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.

On Fighting

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foreground of evergreens, with a river and mountains in the backgroundMany years ago, when we were attempting to see a couple’s counselor to deal with Catharine’s ADD (total fail, but that’s another story), which at the time she couldn’t take meds for, the counselor looked at us and asked, “Are you always this nice to one another?”

We looked at each other with faintly puzzled looks and said, “Well, yes.” The counselor got tears in her eyes and said something banal and we all moved on.

But that moment has stuck with me, because its true that we are really nice to one another. We say please and thank you and excuse me. We inquire after one another’s days. We try to be thoughtful about what the other one wants and needs. (Mixed success on that one. ADD is a bitch.)

I don’t know if we fight more or less than other couples. I’m pretty suspicious when people say they never fight at all, because sharing space with another human being is bound to cause friction at some point. (There’s a reason one of the Buddhist sages said that if you want to be enlightened, get married, because marriage is going to show you every single damn one of your buttons. Also, Catharine once lived with nuns, and they had all kinds of strategies to deal with this difficult reality of humans living with other humans.)

We fight pretty regularly, because Catharine’s ADD is exasperating and can often cause things said politely not to register because they don’t have enough emotion behind them, and I’m stubborn and I have a temper.

But here’s the thing. We fight kindly. We always have.

If I had to articulate our implicit ground rules, they look like this: no name-calling. No characterizing. As much as possible, own your own emotions. No insults. No dismissing. No contempt. No walking away, although asking for a pause so you can breathe and get a little more centered is not just permitted but encouraged. We try not to be defensive, but that’s a hard one and we don’t always succeed. We try to remember that we are on the same team and the same side.

It’s also true that our fighting has evolved. Over the years we’ve learned to recognize various signposts that suggest that what’s going on — or at least what needs to be dealt with first — is really anxiety or depression or depletion or something else. Over the years we’ve learned to see the beginnings of argument spirals that always go to the same place, so we can collectively refuse to go there.

But if I had to point to what has kept us together, being kind even when we fight is a huge one.

Well, This Week Sucked

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bright green evergreensIt’s been a really hard week.

My work has been really stressful in an emotional way, so I’ve been a little quieter, a little more tired, and a little more fragile than usual. Catharine had her own work stress, which got magnified by taking her morning meds late one day (and possibly having missed them the day before, but we aren’t sure) and missing her evening meds that same day. It’s the equinox, which is notorious for exacerbating mood issues, and I’ve been both PMSy and feeling extremely sensitive to the wonky moon stuff that’s been going on.

It’s meant that she’s been particularly melty — our term for being prone to crying, freaking out, and generally losing one’s center. It’s meant I’ve been particularly unable to deal with said meltiness. It’s meant we’ve had some questionable meals, which hasn’t helped. (Sometimes being a grownup is deciding ice cream with blueberries and chocolate chips is as good as dinner is going to get.)

It’s at times like this that our particular attachment cycles — her anxious, me avoidant — go head to head, and, if we aren’t careful, can spin us into a terrible place where she is a drowning person of neediness and I’m a resolute rock of anger walking away while saying “fuck this.” This is not how we want our marriage to be.

Weeks like this happen, sometimes. They probably happen more often to us than to families who don’t live with mental illness or chronic illness or similar things, because they’re just less sensitive to the vagaries of life, but weeks like this happen. They’re no one’s fault.

But what does get to me sometimes is the implicit assumption that I’m the one who is going to pull us out of it. I’m the one who’s going to “be the bigger person” (what is that metaphor, even?), who’s going to work against my own attachment style, who’s going to put aside, hopefully temporarily, my own needs for care or solitude or quiet to reach out and help quiet her anxiety so we can get to a better place.

Someone has to do it, sure. But this assumption — which is an assumption we both fall into — is born from a pattern in which she is the Identified Patient and I am the Caregiver, and that pattern, which was built in the early years of our relationship, which were also the early years of her diagnosis and recovery, is central to the imbalance and the inequality we’re trying to get past.

This pattern assumes that she is incapable, instead of unskilled. (Hey, recovery takes a long time, especially when it happens after two-plus decades of untreated major mental illness. There are lots of skills to learn/recast, because in some ways it really is a whole new world.) It assumes I am capable, instead of potentially depleted and most definitely limited. It assumes I am the rescuer and she the one who needs rescue. It assumes she is the weak one and I am the strong one.

Every single one of these assumptions is a problem. And every single one of them shows up regularly.

Yesterday we had it out a little bit. I fell apart after too much noise broke my fragile composure, and she started to leave in a huffy sort of way, and then we had one of those fights that’s at least as much crying as fighting and things got better. Later in the day we had another emotional conversation that cleared the air further. Right now she’s at the coffee shop and I’m at home on the couch with my computer and a cat. Chances are today will be markedly better. I’m crossing my fingers that this week will be better than last week. It’s easier to work on these patterns when we aren’t both a complete mess.

The Very Hardest Thing

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red leaves and black branches, seen from beneath

In the 13 years of our romantic relationship, my wife and I have been through a lot.

We’ve lost one father, two grandmothers, and three critters. We decided to have a kid, didn’t get pregnant, decided to adopt, went through the home study process, then decided to be childless. We moved twice, once 150 miles to a city in which most of our friends lived, once 3,000 miles to a place we knew very few people. There have been at least three major career shifts between us. She went to graduate school. I had three surgeries. She had two hospitalizations. We’ve together collected about a dozen diagnoses on top of two or three we started with.

It’s been a ride, is what I’m saying.

On the one hand, it’s our life. It’s normal to us, to a certain extent, and so much of it showed up gradually. We got to get used to things.

On the other, you could forgive us for occasionally needing to lay on the floor and marvel at our collective ability to cope.

Even in this midst of all of this really hard stuff, the hardest things to deal with have been my wife’s mental illness and ADD. They’re so constant, and at the same time so variable. They’re isolating, to both of us. They need so much attention and care and discipline. They conflict so wildly with one another.

And, most of all, they and the patterns we’ve formed around them have made it really hard to have a true partnership, a balanced relationship of mutual support. So many things have gotten so much better over the last dozen years since she was first diagnosed, but we haven’t yet been successful in sustaining new patterns.

I’m leery of talking about this in one way, because so much of the discourse around people with mental illness is how hard it is for their families, as if they are only a burden, as if the perspectives of the people living with mental illness aren’t relevant, as if they are problems to be managed. So many of those narratives are born out of parent/child dynamics that always have power differentials built in, and those dynamics often get replicated in other relationships.

So maybe there’s something radical about starting from the assumption that we can and should have a balanced, equal, mutually supportive relationship, that we have responsibilities to one another and to ourselves.

I don’t think we’re alone in our desire to have that kind of relationship or our struggles to get there. There just hasn’t been a lot of space in the bigger conversation.

I want to write our way into better patterns, more insight, and greater skill. I can only write from my own perspective in this relationship, but I write with the full support of Catharine.

It won’t always be pretty and intellectual. Sometimes I’m so angry I want to blow up the world. But I have faith that showing up to the work and sharing that work with others who know can change things for the better.