People change, sometimes drastically. But also people can pretend to be someone they are not. I know a few people who had to experience this kind of thing. Really fucks up your trust in people and your own judgement.
She moved in and adopted my whole personality. Naturally, her own personality was fighting to surface and a person can’t bury who they are forever.
After more than a decade, she just lost it. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, and you’re spot on about it fucking up trust in other people. It doesn’t have to, but it does take work.
In the middle of the chaos that was the collapse of my entire life, I remember one line from a letter she wrote me. “I feel more like myself than I have in a very long time. I know that’s probably hard for you to read.”
She had BPD too, so for three years, one moment I was god, the next she was sitting up in the bed at the end of an overall great day and saying, “I’m sorry. I just don’t love you anymore.”
She wanted nothing to do with me until I found someone else. She lost her damn mind, tried to kill herself, ended up hospitalized for mental health. That got her family involved and we had to fight them for our kid in court. It’s crazy how easy it is for a family member to kidnap your child. They told the magistrate that I held my family hostage with a knife, got a restraining order, and I just had to wait until court knowing that our daughter was scared to death and living through a nightmare on top of a nightmare.
Somehow, the woman I’m with survived all of that chaos with me. I figured she’d get tired of me driving out in the middle of the night over and over again to make sure my ex didn’t actually hurt herself.
Once she got to be herself though, she was alright. She met someone more like her. She went from laying in bed all the time hating herself and her life to taking care of things that she couldn’t before. She never got a drivers license and she was finally able to do that. She never cleaned and when I worked a lot our place was trashed, but her last place was immaculate. Poor girl died of breast cancer 4 years after we split. I wish she had left me years before honestly, so she’d have had a chance to really live.
Life is a mess. Some people do make it hard to trust other people, but we have to carry on and do our best. We’ve gotta work so that problem isn’t everyone else’s problem.
I have done my best to keep from carrying all that baggage into the relationship I’m in. I do my best to encourage her to just be herself. We get one short life, and I don’t want to have a hand in ruining it for anyone. Go see your friends, go be with your family. Don’t sit here alone because I do. Keep building your life outside of me. Maintain something of the world you lived in before you moved to ours.
Sorry for the book. I guess I needed to spit it out of my head again. I could write on this topic for several years straight and I still wouldn’t run out of shit to say about it. :p
BPD took a decade from me too. Been healing for a few years. Was able to protect my kid. Lmk if you need an ear from someone who understands. I’m the guy who all my mom friends introduce to their other dad friends who are going through breakups with mental illness. It’s a thing 🤷 You’re not alone.
I appreciate that, it’s been a pretty long time ago at this point, though the breakup did really fuck my perspective of time all up.
Since you and I can probably relate on a lot of things, I’ll share a bit with you.
I definitely could have caught her cheating years earlier if I had looked, but I didn’t. I believed two things that kept me from looking. One, she was crazy about me. Two, she had a right to privacy.
If she hadn’t just been blatant about it and so comfortable lying, I might never have known and could have ended up with an sti, which she ultimately did end up with but fortunately for her it was curable. I didn’t, thank goodness. That didn’t stop her from going around telling people I gave it to her and praying that I had slept with her behind my girlfriend’s back. She really believed I started seeing my girlfriend before I left her, so I believe that she hoped we’d both have it so she’d leave me. It was nuts.
Once I caught her, I thought I could work it out, forgive her, and move on. It just opened the flood gates though. It was like I had permitted her to do whatever she wanted to do by forgiving her. She went around telling everyone that I beat her and kept her as a prisoner for all of those years. She’d disappear for days at a time leaving me and our daughter to worry about her. The first time, I didn’t panic until it was clear something was wrong and she was out beyond her normal time, so I probably traumatized our kid by driving around looking for her that night. I didn’t do that again, but our daughter was still terrified any time she didn’t come home.
When I finally left and started seeing someone seriously, that’s when shit got really, really dangerous. She started being abusive to our daughter, but because her family pulled the legal kidnapping, I had to work with her to get her back. After that, things seemed to calm down and she never did anything that would cause a court to take her away. She just constantly bombarded our kid telling her how terrible I was, how much she hated my girlfriend.
For a few years after we split she’d randomly message me and apologize for things. I’d respond, but something I’d say would spark her to attack me again. Once she got her cancer diagnosis though, holy shit.
I didn’t realize the extent of it until she died and our child came to live with me. I mean, I knew it got bad, but the girl was laying there dying a miserable death and that really complicated things.
The last conversation I ever had with her was an argument. She called our daughter a skank and I snapped. Fortunately her husband was listening in on the conversation and when I said to him, “Please, listen to me! I’m her ex. Nothing I say will ever get to her. You have to tell her that it’s not right and it has to stop. She can’t call her kid names.” He told her that it needed to stop. She actually did stop, spent the next two weeks watching movies with her and spending time with her, but that was all the time she had. I wish I had said something sooner.
I have my daughter in therapy these days. The kid has been through it. She doesn’t miss her mom, and I wish that she could have known the person I used to know. If I so much as compare her in a positive way, I end up causing her a lot of stress so I just don’t do it.
I hope that someday she can come to terms with who her mother was and get past it all.
It was a wild ride.
I’d happily read some of your story as well.
Sorry if this is a mess. I have a 4 year old making me stop typing to watch her do silly things. I can’t even proofread it, but it’s fun watching her. :p
You should write a book about it. You have a good, simple style thats easy to read, easy to understand. It would likely be cathartic to write and could help others.
People can also marry someone for reasons that they think are positive, but end up being a horrible negative. Sometimes people marry someone because the other person is stable and takes care of things but then it turns out that they are extremely controlling too but it wasn’t obvious until later on.
My partner’s ex is like this. She claims that he used to be nice but I’ve only ever known him as an absolute failure. I can’t imagine him as anything other than a vibrating ball of undirected rage. He spends most of his time being angry that he can’t get a better job, but he’s totally unprepared to do anything that might help him get a better job by getting training in something.
People change, sometimes drastically. But also people can pretend to be someone they are not. I know a few people who had to experience this kind of thing. Really fucks up your trust in people and your own judgement.
My ex. Jesus Christ man.
She moved in and adopted my whole personality. Naturally, her own personality was fighting to surface and a person can’t bury who they are forever.
After more than a decade, she just lost it. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced, and you’re spot on about it fucking up trust in other people. It doesn’t have to, but it does take work.
In the middle of the chaos that was the collapse of my entire life, I remember one line from a letter she wrote me. “I feel more like myself than I have in a very long time. I know that’s probably hard for you to read.”
She had BPD too, so for three years, one moment I was god, the next she was sitting up in the bed at the end of an overall great day and saying, “I’m sorry. I just don’t love you anymore.”
She wanted nothing to do with me until I found someone else. She lost her damn mind, tried to kill herself, ended up hospitalized for mental health. That got her family involved and we had to fight them for our kid in court. It’s crazy how easy it is for a family member to kidnap your child. They told the magistrate that I held my family hostage with a knife, got a restraining order, and I just had to wait until court knowing that our daughter was scared to death and living through a nightmare on top of a nightmare.
Somehow, the woman I’m with survived all of that chaos with me. I figured she’d get tired of me driving out in the middle of the night over and over again to make sure my ex didn’t actually hurt herself.
Once she got to be herself though, she was alright. She met someone more like her. She went from laying in bed all the time hating herself and her life to taking care of things that she couldn’t before. She never got a drivers license and she was finally able to do that. She never cleaned and when I worked a lot our place was trashed, but her last place was immaculate. Poor girl died of breast cancer 4 years after we split. I wish she had left me years before honestly, so she’d have had a chance to really live.
Life is a mess. Some people do make it hard to trust other people, but we have to carry on and do our best. We’ve gotta work so that problem isn’t everyone else’s problem.
I have done my best to keep from carrying all that baggage into the relationship I’m in. I do my best to encourage her to just be herself. We get one short life, and I don’t want to have a hand in ruining it for anyone. Go see your friends, go be with your family. Don’t sit here alone because I do. Keep building your life outside of me. Maintain something of the world you lived in before you moved to ours.
Sorry for the book. I guess I needed to spit it out of my head again. I could write on this topic for several years straight and I still wouldn’t run out of shit to say about it. :p
You seem like a great person. You were helping someone out even while they caused you some serious emotional distress.
I hope everything’s all good for you now.
That was quite a read, thanks for sharing.
BPD took a decade from me too. Been healing for a few years. Was able to protect my kid. Lmk if you need an ear from someone who understands. I’m the guy who all my mom friends introduce to their other dad friends who are going through breakups with mental illness. It’s a thing 🤷 You’re not alone.
I appreciate that, it’s been a pretty long time ago at this point, though the breakup did really fuck my perspective of time all up.
Since you and I can probably relate on a lot of things, I’ll share a bit with you.
I definitely could have caught her cheating years earlier if I had looked, but I didn’t. I believed two things that kept me from looking. One, she was crazy about me. Two, she had a right to privacy.
If she hadn’t just been blatant about it and so comfortable lying, I might never have known and could have ended up with an sti, which she ultimately did end up with but fortunately for her it was curable. I didn’t, thank goodness. That didn’t stop her from going around telling people I gave it to her and praying that I had slept with her behind my girlfriend’s back. She really believed I started seeing my girlfriend before I left her, so I believe that she hoped we’d both have it so she’d leave me. It was nuts.
Once I caught her, I thought I could work it out, forgive her, and move on. It just opened the flood gates though. It was like I had permitted her to do whatever she wanted to do by forgiving her. She went around telling everyone that I beat her and kept her as a prisoner for all of those years. She’d disappear for days at a time leaving me and our daughter to worry about her. The first time, I didn’t panic until it was clear something was wrong and she was out beyond her normal time, so I probably traumatized our kid by driving around looking for her that night. I didn’t do that again, but our daughter was still terrified any time she didn’t come home.
When I finally left and started seeing someone seriously, that’s when shit got really, really dangerous. She started being abusive to our daughter, but because her family pulled the legal kidnapping, I had to work with her to get her back. After that, things seemed to calm down and she never did anything that would cause a court to take her away. She just constantly bombarded our kid telling her how terrible I was, how much she hated my girlfriend.
For a few years after we split she’d randomly message me and apologize for things. I’d respond, but something I’d say would spark her to attack me again. Once she got her cancer diagnosis though, holy shit.
I didn’t realize the extent of it until she died and our child came to live with me. I mean, I knew it got bad, but the girl was laying there dying a miserable death and that really complicated things.
The last conversation I ever had with her was an argument. She called our daughter a skank and I snapped. Fortunately her husband was listening in on the conversation and when I said to him, “Please, listen to me! I’m her ex. Nothing I say will ever get to her. You have to tell her that it’s not right and it has to stop. She can’t call her kid names.” He told her that it needed to stop. She actually did stop, spent the next two weeks watching movies with her and spending time with her, but that was all the time she had. I wish I had said something sooner.
I have my daughter in therapy these days. The kid has been through it. She doesn’t miss her mom, and I wish that she could have known the person I used to know. If I so much as compare her in a positive way, I end up causing her a lot of stress so I just don’t do it.
I hope that someday she can come to terms with who her mother was and get past it all.
It was a wild ride.
I’d happily read some of your story as well.
Sorry if this is a mess. I have a 4 year old making me stop typing to watch her do silly things. I can’t even proofread it, but it’s fun watching her. :p
Take care.
You should write a book about it. You have a good, simple style thats easy to read, easy to understand. It would likely be cathartic to write and could help others.
That was a fascinating read and thank you for sharing. If it is any good, I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.
People can also marry someone for reasons that they think are positive, but end up being a horrible negative. Sometimes people marry someone because the other person is stable and takes care of things but then it turns out that they are extremely controlling too but it wasn’t obvious until later on.
My partner’s ex is like this. She claims that he used to be nice but I’ve only ever known him as an absolute failure. I can’t imagine him as anything other than a vibrating ball of undirected rage. He spends most of his time being angry that he can’t get a better job, but he’s totally unprepared to do anything that might help him get a better job by getting training in something.