It is currently 4am, so I am reaching peak productivity hours, as per the night owl I am. I was trying to sleep but my mind kept racing with the scribing I made on here only a few hours prior regarding how I write for relief and that I need to do it more. I also made the assumption that maybe that’s what I use twitter for, a sort-of 240 character cathartic nibble. In fact, whereas my main posts, such as the one i’m currently writing, rarely ever get published, Twitter is an exception. Don’t get me wrong, I have tons of non-contextual drafts piled up like a bad accountant, but the act of posting it and getting feedback from direct communication ie. messages or comments, to the more passive recognition of a single ‘like’ differentiates it in another way for me. In the past I’ve made numerous tweets exposing my current, unfortunate, situations and they gain the most traction in the form of interactions, and as I like to always try to add comedy into everything I do, they are mostly positive, albeit positivity stemming from my expense. So I’ve decided to draw inspiration from opening up on twitter, but I want to apply it in a more in-depth way.
To this day, I can’t think of a better time in my life than the summer of ‘18. One of the nicest summer heats complimented a unifying World Cup in which we all believed in the same cause regardless of wealth, political differences or creed. Personally, this was at a time where I was really enjoying my university work. My local team, Burnley, had just qualified for the Europa League against all the odds and I had paid for me and my-then girlfriend to spend 5 days at Disneyland to bid adieu to the holidays. I think my nostalgia towards this time in my life had been moulded and purified by the fact that the next summer could not have been much more different.
The more perceptive among you may have read the last paragraph and noticed I said ‘my-then girlfriend’, and that’s because, shocker, we aren’t together. This is something I haven’t spoken much about other than a single self-deprecating tweet in which I mentioned the events surrounding the break-up so I’m going to go into more depth about that for no other reason than I want to get it all out. So I’ve always had mental health issues since I was 16 and it comes in waves for me. I’m mostly happy- thankfully, and when I feel low I shut myself off and isolate myself. Back when I was in high school when I first began feeling down, I tried to be as social as possible to help lift my mood, but I always ended up making those around me miserable too, and this surmounted in extra pressure and sadness on myself that would have all been avoided if I had just stuck to myself. And this is something I have carried with me to this day.
However, being in a relationship when you like to isolate requires a deeper level of understanding and selflessness, with trust that your partner will be okay and that it's nothing personal. This isn’t me being picky on this particular person in question, more a general statement. But when the person takes it personally, it reverts back to my previous point about adding more pressure and sadness on an individual, and then spirals into a vicious circle or isolation and a requirement for communication.
So to summarise the journey from the beginning of the troubles highlighted above to the last few weeks, it became increasingly difficult to juggle my own mental health with someone who wanted me to act in a different way. Regardless of whether they themselves have had way harsher problems in the past and required much more of me in return. I don’t think I can quite describe how crushing the weight of suppressing your own problems to keep someone you care about happy and I hope nobody reading this can relate. But I tried, all the way up until the last 2 weeks we were together. We were long distance (300 miles) and she came up to see me so we could ‘talk’, and I put in so much effort. I got her flowers, all her favourite snacks and a card and I remember her seeing it and beginning to cry. At the time I oversaw it but in hindsight she already knew what was coming. I didn’t. I was still invited to her brother's wedding the next week.
I spent 1 week down at her house in Kent, and what we discussed when she visited me was that we need to be more open in our communication to one another. A point I brought up, just like I did in this post, because I know it to have been the root of our problems. It was soon after I arrived that I also saw her messaging somebody else a lot, especially when we were spending time together. Without risking sounding overly possessive, we were together for almost 3 years, and we were quite reserved, so it was out of the ordinary. She told me she met him over Pokemon Go, and then they added each other on Twitter. Then Instagram. Then Facebook. It was after they had added each other on more social media than I had added her on that I began to ask questions and got little answers. Referring back to my original suggestion, I mentioned that it made me feel uncomfortable but always got told ‘they were just friends’. I internalised my worries even though it made me feel terrible. I was going against my own advice for communicating, but was wanting to trust the person I’d spent almost 3 years with too.
The day of her brother's wedding was a weird one, as you can imagine. If you’d like to imagine it more vividly for amusement, imagine everyone in their couples all loved up and then there’s me feeling anything but. I’ll fast forward to the after-party because I didn’t want to selfishly focus on my own problems on someone’s big day so I just spend the entire ceremony as some smiley autopilot. But the after-party was the pinnacle, the crescendo, and this time it was for me. Referring back to the beginning of this paragraph, not much changed. I remember sitting on my own table, I ordered a Papa John’s vegan banquet and had to scran it all on my own, which was really quite depressing. I also had a complimentary bottle of wine that I had been supping straight from the neck, which is always a good look too. It's important to mention that I can’t remember a time before that night where I drank alcohol, when one of the waiters came over and tried to take the bottle off me. We had a little tug of war before he conceded, “I’ll let you keep it if you drink it all now.” I looked at the half full bottle and accepted his challenge. My mum didn’t raise a quitter. The only thing I can really remember, after my blood levels got its first taste of alcohol, was sitting outside eating marmite bites on my own. When I said it was a crescendo, it's because those marmite bites were absolutely pukka.
I remember the next morning clear as day. I woke up, had some ice cream and applied for some teacher training courses (which were successful, I might gloatingly add) before my ex came into the room. I won't bore you with the conversational details, but I remember she came into the room at 3pm and I was on the National Express bus back up to Manchester at 3.45pm. Talk about efficiency, that’s Formula 1 pit crew speed. But the next few weeks are really why I wrote this. I don’t care that we broke up, it’s life. But 11 days later, her and her ‘friend’ were flirting all over Instagram. I got told, as her defence, that she had already broken up with me weeks ago in her head, so that’s why she was able to move on so quickly. Which was news to me as it only took 11 days prior to realise. Strange. The thing that I think really has annoyed me is that she was so happy and at peace so soon afterwards. Without sounding too self-centred and selfish, almost 3 years of a relationship and she’s moved on 11 days after you were officially broken up. I know for a fact that I wouldn’t do something like that if the roles were switched, and as much as I want to believe in karma, where the fuck was it. I was told ‘I didn’t plan for us to get with each other’ as a defence too. As she tried to hide the fact she was messaging the same guy she’s currently dating whilst she was sitting in front of me and I kept raising the point that it was all a bit suspicious.
The week after that was my birthday, which was great. I haven’t had the best personal experiences on my birthday, not that I'm ungrateful to those around me, just a personal thing. So this year was extra… special? The opposite of special? Just bad. Because I like to isolate when I’m feeling down, I’m also very secretive. I remember having to go to the doctors because I was having really strong suicidal urges, to the point where I would have to hold onto the railing with both hands when crossing the road because I couldn’t trust myself to not throw myself in front of an appealingly speedy car. I got placed on anti-depressants for the first time in my entire life, and shaking like a shitting dog as a side effect. I mentioned before about how me and my ex were really reserved in ourselves, and I used to reside a lot in her when I was feeling down and I hadn’t actually planned for a time when I wouldn’t be able to. It just wasn’t a priority thought in my head, until I realised that I couldn’t actually talk to anyone about it. Then came the anxiety.
I’ve never known what anxiety was other than a synonym for ‘nervous’, a term which has been so severely diluted and misconstrued by today's woke social media users. Anxiety is literally your body producing too much adrenaline, or so it was described to me at the time. I was placed on medication for these too, and they stopped the shakes from my anti-depressants, so it was a match made in heaven. I felt like DiCaprio’s character, Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street describing all his drugs that he takes and which ones cancel each other out. I'm far less successful and unfortunately aren’t married to Margot Robbie, to name but a few differences after that though.
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