A Decade and a Half of Hell, Part the Third

My thirtieth birthday was significant for me in several ways. I had been back in Milwaukee for about a year at that point and had already dated and "not-dated" a couple different guys. I was going to MIAD (Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design) and working in the warehouse of an upscale furniture store and tending bar at a small corner tavern I had been going to since before I moved back to Arizona.


I was having my birthday party at the bar I worked at. All my friends would be there.

There was a guy I worked with who told me that a friend of his on Myspace was asking him about me and possibly wanted to meet me. My ego exploded, and I was thrilled, as always, to know that someone liked me. We arranged for him to show up at my birthday party.

Daniel (name changed) was everything I was not, literally. In walks this guy with a shaved head, black polyester pants, two studded belts, a tight tank top, and tattoos all over his arms. I was instantly drawn to his "bad boy" looks. I flirted with him that night quite a lot, and we ended up going to dinner a couple nights later (or maybe he came to Game Night at my friend's house the next night--it was all so long ago). He turned out to be very intelligent--he taught English--he read a lot, he was funny, and he seemed to adore me. Things moved pretty quickly, and before I knew it, we were a couple. A couple months later he was flying to San Diego with me to attend my older brother's wedding and meet my entire family. Everything was perfect, and I could not have been happier. I was finally bringing a boy home to meet my family!

I couldn't have been happier, that is, until we got back from California. Our relationship had intensified quite a bit, and things, true to form, got way too real for me. The "I Love Yous" were becoming all too meaningful. The old demons kicked back in with force, and I started to find things wrong with Daniel, small silly things at first, daily minutiae-type things. I told him that we had communication issues; I told him I needed more space, that I didn't want to see him every weekend. He agreed, begrudgingly. I had a feeling from that very first conversation about needing space that the relationship probably was not going to last. He expressed concerns but I convinced him that we would keep trying, that I would keep trying. But my demons proved to be too strong, and I could not fight the feeling that I had to break up with Daniel. When we finally had our breakup conversation, it was terrible. He was crying. I was crying. But I left his house feeling free and unburdened and even optimistic. He wanted to talk more, and we did, once or twice, I think, but I was over it. There was no amount of pleading or logic on his half that would make me change my mind. (I will forever keep the beautiful letter he gave me in which he said that he was willing to fight for our relationship and fight for me.)

After a miserably failed attempt at a long-distance relationship with my childhood best friend, I somehow convinced Daniel to give me a second chance. We met for dinner and I gave him a letter in which I apologized for hurting him and told him how much I regretted my actions. A couple days later we hung out again, and a couple days after that, we were a couple again.

Daniel became my escape from the stresses of life. But then, about three months later, I turned against him again. I used my brother's divorce, a mild depression I was going through (probably self-induced), and several other things going on as justification for why I could not be with him. I withdrew physically from him almost completely. His touch made me cringe. I avoided intimacy with him as much as possible. He knew what was going on; we talked about it many times. I could see that I was hurting him, but I couldn't stop myself: I was a monster, after all. The second breakup was a bitter and angry affair.

We somehow got back together again for a third time months later. This time started with an email from him apologizing for a scathing email he had sent me a couple months prior. We continued emailing, just friendly how-are-you-doing stuff, and shortly after that, against his (and my) better judgment, we were a couple again. This time, however, I was doggedly determined to make it work out. I was going to do everything in my power to show him, to prove to him, that I was sincere in my desire to be with him. There was nothing that was going to sway me. He was skeptical, and rightly so, of course, but he went along with it. Things could not have been more perfect, as far as I was concerned. There was a period, a couple months after we got back together, that I was actually considering asking him to marry me. I could see myself being with him for he rest of my life. We were always happy. We were in love. This was finally real!

And then Daniel bought a house. We decided that I would move in with him. I don't remember if it was assumed, or if we had a deep conversation about it, but it happened. For my part, our moving in together was confirmation that this relationship was meant to be. I could not have been more thrilled. Daniel, however, expressed doubts (again, rightly so). His doubts made me feel terrible, unwanted, unloved, disregarded, and terrified: I had no backup plan, no other place to go. And so, I pressed harder, ever determined to make it work out. As moving day loomed closer, I could tell that I was much more excited about it than Daniel was. (He didn't help me move any of my things in.) Again, so many red flags were flapping right in front of my face, but I had become an expert at ignoring them. I brushed them all aside. He is just nervous about this major step, I told myself.

When I moved in, there was no honeymoon period. The atmosphere was strained nearly all the time. We had basically stopped being intimate from day one.

And this is where my life reached an all-time low, if you can believe that after reading the first two parts of this post.

I lived with Daniel for almost exactly one year. My journal from that year (beginning literally right after I moved in) is filled with about a hundred pages of pain, hurt, daily anxiety like I had never known, anger, self-loathing, self-berating, and so much misery and sadness. "I’ve wondered more than once if Daniel is doing some of this on purpose, to make me feel what he felt last summer. Some of the juxtapositions are just too perfect. I feel like I’m just waiting [around] for him to completely break my heart," I wrote. Daniel did not want me there, and I refused to accept that. I told myself that I was being neurotic, that I was seeing things that weren't there, that I was just over-reacting. About a month after I moved in, I wrote a letter to him in my journal: "A couple weeks ago, before your trip, we were driving to Best Buy. I said something about wanting to spend time with you before you left. Your music was loud and you didn’t hear me, so you turned it down and asked me to repeat myself. When I told you again that I wanted to be able to spend time with you since I wouldn’t see you at all for several days, you didn’t look at me, you didn’t say a single word, you didn’t acknowledge what I had said in any way. You stared straight ahead and turned your music back up. I literally felt like you had stabbed me." Episodes like this, some less intense, some much, much more intense, were the norm for the next twelve months.

For a while, I was convinced that I was paying a karmic debt for all the people I had used and hurt in my past. I was determined to take my punishment and keep plowing forward. But while I was convinced half the time that the universe was punishing me, the other half of the time I still refused to acknowledge that what I was perceiving was even real. Each time I took my concerns about the relationship to Daniel, he denied all the things I was noticing. I left all our conversations feeling foolish and stupid for suggesting that anything was wrong. On a daily basis, literally, I vacillated between hating myself, hating Daniel, swearing I must be going crazy, wondering if Daniel was purposely screwing with my head, and being terrified of being alone. Every. Single. Day. In mid-October, a mere four months after moving in with him, I wrote, "And now, here I am. I’m sitting in the library at school wanting to run away forever just to hide from this pain I feel. I want to curl up in a ball in a dark corner somewhere and stay there. My head is pounding. My stomach is churning...I feel like I don’t want to breathe. I feel like every good feeling has left screaming from my body. I feel like I’ve been punched, kicked, stabbed, and shot repeatedly in every part of my body. I feel like I’m lying on the ground, helpless, with no one to notice or help me. I feel like going on without this person I love so very much is not worth doing."

One might think that, seven months after that last (rather melodramatic) entry, when Daniel and I finally broke things off, I would have taken a hard look at myself and the previous year and learned from all I had experienced. But no, I did not. I felt abused, like Daniel was the bad person for treating me so poorly for so long. What I was not able to see was that he had been suffering as much as I had, for his own reasons. I was blind to the reality that I had forced myself on him, and I had done so at least partially so save my own ego and a sense of self that was constantly teetering on the edge of a cliff. I had known that he didn't want me, and I feel bad now for forcing myself on him over and over.

There is a song that I love, "Divers and Submarines" by Passenger, that reminds me of this period. (video below) The first verse says, "I clung to you like cat hair clings to a woolen shirt. You needed me like a wedding dress needs dirt. The more that I wanted, the harder I squeezed. The harder I squeezed, the less you could breathe." The more Daniel pulled away from me, the more paranoid I got, the more I wanted him, the more I needed that relationship to work out. I drove myself crazy that year trying to force puzzle pieces together that were not meant to interlock.

A few weeks after our breakup, I moved out of his house and in with my dear friend Kristen. Within a couple months I started dating like a fiend. It was like I was back in my mid-twenties again. My year living with Daniel was what I blamed for all this now. I felt entitled, almost, as much as I hate to admit it now, to get affection and validation wherever I could find it. I had felt so ugly and undesirable for so for long that I latched onto anyone who paid me even the slightest compliment. This directionless behavior continued for the next year and a half, before I graduated from college, right up until I got a job in a small town about an hour north of Milwaukee, a town that isn't exactly a gay Mecca.

I saw this isolation as a forced blessing: it was yet another chance for me to realign and get in touch with my "truest self," even though I had not even the slightest clue who that person was. Well, that didn't really work either because I continued to meet people on internet dating websites. I may have never met them in person, but I still led them on and primed them to praise and compliment me. I still kept my distance, in a literal sense, which is a sign that I was at least recognizing my destructive behaviors. I mostly talked to men who lived too far away to actually date. One of them, a guy who lives in Los Angeles and had offered to fly to Wisconsin to meet me, which of course sent me running in the opposite direction, wrote me an email in which he accused me of "getting off on reeling guys in and then breaking their hearts." Although I fired back at him, this was the first time that I actually admitted to myself that that was, indeed, what I had been doing.

I took myself off all dating sites and apps and focused on my job, on my writing, on practicing the piano, on forming and keeping authentic friendships, anything to keep me busy.

A few months later, my big brother John would pass away and set in motion a flurry of events that would completely alter the way I see and interpret my past and myself and my future.