” Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time… What I want to say is, I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good… If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V. ”
These are the words Virginia Woolf wrote to her husband Leonard Woolf before she drowned herself to death in March, 1941. After years of struggling with mental illness and being married to Leonard Woolf, this literary genius and a forerunner in women’s writing, succumbed to Bipolar Disorder at the age of 59.
This is a tribute to all of those people who have lived with, and loved those souls plagued by the very complex and intricate illnesses of the mind.
Here’s a personal account opening up about the struggles of being in love with someone who suffers from mental illness, and the beauty of it:
I had never seen anyone cut themselves before. I sat on my bed, across the room, as she sat under her blanket trying to hide her tears. She sat there, blade in hand, swishing it swiftly across her wrist, multiple times. I didn’t have the slightest inkling till I heard a sniffle. I rushed to her side of the room, and trembled as I held her hands in mine. I wept with her, wiping off the blood from the surface cuts on her perfect wrists with whatever cotton I could salvage from our little run-down apartment. It had been a month since we had moved in together. She was my classmate at my graduate program, and we had fallen in love within a week’s time. After dating for a year, we decided to take the plunge and shack up. She had told me about her mental illness during the initial weeks of us having started dating.
But nothing had prepared me for the emotional roller coaster ride that the next two years were going to be.
Being with her opened me up in ways I never could have imagined. We sang, danced, painted together. Conversations were fantastic, and we revelled in each other’s creative outbursts. We cooked for each other, did chores around the house in perfect harmony. She was my person, and I was hers. Her effervescent energy, her impeccable dark humour, her infectious laughter, left me reeling.Then, there were the days when the dark cloud of gloom crept in. Sometimes, it wouldn’t leave for days. She wouldn’t get out of bed, or eat. She would cry in my arms, as I held her shivering, frail body, telling her it was going to be okay. Nothing I did could make her crippling sadness go away, or her anxiety. The helplessness I was feeling was nothing compared to what she was going through, her feeling of helplessness consuming her whole.
I went for each of her sessions with the psychiatrist. She had been diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia, social anxiety and bipolar disorder. I held her hand on our trips to the hospital, which would always be followed by a trip to Hamley’s and going into bouts of laughter as we sped across the sprawling floors of the store on the little plastic scooters. I accompanied her everywhere, keeping a tab on her diet, her medication.
When she told me about the friend that lived inside the mirror who read poetry to her, or the faceless lady who watched us as she slept in my arms everyday, I didn’t know what to tell her. I’d only listen patiently. That’s all I could do. I wanted these sounds, these faceless shadows to disappear, to leave her be. I desperately wanted her to be happy. I’d get mad at her when she’d skip her meds to drink a pint of beer, or when she wouldn’t eat her breakfast. I was perpetually scared for her, for us. The line between that of a lover and a caregiver was quickly blurring.
We have broken up since. We’re still friends, and talk sometimes. She has found love again, she says, and hopes to get married to him the next year. I for one, just want her to find her peace of mind. I have gone past the bitterness and realized that being in a relationship with her was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Those three years of my life made me grow as a person, and made me realize that it was in my efforts towards trying to ensure her happiness that my happiness lay.