Introduction
I have a lot on my mind this morning. I am running on 24 hours of no sleep and just got home from 18+ hours of driving. The reason why is sort of the thing that initiated all of the thoughts I am going to document in this post today.
Yesterday I was in the city doing Uber, and I got a pretty good ride request. $33 to be exact. Now, in my city almost all rides take around an hour, so a $33 ride equates to $33 an hour. Not too shabby considering I don’t have to pay taxes on that income.
However, when I arrived at the train station, I had four passengers. A young Hispanic couple and their son, and a very respectful Hindi gentleman. However, not one of them spoke English. There was some sort of situation they were trying to communicate to me, but two were speaking Spanish, and one was speaking Hindi.
After much google translate, I found out that these poor people were on a greyhound bus to Denver, Colorado. The bus left without them, and their luggage and visa documents were on that bus. Given the current situation with deportations, I didn’t want to leave them stranded.
The bus was supposed to stop in a city about an hour and a half away. I called ahead to see if they could hold the bus so they could get their luggage, but the bus was just a drop and go. I finally arrived at the bus stop about 30 minutes after the bus left, and there was much confusion over what to do.
I really couldn’t leave them stranded there. They spoke no English, nobody else seemed to want to help them, and they were vulnerable with no clear solution to help them get home. So, I told them I would try to help them catch up to the bus.
It took four hundred miles and 6 hours and 18 minutes, but we finally passed the bus just outside of Junction City, Kansas. Which was where the next stop was. So, I slowed down, got behind the bus and followed it to the stop.
When the bus pulled over, we all hopped out of the car and ran to the driver, and I explained to her the situation. She scanned their tickets, and they were finally able to get on their bus and go home. Before they boarded the bus, the dad and the Hindi gentleman both gave me hugs in tears and said I was “good people”, and a “brother”.
Now, being 7 hours and 400 miles from home, I had a very long time to reflect on that and how I felt.
Reflections
I was grateful for their response, I felt good at first because I did something compassionate. However, as I began to reflect on my life, I noticed a pattern that was more disheartening than encouraging. See, these people were complete strangers. I don’t know them, and I will never see them again. Yet, I dropped everything and drove 12 hours just so they could get home.
However, when I look at my interpersonal relationships, both my recent relationship with my ex-girlfriend, and my relationship with my family as a child, there was an evident lack of compassion. I moved heaven and earth to get people I barely knew to a bus hours ahead of me.
But in my relationship with my girlfriend and my relationship with my family, I couldn’t even do simple things such as respecting boundaries or even sitting down an being supportive by listening without making it all about me.
There were several countless times that my girlfriend had asked me to respect a boundary to help her, and I blatantly disregarded it. I remember her sharing something with me and her telling me that it was something that was vulnerable for her and that it would really help her being more comfortable with it if I didn’t fixate on it.
Not only did I fixate on it, but I hyper fixated on it, continually bringing it up in some fashion or another until she was in tears. And when she told me I had pushed her boundary to the point where she was in tears, my response was not compassion or understanding, but saying “I did respect that boundary, what are you talking about?”
I essentially completely disregarded, invalidated, and made her feel like she was crazy when she was telling me I was hurting her. She was pleading for me to stop hurting her, and I completely ignored it.
And this wasn’t a one-time occurrence. There was another time where she opened up to me about an activity she was interested in but was unsure about how she felt about it. I told her I would support her in whatever activities, hobbies, or endeavors she wanted to pursue, as long as she didn’t forget about me and still made time for me.
After so much of this, she got tired, frustrated, and, again, hurt, and she said verbatim, “You say you want to support my dreams, goals, and interests, and long as I love you.”
Again, I completely ignored and did not hear what she was actually saying. In fact, I actually had no clue that was what she actually said, until I went back to read the texts to figure out why she left. I was offering her love and support with conditions.
I kept offering to help her, and get things for her as long as she did x, y, and z. She said, “Why can’t you just do things to be kind, and not just if I do x, y, and z?” Yet again, she was telling me, “You are hurting me, please stop. You say you love me; can you please stop doing things that hurt me?”
And yet again, I did not take the time to actually hear what she was saying. All it would have taken was 5 minutes to hear her. Not just listen, but actually hear what she was saying. And then to cope with the anxiety that was causing the behaviors that were invalidating her feelings consistently, and repeatedly.
I could have spent 30 minutes sitting down and coming up with the coping mechanisms that I only found after she was so hurt for so long that she had to leave and walk away to protect her own mental health. She told me a few times that I completely changed after I died. I told her, “I’m not perfect”, and she said, “Actually, you kind of were”.
I think that compassion that drove me to drive those poor people 7 hours to catch up with their bus, was one of the major things that led her to fall in love with me. When I died, I said a lot of things I didn’t mean or even believe because of personality shifts due to brain hypoxia.
Because of how unkind and concerning those statements were, her parents didn’t want her to see me anymore because they were concerned for her mental and physical safety. Over the next 10 months, she kept trying to make opportunities for us to see each other again, but I repeatedly invalidated her feelings, tried to leave her (triggering feelings of abandonment in her, which I knew about, but again was so preoccupied with how I was feeling due to the overwhelming anxiety from the uncertainty of when I would see her again).
Because I let my fear of the unknown, which previous posts have described as being tied to my “inner child” using an unhealthy coping mechanism to hide from a perceived threat (uncertainty), I never heard a word she was saying. I never heard when she was asking me to practice empathy, what she was actually asking me was to bring back that guy who everybody could tell immediately loved her. The guy that was compassionate and loving towards her without cause.
He offered no conditions; it was unconditional love simply because he loved her. It was the kind of compassion, the kind of willing sacrifice, the kind of loving soul that appeared again for 7 hours last night to help complete strangers, and the soul that is finally making the changes and realizing what actually happened far too late.
She begged and pleaded, and I never got the hint. I told myself I couldn’t find coping mechanisms because it was too hard, yet I spend a week or so sitting down and evaluating and have several that work and am finally making progress all too late.
I could imagine it felt like I didn’t love her. I was so inconsiderate and invalidating that I am sure she questioned whether I stopped loving her. I never stopped loving her. I’m not sure if I ever will. But my lack of control over my emotions broke her. Even when she was telling me over and over to take the wheel back from my emotions because I was hurting her. The mood swings where like whiplash to her.
I’m not sure if she will talk to me again, and with the insights I have learned the past couple of weeks, I honestly don’t blame her if she doesn’t. The amount of love she would have to have to risk facing that invalidation again, even if I won’t actually do that, says a lot about how kind and compassionate she really is.
And honestly, the tools I am using to actually move forward with my mental health were all things that she taught me. She taught me so much about so many things. She invested so much in me over the past two years that I don’t think I can ever fully thank her.
I am so sorry and have so many regrets of how I treated her, but I had every chance to fix it. She was so patient and put up with so much just hoping I would bring back that guy that drove 7 hours. Just someone to listen to her, validate her feelings, and actually hear her.
Respect her boundaries, be the support and source of levity she needed when things were stressful. She’s gone through so much lately and she just needed me to be there.
I was so focused on my own feelings with the anxiety from the uncertainty of whether I would get to see her, that I didn’t realize the only thing I needed to do to get to see her was to cope effectively with my emotions, and bring back that compassion she fell in love with. Bring back the guy who did things just because he loved her. No conditions, just kind things just because. Flowers just because. Chicken just because I knew she loved it.
Bring back the guy who would buy a charger without a second thought because hers broke and didn’t complain because it was $60. Bring back the guy who would drop whatever he was doing, even for a moment, just to make sure she was doing okay. The guy who asked her every morning “Is there anything I can help you with to take some weight off of your shoulders today?”.
The guy who loved without thinking. The guy who wanted to do stuff for her because he could. The guy that listened to her. The guy that asked her “Are you looking for a solution or just someone to listen?”. The guy who heard her well enough to hear the things she never said out loud. The guy who saw sadness or stress in her eyes and kissed her on the forehead and told her everything would be okay. The guy who held her and comforted her while she cried, not the guy who made her cry.
All this fear, all this stress about uncertainty would have been gone months ago if I had just listened to her and put in the weeks’ worth of effort it took to find coping skills that worked. The simple effort it would have taken to be able to hear her and be the source of levity and comfort she missed and wished desperately I would put into to bring back.
I realized all of this too late. The only person who was in my corner since day one and invested two years into me and gave me the tools to start becoming and start the process I am currently in of breaking the mold of every influence I had as a child that was bipolar. I let my lack of recognition and effort drive her away. And likely permanently.
Throwing away something that special, someone who cared that much, is a level of guilt and remorse that never leaves. But time moves on and the only person’s actions we can control is our own. And the lessons learned from this have been extremely painful. But if I want to break this mold, and stop driving people who care about me out of my life it unfortunately was a lesson I needed to learn.
I am grateful for the lesson, but I regret that I lost the one person who would have been by my side and held my hand through hell and high water.
Once more, I will end this post with a quote.
“Individuals only have control over their own actions, thoughts, and judgments, not external events or the actions of others.” – The Dichotomy of Control, a core philosophy of Stoicism