Six years of complicated grief

Dear all,

Thank you for this forum to share stories and contribute where we can to help each other through our journeys of grief. I have only joined recently and have learned so much already, and look forward to learning more. Today, I would like to share my story of grief, partly to share what has weighed me down for so long in a safe non judgemental space, and partly as a starting point to explore the next steps in my journey with grief, with your help, if willing and able.

I title the post “complicated” because the relationship I had with the woman I loved (still love) was never officially labelled as a “relationship” but our split could definitely be described as a split between two partners. The short story of what happened was that we worked together on a business that I founded, which was in trouble due to my financial mismanagement and my terrible emotional regulation and control which was impacting everyone around me and I was blind and believing in my own crap not to realise. We were running the business during the unprecedented times of Covid, I had secured investor funds and we were racing against the clock to build a stupidly complicated product to show off to more investors. She did attempt to warn me things were going wrong but I chose to put my head in the sand and ultimately she walked away.

Initially I accepted this on a very bare surface level and admitted that I loved her (which she rejected – honestly, fair enough). And then I developed psychosis and believed in a lot of awful terrifying delusions that were completely disconnected from reality. I started believing car number plates, the birds outside, the news on TV, the numbers on clocks, books I was reading (the list could go on) were containing secret signs telling me how to get back to her. Worst of all, I started blabbing all about my anger and fury on social media, trashing her reputation, trashing the reputation of my parents who were trying to help me, holding myself out as a victim, begging for money like a desperate homeless person as the debt started piling up. And unfortunately, this was all during Covid times when visiting people physically was heavily restricted so nobody was able to see with their own eyes that I was clearly not mentally right in the head and they all thought I was completely crazy personality wise and a danger to society.

One day she finally told me in an email to stop contacting her or she would call the police on me after months of me essentially harassing her with unwanted communications. And that’s when it hit me, even when I was deep in psychosis, that I had done something terribly and utterly wrong to her.

Eventually I was sectioned in a mental health ward for nearly two months and various drugs were trialled on me without success. One did help me finally break the delusions and the horror and shame I felt upon realising what I had done when the cloud lifted complicated my recovery going forward. The drugs staved off my delusions but I struggled to concentrate and do well at work and so I basically had four jobs in two years. I felt even more hopeless, suicidal and depressed during this time.

However, I did take a chance on love again and have found myself in a happy relationship with another woman, but I still really struggled to come to terms with my bisexuality which was what my ex-not-really-my-ex (but will call her my ex for the sake of this post) had forced me to confront, and I had to learn this truth about my sexuality in such a traumatic context.

From my perspective, we had started out as friends, but I was developing strong feelings for her as we worked more closely together which terrified me because I was in a relationship with a man at the time and she was in a relationship with a woman and I thought this was bad because I didn’t believe in cheating and I believed in monogamy. So I did my best to suppress those feelings which turned out to be an incredibly bad mistake. Looking back, I know I was young, immature and had no idea what it was like to actually love somebody, and losing her opened up a whole big world of grief that I didn’t realise until now was stemming from how much I did care and love about her. How I loved her intelligence, her beauty, her humour, her wit, how she stood up for me, cared for me, believed in me when nobody else did.

And I treated her terribly. I was a bully, I was being controlling, I was emotionally manipulative, I was telling lies and half lies to her and people all around me all the time and lying to myself. And when she walked away and didn’t tell me why in a way I could understand (which was in writing), I spent the last six years in the dark hoping I wasn’t making the same mistake with the woman I am now dating. I spent the last six years with grief I could not talk about because we weren’t officially dating, it felt taboo to talk about it to anyone because I screwed it up talking about it so publicly without getting appropriate, private help for my grief, and because I was such a liar and a manipulator, people didn’t believe me anymore if I said I was struggling and probably thought I was just making up more illnesses as attention seeking and just being dramatic.

Recently I started experiencing signs that seem akin to PTSD, like flashbacks to walking in a park with children running around and having a terrible fear I was a danger to them like I was a danger to society when I was psychotic, hearing conversations about business charlatans and being triggered into remembering that I was that business charlatan once and feeling incredibly guilty and ashamed for it, watching YouTube videos about international travel that made me stressed and cried because it represented a future I lost with my ex, also basically experiencing so many of the psychosis signs that I used to have except this time I actively recognise that they are not real. But then everywhere I seemed to go I felt like I was stuck in an alternative universe where all my previous lies and manipulation were in a mirror reflecting back to me and I was being tested constantly needing to prove my trustworthiness.

But then it all started turning into me not trusting my own body’s hunger responses, my own body’s feelings and sensations, and it’s gotten so bad to the point that I even question whether I’ve actually broken my own foot recently and whether the scans really showed broken bones, whether the iron test I got recently actually showed I got low iron at all, whether the doctor actually gave me an iron infusion at all or just a placebo, and I literally felt like I could trust nobody except for the woman I’m currently in a relationship with and looking at the clouds and looking at past books I used to own because I felt it was impossible to manipulate those things into a reflection of the terrible things I had done in the past that kept triggering guilt and shame.

I’m aware writing this makes me sound pretty crazy so I want to reassure you all that I am visiting my psychiatrist this week to discuss all of this, to get appropriate help for what I’m struggling with, I have booked in a psychologist appointment for the day after, I will pick up the phone to Griefline if I need support while I wait for the official supports to come through, and I’m also open to your suggestions as to what else I can try.

Yes I was so angry and resentful and hated my ex at times for what she did (what she had to do to stand up for herself) and yet I still cannot help but feel love and affection for her and knowing she did the right thing to walk away and it wasn’t her fault that I didn’t have the right supports in place to pick me up when I fell to pieces through grief and heartbreak. She did force my head out of the sand (after a lot of unnecessary detours) to confront the changes I needed to make in my life, to stop being the manipulative liar that I was.

I did go on to find love elsewhere, I have been able to hold a steady job for the last 10 months, I was able to move out of home again, I was able to afford buying a secondhand car, I started pursuing new hobbies like junk journalling, I am still learning to not make work my entire identity and to explore other areas of life to enrich me, I started volunteering regularly again in a way that is sustainable with my current job, and she forced me to really dig deep to discover my own truth about myself about how I was capable of change all along, I just had to cut the excuses, try new things, build consistency, communicate a lot better to people, learn to be more assertive, and just start telling the truth consistently. I still have a lot of work ahead of me to really embrace myself fully, but since joining this community I realise I never really sought redemption all along, I just wanted to find peace with myself for what I had done wrong, what I am doing now to make amends and what future I can build for myself instead of feeling stuck in this grief and shame and guilt that was holding me back and frustrating everyone around me.

So thank you again for your patience to read all of this. Open to your reflections, suggestions and thoughts. I’m sure I will have more to add over time as I continue to process and make the changes I need in my life to embrace the gift that my ex has given me. I have no expectations that she will ever return to see what I’ve done and who I am now because that was never the point.

I know I’m a good person who has done terribly bad things (when I was sane and when I was insane) that I need to atone for in good time, and also I have done good things as well that have mattered. Both things can be true. I also know, much as it does hurt that some of the closest people in my life have openly expressed doubt that I am grieving at all, that the feelings of grief, the inability to process it and now working through the grief process with the right support, are all valid things to experience just because I am human at the end of the day. Reading the experiences here has really made me so thankful that I am not making this stuff up, that what I feel and experience is real, raw and worthy of support. So thank you, I appreciate you all.