People want breakup stories. Clean cause and effect. Something they can file away as “this is what went wrong.” At least I did. But the truth is usually messier than that. It’s layered. It’s timing. It’s emotional history colliding with a new connection that feels bigger than your nervous symptom can realistically hold.
Before this relationship, I had already lived through the collapse of an engagement. Two, actually.
That kind of ending doesn’t just disappear because time passes. It rearranges you. It changes what you expect from love, from stability, from yourself. After that, I got sober. I rebuilt slowly. Quietly. Away from social media and everything I knew. I tried to become someone who didn’t rely on chaos or intensity to feel alive. Someone who could sit with themselves without needing to escape.
And I did manage to build something stable for a while. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a real effort. It was learning how to exist without numbing everything I felt.
Then, I fell in love again.
After 3 years of celibacy, connection hit differently. It wasn’t just attraction or companionship – it felt like a flood into a part of me that had been sealed off for a long time. I didn’t realize how starved I had been for emotional intimacy until I had it again. And once you feel that kind of connection after deprivation, it can become incredibly hard to separate love from survival.
I started reorganizing my life around that feeling. Not in one dramatic decision, but gradually- emotionally first, then practically. The relationship became a center of gravity without me fully noticing it happening.
That’s something I understand more clearly in hindsight: it wasn’t one choice that changed everything. It was a slow accumulation of small ones made under emotional intensity.
And intensity is where things get complicated, especially with Bipolar II Disorder. Because emotional states can come with a kind of certainty that feels absolute in the moment. Not because the compulsions are correct, but because they feel undeniable. Love can feel like fate. Hope can feel like instruction. Fear of loss can feel like urgency.
Looking back, I can see how much of it was happening inside me: the attachment, the longing, the meaning I was assigning to everything, the way my nervous system latched onto connection after years of holding myself apart.
When it eventually started to unravel, what hurt wasn’t just the loss of the relationship itself. It was realizing how much of my stability, identity, and emotional regulation had quietly become intertwined with it.
And then I had to face everything underneath that – the grief from before, the sobriety I had worked for, the parts of myself I had been trying to protect – all still there, still unresolved, now fully exposed again.
Not because someone took them from me.
But because I had been carrying them alone all along.
And I want to be clear about something I’m still learning how to hold without collapsing into shame or resentment.
I’m not resentful.
I don’t look back at this with anger toward a person, because that isn’t what this was. What I see now is 2 people trying to love each other without the tools or understanding to recognize what was actually happening underneath the surface. My symptoms would flare – my emotions would spike, my attachment would intensify, my fear would get louder than my logic – and what I needed in those moments was stability, grounding, and understanding.
But neither of us really knew that at the time.
So instead of support there was distance. Instead of clarity, there was confusion. Instead of naming what was happening, we both reacted to it. I can see now how easily that can look like pushing away and being pushed away, when in reality it was just 2 nervous systems trying to protect themselves without language for what was going on.
I don’t believe that means what we had wasn’t real.
I think it was real – just unsustainable in the way it formed, because it was shaped by intensity, timing and unrecognized mental health dynamics I didn’t yet understand myself.
And I’m learning to hold that truth without turning it into a story of blame or failure.
Just honesty.
Just grief.
And they understand that sometimes love isn’t enough when neither person knows how to speak the language of what’s happening inside them.
And I’ve been thinking about how this doesn’t only live inside romantic relationships.
It shows up in families too. In friendships. In anyone trying to love someone who is struggling with mental illness without having the language for what’s happening.
Sometimes people don’t leave because they don’t care.
Sometimes they leave because they don’t understand what they’re seeing. Or they don’t know how to stay close to something that feels unpredictable or overwhelming. And sometimes they disappear not out of cruelty, but out of their own fear, confusion, or emotional limits.
And on the other side of that, it can be devastating.
When you’re the one struggling, their distance can feel like abandonment. It can feel like proof that you are too much, too unstable, too hard to love. It can reinforce the deepest fears you already carry about yourself.
Both things can be true at the same time.
There can be real pain in being left.
And there can be confusion and helplessness in the person who leaves.
I don’t say that to soften what it feels like to be the one who stays behind – because that pain is real and heavy and it lingers in the body long after the moment is over.
I say it because I’m learning that mental illness doesn’t just affect one person. It moves through relationships. It distorts communication. It creates gaps where language should be. And if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can mistake symptoms for personality, or intensity for incompatibility, or crisis for rejection.
I wish I had known that sooner – about myself, and about others.
I’m still learning how to hold all of it without turning it into blame. Without turning it into shame. Without erasing the love that existed just because the connection couldn’t survive in its original form.
Some things are real and still don’t last.
And that truth is painful – but it’s also where understanding finally begins.
There are 2 relationships that I keep thinking about when I try to make sense of all of this.
One is my ex-girlfriend, who I loved romantically. One is my brother, who I’ve loved and looked up to my whole life.
And what connects them in my mind isn’t blame – it’s distance that formed during moments neither of us fully knew how to handle.
I’ve been on the side of intense emotion, spiraling symptoms, and not having the right words to explain what’s happening inside me. And I’ve also been on the other side, watching someone I love disappear into something I didn’t understand, not knowing how to reach them without making it worse.
Both experiences leave a kind of silence behind them.
But I don’t see either of them as villains in my story. I don’t even see them as failures.
I see people doing their best with the tools they had at the time.
And I can finally say I’m trying to do the same.
Not to rewrite what happened. Not turn it into something it wasn’t. Not to force it into meaning that erases the pain.
Just hold it more gently than I did before.
Because I don’t want the ending of these relationships to be resentment, or confusion, or self-blame.
I want it to be understanding – even if that understanding arrives late, even if it arrives slowly, even if it takes everything I’ve been through to finally see it clearly.
And maybe, that’s the only kind of closure that actually lasts.
The Fragrance of my Mother 