Julie Clarenbach

You matter.

If you're here, we probably have something really important in common: we both love someone with mental illness. We know how awesome they are, and we also know how fucking hard it is.

Here's what I want to say to you: You matter.

You matter.

You matter when it feels like you — everything you are — has been subsumed under the hard and the complicated and the heartbreaking of your person's mental illness and all the needs that come with it.

You matter when people tell you how good you are for your person, as if you aren't a person yourself and how, exactly, is this good for you?

You matter when you desperately want to vent, but hold your tongue because you know talking to someone who doesn't get it is going to devolve into them telling you how awful your person is and you defending your person, now angry and sad that you didn't get to vent and you have to do all of this extra emotional work on top of it.

You matter when your person is having a really hard time and needs you desperately, and what you need desperately is not to be needed so fucking desperately right now.

You matter when the accumulated stress of everything gives you or exacerbates your own health issues.

You matter when you're connected to the joy of this relationship, and you matter when you feel flat and wonder how much longer you can endure.

You matter when you choose to stay and you matter if you choose to go.

You matter when you grieve the life you don't get to have, the life you thought you'd have, when you grieve out loud and when you grieve silently because you don't want your person to know that being with them comes with some grief.

You matter on the days when you're really fucking pissed off at the Universe, and you matter on the days you feel balanced and serene, like you've got this and everything will be okay.

You matter when you not-always-so-secretly resent how expensive mental illness and other chronic illness is, because there are other things you dream of doing with that money.

You matter when you throw up your hands and let the chaos win for the day, because you can't bring yourself to keep it at bay today.

You matter when you have someone who gets it and when you gleefully tell them the latest ridiculous story and you can both laugh and shake your heads, because it is funny and it's funny precisely because you both know how awful it also is.

You matter when you just need someone to support you for a change.

You matter. No matter what.

Oh, Technology

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I logged on — or tried to, anyway — to talk about the fight Catharine and I had last night, but for some reason my site was giving me a 500 error. My hosting service was able to roll things back, although I apparently didn’t lose posts I made after that backup, so I have no idea what’s going on, honestly.

Until about 7pm, we’d had a great day. We spent the morning driving around neighborhoods we might be interested in for buying a house, then we came home and basically lay on our respective couches, recovering, through dinner. (Which we ordered.) Around 6:30 we finished watching tv and I went upstairs; once I go upstairs, I consider it introvert time. I’m in my room, by myself, reading or watching something or writing or whatever. (Also fighting with the cat who likes to attach my headphone cord, but that’s another issue.)

Some friends of ours got on messenger and wanted to talk about when we’d next get together, so Catharine texted me to tell me to get online. This annoyed me, because I didn’t really want to be interrupted and certainly not for something that wasn’t time-sensitive. The conversation itself was weird, because friend A started it and then disappeared, and friend B was chatty, but about random things. So it eventually ended with no actual plans having been made. I expressed to Catharine that it would be helpful if she didn’t interrupt this time for non-time-sensitive stuff, and that next time, telling them I was in introvert mode and she’d check with me tomorrow would be a fine strategy.

Well. One of the challenges we have is that my need for solitude can and often does poke her abandonment stuff, so me needing time to myself turns into “you don’t want me around” which is both true and … not about her? And for whatever reason, this time she went into full emotional meltdown, which meant what could have been a short “I’m annoyed and here’s why, please do X instead of Y” “Oh, yeah, didn’t think of that, thanks for telling me, I’ll try to remember for next time” turned into a 2+ hour thing.

Sometimes it really does seem like any emotion I have that isn’t 100% centered, compassionate, connected, and whatever is for her a huge problem. It’s not a reasonable thing to ask of anyone, especially because it’s not like my moods are extreme. I get annoyed, I get sad, I get angry, and yeah, I might be snappish or quiet or speak with intensity, but it’s all just … that? But if I assert a need of mine that happens to not be the easiest, most comfortable thing for her emotions/personality/issues, then all hell breaks loose.

I mean, the thing itself was annoying — I need to be able to have solitude without it being either about how I feel about her or how she feels. But the real problem was the meltdown that accompanied my setting a (perfectly civil) boundary/request. I think she’ll probably (sometimes) remember about leaving me alone once I go upstairs. But I don’t have any faith that we won’t have this pattern again, and that’s the part that feels so demoralizing. We can work through individual pieces, but rarely the patterns that prevent the individual pieces from being so terrible.

I don’t always like who I am around her, because I don’t want to be shut down or distant, and I don’t want to be upset and crying, and so often those feel like my only actual options.

Marital Update

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I’ve been missing writing, so I’m going to attempt to do a post a day for a while, just to get back into the habit.

As has so often happened, a spring crisis derailed all of my lovely plans for the year. In mid-March, Catharine got hives. And I don’t mean one or two; I mean all over her body. They landed her in the ER at one point, when her eyes and lips swelled up. She’s taking a 24-hour antihistamine four times a day (doctor’s orders), and for a while the one she was taking turned her brain into Swiss cheese. She’s had periods when they were so bad that she couldn’t focus or think or really do much of anything except scratch and try not to scratch. It is mid-November and she’s had exactly half of one day hive-free. We think we’ve figured out some things, so we’re hopeful things will continue to improve, but it’ll be months before she can back off the antihistamines.

The only good thing this whole debacle gave us was a new psych med that was intended to be a temporary counteraction to prednisone and made her mood better and more stable than she’d experienced in her adult life.

A more stable mood on her part is the only reason we’ve really made it through this period. She’s been less able to be present around the house, especially because she also sprained her knees, and the resulting load on me has made things really hard. I’m at capacity, which means when she asks still more of me, I have a tendency to fall apart. A friend challenged me to do more in the way of self-care, and I’ve added solo movies and trips to the coast with a friend to my calendar, but the reality is that my energy is limited and that is always part of this complicated mix.

So, we’re still here. I’m still struggling to figure out how to have the inner life I want, the writing life I want, in the face of what we’re dealing with. In some ways we’re so privileged, and that can sometimes obscure for me the ways in which we’re dealing with more than most people. I can’t do it all, just because I want to and because I have fewer (maybe? differently) limitations than she does.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and dear friends are coming over to cook and play cards and hang out in PJs, because we’re fancy that way. It’s the first time in a long time I’m feeling anything like the holiday spirit.

The Importance of Solitude in the Care and Feeding of Julies

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small pinkish purple flowers on spiky dark green conifer stemsCatharine and I regularly joke that we’re doing things backwards. Because I work remotely for a company in DC (and my family lives out there), I periodically fly east for a little over a week while she stays home. Because we both work from home, that means I spend nine days running around from meeting to dinner to hangout while she sits at home by herself, having her meetings and doing her work, but physically alone.

In the Myers-Briggs system, I am all I. She is all E. If you know anything about introversion/extroversion, you can see what a problem this is.

I come back happy to have seen all of my people but absolutely, completely fucking drained. I want to hole up in a dark cave and not speak another word for three straight weeks.

She, on the other hand, is desperate for human company. The words have kind of built up inside her and are bursting to get out.

We’ve found ways to not make this a complete disaster. She has coffee with people and has a friend or two over to take the edge off; I gird my loins and accept that there will still be some people time even though I really don’t want to have any. We make it work, although the first week back is usually a little rocky.

If only she were the one who traveled and I was the one who got to stay home, things would be kind of perfect. I’d get the week of beautiful solitude, after which I’d be all calm and filled up, and she’d come home from a trip physically exhausted but emotionally replete.

But since this isn’t how it is, and since we do both work from home, we had drifted into a pattern whereby we were home, together, basically 24/7 unless someone had a doctor’s appointment. And since Catharine only goes to doctor’s appointments by herself during my work hours, the only times I had when I was home alone were the (very) occasional weekend coffees or preaching dates.

A few weeks ago, I said to my therapist that I just want a fucking break. For better or worse, my brain is a sheepdog, and if I am not alone, some part of my brain is busy keep tracking of all of my sheep, which means I cannot fully relax. That’s true even apart from the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into (I once told my friend her 5yo had climbed onto the kitchen counter and was getting something out of a cabinet while we were in the living room — she looked at me like I was from Mars, but sure enough, there he was on the counter), but it’s made worse because of the caretaking patterns we’ve fallen into. I’m also just energetically sensitive. If people are around, I’m picking up on their emotional states, which makes it really hard for me to get clarity on my own.

She pointed out that solitude isn’t exactly something unattainable and asked me if Catharine would be amenable. Once upon a time, she took my need for solitude personally, because it poked all of her abandonment buttons, but time and repetition and lots of conversation have convinced her that it’s nothing to do with her personally — it’s about me and my needs. So yes, she’s amenable. We’ve even talked about it before. We’re just really bad at consistent follow through. Or, at least, our life makes consistent follow through challenging.

So we talked about it again, and the deal is now that every weekend, I get a few hours home alone. Catharine either goes to church or a coffee shop or a workshop or wherever. I don’t care which day it is, and I don’t care where she goes. So far my alone time has coincided with migraine spikes, but everything has coincided with migraine spikes lately, so that’s not exactly noteworthy. We’re going to see if this is enough, or if we need to add a quarterly hotel staycation to the rotation.

For so long, everything was weighted to what she needed, because the consequences to her not getting what she needed were so much more immediate and obvious. We’re trying to course correct, because just because I’m not going to literally die or fall apart in the short term doesn’t mean my needs shouldn’t be an equal part of the picture. We’re getting better at it. But it’s still hard to rewrite the internal assumptions.