger anxiety inducing realization was coming to the conclusion that even if they approved me, it wasn’t going to be enough to rent a place of my own any time soon, if I could even find one. This was a huge setback for me, because I knew that the only other viable option in my situation was to move back in with my parents. You know, the very place I was trying to escape from in the first place. Out of the frying pan, into the fire, and straight back into the frying pan again. It seemed like I was getting burned left and right with every step I took in life, and I couldn’t seem to escape that blistering cycle.
​           Needless to say, all this came as a huge blow to that small, fragile part of me that was still trying to fight while every other part had already given up hope. The future looked bleak, and the seeming inescapability of my fate morphed into one of the worst bouts of suicidal tendencies I’d ever had. I had my letter ready, carrying it around everywhere with me, in the back pocket of my handbag. At some point, I even sent an internet friend of mine an email with a list of all the people I wanted her to contact and all the accounts I wanted her to delete once I was gone. Obviously, she didn’t agree with that and she called my therapist when I refused to do so, resulting in yet another admission to the crisis ward. No surprise there.
​           
​           Here’s a small, translated excerpt from the diary I was keeping for therapy at the time:
 
​           I felt alright yesterday. Today, I felt myself sinking. I tried to pull myself up again, I swear, but it’s like I’m trapped in quicksand and today I sank neck-deep. All I could do was gasp for air.
The school day wasn’t even over yet, I had a few hours to go. But during that hour in the lecture hall, I just lost myself. It was like I’d become a marionette, the monster in me pulling the strings. On my notepad, I made a last little drawing for Ben and I wrote underneath it: “I love you, Ben. I’m sorry…Go on.”
Then, I took my time gathering my belongings and putting on my coat. While my classmates hurried to our next lecture, I walked in a completely different direction. I took the stairs and put my headphones on. I left the building, stepping out into the rain. Then, I texted Ben that I loved him and I switched my phone off. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, my vision went blurry, I couldn’t see anything other than the ground beneath my feet and the mist in my head.
​           People hurried past me and looked at me, but I didn’t care anymore who could see me. I walked across the bridge and stepped onto the grass, staring at the fence in front of me. Behind that fence, there are train tracks. Every so many minutes, another train comes tearing by. The school’s windows rattle in their panes every time.
​           And then, I stopped. I looked back at the school, and then back to the fence. Back at the school once again. At the people who saw me walk by, wondering what on earth I was doing there. My knees gave out and I fell to the ground. I just sat there in the wet grass, sobbing with my head in my hands. I can’t do this. Not now. Not today.
​           I pulled myself up off the ground, and ran back into the school as fast as I could. Over the bridge. Through the puddles. Through the revolving door. Up the stairs and into the classroom where the lecture had just begun. I dumped my bag onto the floor, and with my back towards the others I quickly wiped the tears from my eyes with the sleeve of my vest. As nonchalantly as I could, I sat down on the only empty chair left in the circle as I tried to ignore the questioning looks. “Are you ready?” the teacher asks….”Yeah, sure, go ahead.”
​           Let this be like giving birth. Two steps forward, one step back…
 
                So yeah,  I wasn’t doing well. Something had to give, and fast. But although I was taking steps, I was still without a plan. How do you decide how or when to tell someone you’re leaving them? And moreover, how do you do that with someone you’re completely enmeshed with?
​           I was beginning to understand that there would never be a good time, and it was going to be messy either way. I might just have to rip off the band-aid. Fast. Because my demons were gaining on me.
 
​           To be continued…

​