F*cked On Arrival💗[26.12.23]
*Trigger Warning* Contains Paranoia! A Slice of Life - Ghost Intuition - Forgive To Forget - Confessional -Clock In🍷🎧🤍
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A Fly On The Wall Welcome! Hello Chasers!💗
I will try to document this feeling. It’s difficult to do because I am in freeze mode, as in- Fight, Flight, Fawn and Freeze. I tend to freeze - from the inside out. I don’t just go a little catatonic with my physical movements. My muscles and nerves seem to stiffen up like they are becoming frozen. My stomach is the only thing moving and whatever is happening to me physically on the inside, my heart is working extra hard to support it. I can almost hear it thudding in my eardrums. It’s also stiff and tight and hard and weighs a tonne. I feel it getting heavier the more that this goes on.
It’s only just started to take hold. It’s based on memories of a situation that in itself was based on gut feeling and intuition. When my partner said he hadn’t wanted me to go to his sister’s wedding to the guy she met (shortly after me and him had got together over twelve years ago) his sister and now-husband have three children together and I’ve been Aunty Chasey since before they were born. I witnessed all of their pregnancies from day one, I knew him not allowing me to that wedding - there was something sinister going on in his mind at that time. I was told it was because a couple of girlfriends of his brother were also invited and I have openly said I don’t like any of them; I say plural because he was between two at the time and didn’t know which one was going to be with him on the day. However, in the past I had beef with both of them individually so rather than say any of those girls couldn’t go, you know the one-month wonders, lucky fucking dip women, no. Let them go. Why not kick the longstanding, ever faithful, constant in my partner’s life for thirteen years - kick her out. Me. I am scapegoat material being that I am considered a second-class citizen. I ‘mental’ remember!? I must be mentally challenged. I cannot be trusted to drink any alcohol incase I kick off (the chances of anyone else doing the same don’t really matter because they don’t have schizophrenia) it has to be considered that I probably wouldn’t ‘enjoy myself’. Meaning, he couldn’t enjoy himself if I were there. I remember being gutted. No point me saying, I’ll just drink juice like what they make me do at any other social gathering IF I am actually invited to attend. Can you see where I am going with this? I was pissed off then, at the time, and I am still pissed off about it now almost a year or something later.
I think it’s pretty cruel to treat me this way. Even on this occasion where the bride and groom have the final say, they were begging my man to allow me to go. They would arrange tables separating us two from any of the other girls and we could all be adults about it. He said no.
It turns out that the groom’s young adult kids from a previous relationship were attending and the youngest had just turned 17. My partner was renowned for complimenting the groom on how attractive, smart and amazing his older children are because the groom is also very proud of how they have ‘turned out’. I think my partner, aged 42, fancies them. There I said it. He openly admits they’re very attractive women and that there’s nothing at all perverted or unheard of for a man of his age to date anyone of the legal age which in the UK is 16. I think it's really disgusting but not actually unheard of.
I can’t judge everyone by my own slippery standards and by that I mean. I am no angel or prude (although he makes me feel like I am talking like one) . I used to date a guy aged 38 when I was 17. I know it didn’t feel dirty or wrong in any way. What I do know is that I can’t even look at a younger man than me and say to myself “oh! he is fit”. I don’t get it. It could be the most attractive man on the planet but to me I would see a boy, I would wonder what his parents would think if a woman my age were to show sexual interest in their kid. It’s fucking mad. So, that’s where I stand. As I was saying I can’t judge everyone by my inability to look down on younger adults and not consider myself being intimate with them.
He was at the wedding and only video called me once the entire time and he was too drunk to remember showing me the table he was sitting on with some slag sitting there staring at the camera (amongst one or two of his other family members who I sort of recognised). The pretty tart was rolling her eyes as he scanned the table without me asking or even wanting his to do so, he kept bellowing out loud - “See Chasey, this is who I am with I am being a very good boy!”... Dickhead! I thought. He just gave me a very uneasy feeling inside. The cocky looking cunt wearing a short black skirt kept staring and staring at the camera. I didn’t react. Then nothing else was said about the night. Only that he wouldn’t dance with anyone.
Three days later I overheard other relatives talking to him on messenger asking him to explain where he went for those few hours when he ‘went missing and nobody could find him’. He hadn’t said anything about anything to me. When I asked what they were talking about, he said, “no it was only for a minute I was just on the toilet”. I didn’t and don’t believe a word he said. I know he was off up in the hotel room with that slag from the camera and whoever else he fancied. I think it turned out that ‘that slag’ was one of the groom's daughters.
Now back to why my gut is rolling over and over keeping me running to the bathroom only for nothing to happen that feels like I need to do. Why I am trembling at the time of typing this and only by typing this am I getting some respite from my jealous anxiety bodily functions. It’s because he is currently at his sister’s house for Christmas dinner. She lives around the corner from his brother’s house. My other half is dog-sitting at his brother’s whilst his brother’s current girlfriend is dying in hospital. Yes it’s all tragically sad but so are funerals and everyone knows what its like at funerals and weddings. Breeding grounds for slags and dirty cheating bastards like mine. He didn’t tell me before today that these girls were also going to be at his sisters all day and into the evening celebrating the day with their dad and little brother’s and sister.
I don’t begrudge them being them being there or living their fucking lives. I don’t begrudge him the same right. I just can’t undo those gut instincts, those mad memory muscles, paranoia and intuition borderlining, envy, jealousy and it all manifests into anxiety and emotional disturbance. I feel traumatised all over again. Like, everything I have ever imagined or ‘worked out for myself’ going from clues against omissions and everything; feels so real. It feels like it’s 100% happening, happened and will happen again. I haven’t mentioned anything to him today. It’s Christmas Day for fucks sake. I see him talking over her shoulder into her ear in my brain, saying the things he wouldn’t want her Dad to hear him say. I imagine them making arrangements to fuck again later on that night - without anyone else knowing what’s going on. I imagine what if everyone does know it goes on and just doesn't care that he is cheating on me, like it's just life, it’s only a bit of fun or they’re of the opinion - “None of our business' ' and turn a blind eye to it all.
I am suffering already in my home alone with our new puppy. Not drinking because I am not allowed (even on my own) by his rules and, this time around, not his rules alone. I don’t want to be drinking around a little puppy that is dependent on me and relies on me to provide and play and feed and take care of her and who deserves that I do that properly. I don’t care that I’m not drinking. I would care if she wasn’t here and I would still be forbidden to go out and buy a bottle of jack. That’s the only one I’d want to sup on. I don’t have anything to take my mind away from the pain of the emotions you actually experience when all this really happens to you. I feel the same.
Back to real time now. That was the brief explanation as to why I am panicking and feeling so shit, unsettled and upset now. Here is where I try and ‘type it out of my system’ whilst still sitting in my misery. It’s hard to focus on creativity when your head, hear and soul seems to be in turmoil against your will.
I have turned my mobile phone off to avoid more awkward phone calls and ‘dead giveaways’ to what’s going on behind the camera. I don’t want him phoning me on camera while at that house and showing me around the room for no reason only to make me look like a toxic paranoid fool. I’m far from toxic… I can’t deny, wholehearted, the other two. I need to try and pamper myself a bit now to get past these next terribly upsetting hours or days, as the case may be, where I am waiting here alone not knowing what he is doing or what’s going on behind my back. I just have to accept it. Put up or STFU. It’s easier to forget the past when making more memories in the present.
So, I disassociate my mind from all of this emotion and devastation that’s currently haunting me, when he is at home with me and it's just us . I don’t forgive him though. I do. I forgive only to forget though. It’s not the same as true forgiveness and I can’t prove any of this anyway. He makes me sound so ridiculous. Brings out the moral high ground set of playing cards. Knowing that he doesn’t even play by his own rules to any of the games.
The next step to improve my mood and get over myself was to have a nice relaxing bath which turned out to be a duck and a splash before my puppy started crying from inside her crate bed. I didn’t want to leave her waiting for me for too long as she’d been sleeping for 30 odd minutes already, she might have needed a wee. Like I said I ducked my head in the green (bath bombed) water, wet my head, washed thoroughly but quickly. Always rinsing my face wash off with cold water directly from the faucet. Felt a bit better. Got out of the bath, re-dressed for chilling out, tripped over the dog’s water bowl, got my socks wet and nearly had a meltdown. If it wasn’t for my tiny furry companion being so compassionate to my plight just trying to help me clean it up by licking and skidding about the wet floor, I might have actually cried. I am made of stronger cotton wool than that though and went to check on the chicken I could smell starting to cook. It was as I just said just starting to cook. I didn’t and still don’t feel like eating at the moment.
I have a sink full of soaking dishes. I feel depressed and worn out every time I look at them. I will get them done today, I said the same thing yesterday but life gets in the way. I am going to wait until Lola is sleeping again before attempting the washing dishes thing. It must be my least favourite household chore ever. Especially, when I have in the past, lived in houses supporting a dishwasher. I had become accustomed to relying on such machines. Unfortunately, where I live now, there is limited space to accommodate a full one or even a small countertop jobby. My partner doesn’t even want one and it’s usually him who gets to enjoy that part of the rota in cleaning duties.
He’s back on my mind again. In between playing with a huge pink snake, a unicorn the same size as my dog, a bitten blue fishbone rubber toy and a piece of soggy wet rope that she loves to run around with and slap hard into your face with her nose, typing this and watching my shutdown mobile phone on and off, I have been trying not to listen to my heart banging in my bone cage demanding to get out because it is in too much pain. The more I worry the bigger my heart grows, it’s swelling like a bowel does when breaking down the delicious food it has had to eat. I feel like my heart wants to fart or explode or both. My mind is breaking down all that I love about him and all that I don’t. It's a tasty combination that’s why I suffer.
After the bath I was still feeling stiff and slow moving, fatigued a little bit but was more refreshed. I had equipped myself to plod on forward and continue with those less exciting chores that needed to be done. As always the actual job of cleaning takes no effort or time at all once I get started. It’s a mind over matter task with me and it got me thinking that this paranoia, anxiety, jealousy thing I was going through was exactly the same thing! I was worrying about the worst case scenario event and the worry was weighing more pain on me than the actual event would if it did happen. My thinking about how much it hurts me is all down to my relationship with myself. I reasoned that I should maybe calm down and, although I had already told my mum that I was feeling this way, I knew I shouldn’t express anything to the culprit. He would just go mad either way. If I am right he will lie and shout and kick off at me, if I am wrong he will shout and kick off at me. There was no point sharing my concerns with anyone else, especially not him. I agreed to try and cheer myself up. I wasn’t in the mood for eating but continued to cook the rest of the Christmas Dinner for myself. I ate it slowly and didn’t taste anything. If I wanted to be poetic about it I would have say that I tasted nothing but my own fucking tears. Not even joking!
Later that night when he tried to video call me on messenger, I thought about how to approach this call. I had to consider everything that I had told myself not to say and do about the way I’d been feeling. I was calm and collected but still tethering on the verge of meltdown. Just the phone call in itself - literally the phone just ringing, threw me into a mental tizzy. The chance call coming through dragged back up all the paranoia about what he had been up to prior to contacting me and I don’t think that I could have handled this emotional upheaval any better than what proceeded. I ignored the incoming call. Immediately after the missed call I received this message:
HIM: R U okay!
(why not just OK, ‘are’ was too much and I am not important enough to be addressed as ‘you’ - okay must be special. It makes sense. To be Okay would be extremely special if I was now.)
ME: yes xx
(me in full British tradition trying to Keep Calm & Carry On.)
I phoned my mum again so that he wouldn’t be able to get through and I wouldn’t say something stupid and I wouldn’t look at his face and see some other girls cum all over it. My head does play evil tricks on my eyes under these circumstances. I see shit that's not there and I get a movie image of what’s gone on there before so I feel the images and they’re like old ghost polaroid undeveloped photographs. Like holding my intuition up to the light to see evidence. Then this happened:
Ok, so I could only contain those words from coming out of my mouth but my fingers never lie and when I type somehow, somewhere, with or without my consent, I tend to tell the truth. It’s the only thing I have faith in my capabilities of knowing but it’s only my truth. The night was mapped out with bad energy, bad conversations (if you can call me being screamed at - a conversation!) If you can say I made some input with the odd word here and there and my refusal to explain what’s going on in my brain, other than I know he has cheated and ended on the cusp of bad decisions. I was convinced that it was never going to work out with us while I cannot trust him enough to keep my thoughts at bay. I honestly believed that he had hurt me by betrayal and that I should stick up for myself and not be treated in such a way.
This is where schizophrenia’s residual symptoms have the largest impact on my life. It’s a common product of a person suffering from Romantic OCD too (which is a new concept to me but one my therapist and I have been thinking about lately.) I don’t try to wish things away by explanation either. I think as human beings we are all capable of suffering from symptoms of every possible disorder, illness, dysfunction discovered and even more which are yet to be. I am always self-diagnosing on top of my sometimes debilitating and chronic condition that they say is paranoid schizophrenia. I still struggle to believe that is a correct diagnosis because I have mental scars from the times when I had lost reality, was going through serious psychosis, and had no insight as to what was real or could be real or false. I wouldn’t believe it was really raining even if I was standing outside in the garden getting soaking wet.
I understand that my condition was the cause of not being medicated, built up loneliness, fear of persecution and the isolation and previous abandonment issues. My Dad having suffered the same illness apparently increased my chances (although genetics or environment alone have yet to be approved as probable causes for schizophrenia) the line falls somewhere in between. My mum had manic depression when I was growing up and in my teens. That was the previous or outdated name for bi-polar disorder so, if genetics does play a part in all this than we actually know it seems to be I was fucked on arrival! As I was saying, I think we all have an array of conditions inside of us due to our environment, childhood, and the belief systems we have invented or were drummed into us all our lives and we are always adding to that mixture, always evolving. That’s why I am MY OWN THERAPIST. We all are our own therapists. Even you who may or may not have an official label (that’s Okay too - as in special) are still always trying to figure yourself out, the reasons for doing the things you do, trying to analyse the why you are doing those things, considering the thoughts and what you’re thinking to cause it and working out self-improvements all the time.
I am fortunate in that I have and I am in a position where I don’t fight my own vulnerability. It’s important to be vulnerable to grow and change and progress and evolve into better human beings. I admire the octopus who has no protective shell to help ward off predators and no real defences. All their organs are at risk to the elements in the sea, the dangers of living and in order to not die they evolve faster than any other creature on the planet. I heard a poem about this exact thing! I love Andrea Gibson -Poet- and admire and understand, dig it and get it the love and lessons she’s learned and the life she lives. I could never ever ever ever say anything like she does that would hit as hard as it does when she says it. I would love you to watch this video which will complete the entire point of this current paragraph for me.
In fact, Andrea, will make the entire piece worthy of publishing as at the time of writing, although sometimes addressing myself to the Chasers! I have no real intention of posting this anywhere, any time soon. I have reached 3582 words without batting an eyelid. It’s double the amount I usually post as an essay. I will have to think about wrapping this up soon if I hope that anyone will like to read this at all. Maybe I’ll take a screenshot for the post.
I don’t know enough about anything let alone mental illnesses. The concept of having one used to fascinate me when I was sixteen and I’d read books by people who had one and enjoy them more because of it. I would enjoy learning about my Dad’s illness, and put him up a notch more on the pedestal next to my mother. But my experiences of reading, listening to and looking at anything with the mental illness topic has dwindled since I fucking became one. Even this conversation here with you now is beginning to grate on me. I just wanted you to know that there are such causes, other than schizophrenia, that could explain my erratic or unorthodox (is that the right word? I think not. I also think I will post this tonight on Substack!). If you get this far I hope you drop me a heart or something, god knows I might be needing a replacement if mine keeps vibrating this furiously like it does.
What I mean is that my behaviour isn’t me being a bad person. My mind is as good and as fucked as the next man. I am no less of a good person or less in control of my own actions just because I have an illness behind me (with me constantly) but backing me which I could throw all the blame onto.. I don’t but it’s hardly unheard of. I know people play on things like that, especially when embarrassed. I am always so perpetually embarrassed and suffering from some form of shame or the other that I have a permanent shiver from the constant cringing.
We almost agreed to split up. He was devastated but a bit too intoxicated to articulate himself correctly, at least his words matched his intention. He just delivered them in a shit angry shouting, spitting, frothing, reactive way. I deserved his anger but it wasn’t fair that I received it from him whilst he was drunk. He told me he absolutely loves the bones of me and wants it to be us three; him, me and Lola (my baby-puppy if you’re not familiar with my triangle haha!) the only other person in my ‘tribe’ is my mum who is privy to most of my emotions and as you will have seen from our messages, if I’m not complaining to her about it, he is telling her everything anyway. Mum does not interfere much but sees eye to eye mostly with my partner. She doesn’t agree with his behaviour but she understands his frustrations of being accused of betrayal and cheating with people, as she has been on the receiving end of my accusations too. He phoned her that night but it’s all kind of blown over now that he has come home as a surprise. He is here with me and Lola for as long as he can be until he may be called back to assist with dog-sitting (under terrible circumstances) duties. The subject of him actually coming home early was never even thought about or approached between any of us. We both knew why he had to be there and my paranoia had nothing to do with the final decision to come home and surprise me but perhaps it reminded him that I am only human and can’t switch of my symptoms like a tap to suit every situation now matter how serious it is unfortunately.
As soon as I set eyes on him, I was automatically back in love with him (as prior to that I was prepared to give him up and he would have taken my little dog back with him too as she was part of his family with his sister first. I would hate to lose her but I was adamant that I couldn’t be with a man like that anymore. I was the one over-reacting in my cold, vicious, silent sinister stare. I was being totally cold-hearted because of what I was putting myself through. I had no proof. I only had a gut instinct that is unreliable to say the least. My gut responses are just trying to undo what they’ve learned through trauma, love and fear, just like the rest of me, my brain, my nervous system, my psyche, my soul and my heart. I may or may not have been accurate and I hope for my own heart’s sake that I’m not but, as they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
