Losing Control
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This is part three of a multipart article about my journey to autism acceptance and pride.
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I admit, I saw every new situation as an escape. I don’t want to say my husband was my way of escaping, but I’d be lying if I say that escaping did not play a part here. How could I not want to escape into the arms of someone who is so caring of me, someone who wanted to give me his time and affections?
He and I discussed the difficulty of getting into a relationship because of my situation, but neither of us could deny our love for each other. We knew that, logically, it would be best for us to hold off until my own situation settled down. But logic went out the window. We are both often ruled by our emotions. Not to say this was a horrible decision. It definitely made things a lot more difficult for us both. But we decided that whatever happened, whether good, great, bad, or catastrophic, we’d experience it together and support each other as best as we could. We loved each other fiercely and wanted to hold on to this very special relationship.
The ex discovered our emotional affair when he looked into my phone and found texts between us. He went ballistic. The next few weeks after that was scary, as he made me and our daughter feel unsafe. He began telling everyone who’d listen, mainly his family and mine, that I was committing adultery. That was obviously BS, as what we were having was only an emotional affair at the time.
One day in April 2012 was probably one of, if not the most, awful day of my life. His family few in from Scotland and stayed in a hotel not too far from our home. They decided to come to my parents’ home, where I lived at the time, to speak - more like confront - me and my family and demand answers. The family sympathized with my husband and his family immediately. I felt cornered. They all demanded why I was deciding to ruin his life and the life of my daughter, why I was so willing and ready to destroy my family. The ex twisted my words and told them things I either didn’t say, or forced upon them his own interpretations of what and how I said them. No matter how I explained what I meant and what I really said, none of them would hear it. I had an epic meltdown, shouting at everyone, “I am not a bad person.” I kept repeating it, over and over, sobbing and crumpling to the floor. I hid away in the bedroom, where I cried and slept for hours and refused to eat.
Getting the divorce going was a confusing and severely anxiety-inducing time for me. Mediation would not work for him. He refused to work together in the process, as he said that I was the one who wanted the divorce, I was the one who hurt him, therefore it was totally my responsibility to figure out how to do it all, and even figure out how to approach him about all of it so that he could decide whether or not he’d agree to anything that I said or requested of him. Every discussion turned into bitter arguments. Approaching him like a mature and calm person never worked with him. He started telling our 4-year-old daughter that I hurt him, that I was at fault for our splitting up. Once he moved out, he made the issue of visitation very difficult, constantly reducing our “discussions” to telling me how terrible I was and calling me names. He threatened that our daughter would “learn the truth about” me in time and see which of us was the bad parent.
All of this was wreaking terrible havoc on my brain. I knew all of this was not good for my mental well-being, but I didn’t realize at the time just how bad it was, and how much worse it would get.
The next few years were spent having very tense and anxiety-inducing interactions with him, trying to navigate the divorce process alone, keeping up my relationship with boyfriend, keeping everything together, hiding my pain from my child, working, going to school, and trying to deal with crap at home where I was constantly gaslighted and my boundaries and need for privacy ignored. As one can see, I was a ticking time bomb.
By 2016, things were finally taking a huge toll on me. I started getting sick. Work was making me physically ill. I started getting recurrent UTI’s, which was a problem before but I thought was resolved. I had constant diffuse and non-specific inflammation. My moods were fluctuating wildly and I was taking things out on my husband. I gained 50 pounds in five years (started around 2015 and reached my heaviest last year), despite the fact I did not change diet. I did become sedentary due to lack of strength and willingness to go on. I started skipping classes and not doing any work. I decided to once again go back to therapy and ask for medication.
My divorce was finalized in December 2017, more than five years after starting the process. One would think a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders. Perhaps for a day or two, I felt relieved. But I did not feel any better. I became obsessed with finding out what was wrong with my physical and mental health. For a year and a half, I visited every kind of doctor, every specialty, as I was having a lot of general symptoms that looked like systemic autoimmune disease. I did find I had an autoimmune stomach disease, but systemic disease was ruled out.
I finally decided that my issues also had to do with my mental state. I was having a lot of dissociative moments and auditory hallucinations. I was self-harming, having very big meltdowns. Most troubling was I was experiencing a major block. Similar to a physical, very large obstruction that I couldn’t get pass, but inside my head. I couldn’t do anything. It was as if I lost the capacity to live a normal life, to do basic things that most others could do. My brain started avoiding everything. So began my next obsession — researching into what was going on in my brain.
