I just woke up from a repeating dream I had for five years now. The dream isn’t always the same, but the person in it is. It’s my ex (common law husband) and every time I have a dream of him, even though I dont’ really think of him much anymore, the dream dredges up all the love I must still have for him.
We were together 13 years. Four years into our relationship, I was diagnosed, drugged and disabled. He knew me before any of that happened. He knew me when I was vibrant and alive and working an incredible job. He was there when the psychiatric abuse began, but we didn’t know it at the time. We just thought they couldn’t get my meds correct. As the years past, I became a different person. Overweight. Lethargic. Unable to socialize, yet he stayed with me. He was in a band and I use to go to every show. I use to be there to help him carry his drums in. We did many amazing things together even though I was sick. He took care of me. He could have left me but he didn’t. Although he tired towards the end. I was often upset and threw things because I didn’t feel good and I actually had never been more unhappy in my life.
The pills took away my personality. He kept saying “I want my old Deb back.” I would say I do too, but these pills make me feel bad. Help me get off these pills and you will find me again. He had never ask me to marry him even though we had lived together a decade. One day when I was on a great deal of seroquel (over 600mg) a day, we were making love. Sex was never good when I was on meds. It destroyed it. I felt nothing. During sex he actually ask me to marry him. It was weird. It didn’t seem planned and for some reason I could not answer. Something told me to not answer. I couldn’t figure it out. He never brought it up again. I knew if I really loved him, I should probably leave him. He had cheated on me a few times in the beginning, but seemed to be committed as the years got worse. Two times he left our house because my illness got to be too much for him. He knew I had no where to go as we had moved to Seattle years prior and I had no family there and could not live on disability. So he came back. .
The way we broke up was horrific. My doctor left town permanently and left me to fend for myself on a really fucked up cocktail of ADHD meds, two anti psychotics, anti depressant and clonazapam. I ran out of the ADHD medication and went into withdrawal. I could not find a new doctor right away. I had a reaction. I went into a crying rage. I also ran out of my anti psychotic and could not get it filled right away. I was in withdrawal. He and I didn’t know about psych med withdrawal then. We just didn’t. He took me to a ER and no one would help me get back on the ADHD med until I could safely withdrawal from it. They sent me home that night pretty upset and said to come back the next day if i felt no better. The next morning I guess he had had it. I was already moving out. I had rented an apartment of my own but it was not to be ready for two more weeks as they were painting it. We had decided that since I had gotten sick, I had not been good for him. But the way I behaved the night before, probably had taken him to his worst low. He came up to me in my pj’s at 7am. I was doing ok at that moment. Just drinking coffee sitting in front of my picture window. He said.
You need to move out today.
I can’t I said. I have no where to go for two weeks. I have lived in this house for 10 years. How can you ask me to move in a day?
I started getting really upset because I was not of my right mind. I was afraid and upset and felt abandoned by everyone. He locked himself in the bedroom. I begged him to come out to talk to me. He would not. Because I was not of the right mind, I said “I will slash your tires if you don’t talk to me.” Of course I was sitting on the floor outside the bedroom door crying when I said it. I didn’t mean it of course. I could not understand why when I was already leaving in two weeks, why he would do this. I was not rational. Instead of calling an ambulance. He called the police. I had gone back to my desk to gather my thoughts and looked down to the street (we lived on a hill) and there were 4 male policeman, walking up the steps to arrest me. I knew they would. I answered the door completely calm. Told them what was going on with me. That I was in crisis and could not get help and my boyfriend was kicking me out of the home I helped pay for for 10 years. They arrested me because i said I wanted to slash his tires. I could hear him crying in the kitchen. I had become a monster? I had been also abandoned by my doctor and left to manage my own meds. The police didn’t care. They took me away with no coat and no bra and slippers and pj’s in the January. If it had not been a Friday, I would not have stayed in jail. I had never hardly had a traffic ticket in my life. I had spent the last 4 years starting a baby pantry in the food bank where he worked. Now I found myself in shock. Here I was in the back of a cop car peeing myself in fear.
He broke up with me while I was in solitary confinement for threes days. I was served a no contact order from him and never allowed back in my home. A doctor came to my cell door and said …
“You shouldn’t be in here.” and he passed me a Valium. I was in shock while in there. I don’t remember much but sleeping for three days.
Two months later, he moved in a Yoga instructor into our house. I suspect he had already met her before we broke up. I don’t blame him. A year later he married her. I nearby and still volunteered and we would see each other because it was a small town West Seattle. I never spoke to him again. He never spoke to me. I lived with it. I mourned it for a year in 2011. I cried from the trauma of it all for a year. I dreamt of him almost every night back then. Eventually I got over it. I knew it was for the best. This man I spent 13 years with was better off without me. Sadly he didn’t know then if only he had encouraged me to wean off the meds, I would have been his girl again. I lost him. I let him go and really dont feel like I love him anymore except,
for no reason and out of nowhere I dream of him. Like the morning before my Grandson woke up, there I was in a dream with him. again. He was standing next to me and I could see his wedding ring and I was happy for him. I was wearing an old flannel over a tattered nightgown. He looked right through me and I looked away ashamed for how I hurt him. Ashamed and so dam sad that I didn’t marry him when he ask.
Today I’m crying and I can’t afford to. I have a two year old Grandson to take care of this morning, but I can’t stop crying. When I dream of him it brings up all kinds of feelings that I thought were long passed. Therapy has not helped. Writing about him has not helped. I thought I had forgotten him. I even moved back to the town where we met leaving him in our beautiful home we found in Seattle together to live in peace with his new wife. Gosh, I even invented an imaginary love in my ongoing novel to distract me from being hurt by him years ago.
But the dreams still happen. About once a month for the last six years (it’s been six years since we broke up) I go to bed happy and wake up so incredibly sad I can barely function. I don’t take meds anymore for this very reason. They destroyed my life. I never knew how much until I was off them in 2012 and reflected on the choices I made to take them. I blame the doctors who told me I had to take them. I could have choose to live with my depression. I could have refused their label of bi polar. All I keep hearing in my mind is “I want my old Debbie back.” It’s him in my dreams still loving me. He still loves me in my dreams. I wake up loving him again and then later in the day it goes away until the next time I go bed and become the victim of my dreams again to wake up devastated as if it all just happened yesterday.
so now I have to stop the tears because there is a little boy here in my charge who needs me. It does help me having this child around, but I realize I am here to take care of him and one day like my son he will be grown and I will be old and have lost the last love of my life. I get so frightened about old age alone. With no love in my life. It’s the most terrifying thing to imagine. There is no way to make that fear go away. Just memories of what could have been.
There is a little tremble in me that says, “you have some pills in cabinet, you can take one and feel it less.” I won’t do it. I can’t. In honor of him and of me who worked so hard to get the old Deb back, I will feel it. I will survive. But if only I could go back to that moment when he ask me to marry him, I would have said YES.
frown emoticon
I made this video about us two years ago and put it in my blog I hope to publish one day or make a film. Making it helped at the time. I hardly watch it ever, it’s too painful.
if only my dreams would leave me alone, I could forget. I will be better later today.
What does this animation have to do with what I’m about to say? 
Science Goes On - A Blind Date With God 
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