Today’s post was going to be about something different, but I had something happen last night that is worth noting before getting into the other stuff.
Last night I accidentally came across something that I didn’t know about my ex-girlfriend while I was looking for a specific song she had shared with me on YouTube last year. It wasn’t anything shocking or drastic, but what it did do was trigger the exact panic response that led to the hurtful ways I acted towards her (covered in previous posts) that led to the end of our relationship.
Now, I want to be clear, I was not looking for this but found it by accident. I have intentionally invaded her privacy before, which at the time she told me was extremely hurtful and was a behavior she was extremely uncomfortable with. If you have read my previous posts, you can guess how I responded to that.
I want to dedicate a bit of this post to understanding the unique sensations and feelings that I feel in this response, and how I handled it last night.
I first want to start by naming the emotions. To most readers this may sound extreme or made up for attention, but what I am about to describe is my genuine fear response, and I am going to tie that back to my childhood, so it makes more sense as to why it is so extreme.
The emotions I felt were terrified, scared, and panicked. To provide more context, I am going to provide the definitions as described by my emotions app that helps me identify my emotions.
- Terrified: Consumed by fear.
- Scared: perceiving threat or danger, whether physical or physiological.
- Panicked: feeling frantic and overcome by fear.
An overwhelming array of physical sensations accompanies these emotions that further disables any and all functioning and ability to effectively cope. There is a rising heat in my face, my heart rate immediately jumped from my typical resting heart rate (I have conditions that make my resting heart rate borderline bradycardic or less that 60 bpm) to the heartrate I have post exercise (typically 150 – 180 bpm).
Keep in mind this wasn’t a gradual change, this was a change from 60 bpm to 150 bpm in a matter of seconds. Not minutes. Seconds. This was accompanied by extreme shaking in my hands, loss of motor function to the point where I couldn’t hold my phone, move, or anything. I was quite literally paralyzed by fear. On top of that, I was getting extremely lightheaded, extremely quickly. This doesn’t typically make me enter syncope, and it didn’t do so last night, even though that is a risk.
This response is terror. Sheer terror. The kind that you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and there is a guy standing over you with a bloody knife kind of terror. It is an emotional response that does not match the situation at hand. That alone to me was an indicator that the response was tied to trauma. Especially trauma from when I was young. I felt more like a kid terrified of a real danger and I had no one to save me because all of the adults were “busy” while I was about to be harmed.
So, I previously never had the words to describe this to my poor girlfriend. All she ever saw was the outbursts of behavior from my fight or flight response kicking into overdrive. It’s understandable that she was hurt. The behaviors that I did following these responses were hurtful, and typical of someone who doesn’t love you. She never knew the why, she never knew how extreme the fear response was. It just felt to her like I didn’t love her, I didn’t care about how my actions were affecting her, I didn’t care about her feelings, or her.
All of these are valid feelings given the context. She wasn’t wrong for feeling that way. I always loved her, and I never stopped loving her even though it felt like I did. And I am at fault in every way because I never really sat down and tried to communicate what I was struggling with in the way I did in the previous paragraphs. And I never sat down and came up with the coping mechanisms that triggered on autopilot last night.
So, I have established the emotions and feelings. I have established that they were the exact emotions and feelings that ended my relationship. And I have established that I was not intentionally seeking this. I mean, from a logical perspective, who would want to seek to experience that?
The strategy of building automatic coping mechanisms that trigger on autopilot actually worked. If I am honest with y’all, I never really expected this to work. I was coming up with all these strategies and plans, but I never expected them to actually work. I felt like I was doomed to the same fate that everybody I knew with bipolar I knew as a child lived out.
My first response was to start deep breathing. Unfortunately, this led to me starting to hyperventilate which only made things worse. Like I mention earlier, I had a loss of motor control. Very similar to situations I have when my blood sugar is low (I checked my sensor reading after I calmed down and it was normal). So, I just blurted out “Hey Siri, play my anxiety calming music”. Now Siri being Siri, she pulled the wrong audio. But apparently “anxiety calming music” is an effective enough query that it still pulled audio specifically designed to calm a fear response.
I just sat there with my arms crossed sort of rocking back and forth, trying to breath. Over the next few minutes I noticed that my breathing slowed down, I began to stop rocking, and my arms gradually untensed. Eventually, I was sitting there, calmer, but mostly spent from the overwhelm introduced by that fear response.
While tired, I was at a point where logic was as accessible as emotion. I knew that if I didn’t process this before deciding to go to bed, the only thing this would have helped was stopping the overwhelm. It wouldn’t help me in stopping whatever core thing was driving this kind of behavior.
So, I propped my pillows up, turned on my cozy lighting, and took time to take some brief notes for this blog post. So, the thing I was sort of relieved and also pretty sad about was that this response actually had nothing to do with my girlfriend. It had everything to do with my childhood.
As we have discussed in previous posts, I have an extreme fear response tied to uncertainty. What does anything in this situation have to do with uncertainty? Well, I will just give the details of what I found. It’s nothing harmful at all, not one bit.
There was a song that my girlfriend had sent me last year and I couldn’t remember what it was. It gave similar vibes to the one my roommate was playing on her TV and it had good memories attached to it, so I was trying to find it. Now, I had never saved this song. It was on her YouTube music playlist (we would listen to the song while hanging out together), which post break-up was another thing I no longer had access to.
So, I was trying to find her playlist (still didn’t know I didn’t have access to it at this point), and I googled her name and “YouTube music” to try and find that song. What I ended up coming across were songs that she had written and published and dedicated to friends of hers.
Now, this triggered the fear response because of a few things. She originally had started writing songs and sharing them with me on soundcloud. She was an excellent song writer, and I loved her songs so much. However, I had wanted to introduce her to a label I had contact with hoping to help her get visibility on these amazing and beautiful songs.
The producer for the label told me that based on what he heard these songs were produced by AI not her. This had triggered that the same fear response detailed earlier, and (seemingly out of the blue from her perspective) I became confrontive and began interrogating her about the songs. She did end up using an AI tool, but only for pitch correction. Creating songs takes a lot of effort and you can’t always hit a note perfectly.
So, this was the first of many things where her inner child was like “Oooh I created this thing I am so proud of, let’s go share it with the person I love! He’ll be super proud too!” And I was at first, but then came the flip due to the anxiety response.
Now, why is that relevant. Well, each thing that her inner child wanted to share with me because I was her safe place, that I kept repeating this “light switch” pattern of behavior, she slowly stopped sharing with me. Our conversations became less and less about things we enjoyed and loved sharing with each other, and more and more about disagreements, unmet pleas, and hurt feelings.
So, all of those things she was excited to share with me, she stopped sharing. Because it was no longer safe to share these things with me. It became a “danger”. So, I had been checking her soundcloud for the past few months waiting for a new release, but she hadn’t posted anything on there since that fight. Last night I saw the songs, and that others had known about it, but not me. And that uncertainty kicked in, “Did she really love me?”, “Was it all a hoax?”, “Was the whole thing a lie?”.
But in my processing, I realized that the reason she wasn’t sharing this stuff with me anymore, the reason why other people were her safe space, the reason why her friends knew more about her than I did, was because my behavior, my inability to explain was going on emotionally with these fear responses without placing the blame on her, these things had all caused her to ask the exact same questions I asked at the end of the last paragraph. It was never that she was hiding things, it was just that the shell left of the compassionate guy she fell in love with was no longer a safe space.
Even though at the time I thought I was all that and a bag of chips, to her, not only was she afraid to share things with me, but she was mourning. She was mourning the loss of the guy she fell in love with and desperately wondering if he would ever come back, or if this shell was all that was left of him.
All of those fear responses that damaged our relationship to the point where it finally broke… They were all because of my own lack of recognition of the damage I was causing. Her inner child was in the same place mine was with my mom. My “I can’t share this new thing I’m so happy about with mom”, became her “I can’t share this new thing I’m so happy about with Noah”. And on top of that she is a mother. Not only did I make her feel that way, but I made her afraid that I would make her daughter feel that way.
She was so happy, and so proud that the guy she fell in love with was going to be the father to her daughter. After I died, she was terrified that the shell of the guy she fell in love with was going to be the father to her daughter.
While I am so happy that my coping mechanisms are working, and working well, and I am so happy that I am finally becoming less of the shell and more of who I was, I find myself wishing every day that I could travel back in time to the guy in October of 2024, sit down with him, tell him the two futures he could have, and give him the roadmap I have now.
I know how much that guy loved her, and I know the future he would choose. I’m not going to say she’s never going to come back, I’m not going to say she’s never going to be willing to give a little bit of herself again to see if I am going to protect it, or if I am going to hurt it.
But what I can say is why would she? Who would take that risk? What logical person would give a little bit of themselves to see if that guy is really back, or if he isn’t? What logical person would love someone so much, what logical person would believe in someone so much, to risk that? Especially after all of the ways I have hurt her that I’ve processed, journaled, and talked about over the past few weeks.
Always and never are not standards by which we should judge situations. I can’t say it will never happen. But I also can’t wish that someone would risk that again. I still have dreams every night that we are together, and I have had the perspective I have gained in the last month. She is happy, she can go spend time with her friends and not be afraid of dealing with a spiral when she comes home, she can talk about whatever excites her without facing interrogations that leave her in tears when she just wanted to share something she loved with someone she loved.
And then I wake up, realize what happened, spend a bit mourning, grab my stuff and start my day. I have several things to be happy about. I am finally getting to invest, bills are paid, I have a business mentor who is helping me start my own business, I am finally (I say this tentatively) mentally stable, I’m doing okay health wise, I am eating healthier foods that I like, I have an adorable little plant app that helps me remember to drink water by taking care of this adorable little plant, I have a mental health app that has finally given me the correct words to describe my emotions. I have a lot to be happy about and I am happy about it. So many things going well, and so many little joys.
I had just always envisioned that I wasn’t celebrating these things alone. That she was right there with me. Likely with a custom t-shirt with an epic wyvern that said #1 supporter or something like that. But she’s not here. She had to leave to protect herself and her mental health before I got here. She was my number one supporter, and I did very little to actually support her. I can say there is very little I would sacrifice everything for. But I can say for certain, on the condition that I could keep a journal and a mechanical pencil to help my mental health, I would sacrifice everything and respawn with journal, pencil, 1 vial of insulin, and 1 pair of clothes, just for the opportunity to finally be the boyfriend she needed all those months ago.
We can’t change our past, but we can live in the present, to change our future. As usual, I will leave you with a quote.
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. – C.S. Lewis