Surviving a Sociopath (3)

The road trip seemed to never end. In a way it never would’ve ended had I not discovered a way to get out of the relationship. I was invited to stay with family until I could get on my feet again, but the story that led up to this moment is important. We were in Florida, exactly where my husband said God told him to go to, and he just hadn’t listened. We were working another flea market, and someone overheard us talking about how we were living out of our vehicle. This sympathy would save me from the pain of the extremely dysfunctional relationship I was in, signifying that the cosmos had seen to it that I had learned what I needed to, and that now was the time to move forward.

One of the most difficult things in dealing with my husband was when he drove me to get locked up in mental hospitals again. Even though I was able to get stable on some medication for my mental disorders, it was quite the ordeal handling the mental hospital experience. I’m convinced the cosmos didn’t want me to find any reason whatsoever to return to a mental hospital, or feel inclined to stay with the man who was my spouse, by making memories that were so painful, I’d naturally be deterred from getting stuck cyclically. It would go like this: I would get mistreated for a long enough period of time, I would get locked up in a psychiatric institution again, I’d get out, then it would happen all over again.

I remember I was at a mental hospital in Oklahoma where I was brought to tears talking to my husband on the phone. He’d told me he’d had “enough of my games,” having to deal with mental hospitals and the like, and that he wanted a divorce because of it. I was crushed. Sure, I probably knew on some level we wouldn’t be together for too long, not with the way things were going, but a part of me must’ve cared about him, or the support he could offer me in those conditions, because my heart broke, and I cried. I was lucky I was put on medication that made me sleep a lot in that particular mental hospital, because the anxiety would’ve made me pace in a small unit that would’ve inevitably caused problems. In places like that, the consequences could translate into really being locked up, complete with an escort from the authorities.

Even with luck and the cosmos on my side, it was still very difficult to -ironically- mentally survive in a psychiatric institution. Being in a relationship with my husband had driven me to these places, and I’m sorry, but they are scary! Sometimes you get attacked by another patient. Screaming matches ensue occasionally ensue for no reason whatsoever. Part of surviving being with someone like my past spouse involved dealing with the consequences of the very essence of being with him, causing me to have to do many others would think, that of keeping my sanity intact after being in so many mental institutions. On one occasion, I was randomly attacked by another patient, and with all I’d gone through, it was still one of the most jarring attacks I’ve ever experienced.

Words can’t fully describe how tortuous the anxiety was. I feel like I’ve probably only met one person who understands what this kind of horrible anxiety was like to endure. The only other time I had this pressing problem was when I was married to my first husband. That marriage had issues all on its own, but nothing like my second marriage. My free will was temporarily frozen by this anxiety. One morning, when my body woke me up at six, I had to start pacing. One of the nicer staff members out in the common area made the comment to the effect of the following: “I’m sorry you have to pace. I know it’s something that you know you just have to do, not because you want to.”

I was very touched by this woman’s empathy. Good people like that were lifesavers, giving me that speck of hope that would be enough to keep me going.

Sometimes my husband would come and visit me in the hospital. There was one time he was trying to get in my head, an I ended the visitation after no more than ten minutes, and he was the only lifeline I had most of the time. There would be times when I would be remembered by another family member of mine, which was extremely kind of her, and those visits helped me survive the conditions of mental hospitals, too. The pacing was so horrific, I was lucky if I could sustain a visitation for more than just ten minutes. However, if I really focused, I could last the whole hour, but sometimes things were just too much to bear, and I sorrowfully had to drag my feet and go back to pacing.

The anxiety served to irritate me because I had no choice but to be in constant motion. The cosmos (or “God”) I believe was definitely with me, because my pacing didn’t cause anybody to get nervous, which can often be the case when a nearby person is unable to stop pacing. I was very blessed to be able to not get into any more trouble with other patients than I had to. There were homeless people that were patients as well, and sometimes you’d get overwhelmed with sadness at what they had to go through. Even though a mental hospital is not the place for me, the experiences were never wasted, even if they would prove themselves to be formidable challenges to psychologically triumph over.

There was a young man who was genuinely nice to me. Since people caring about you is so rare for patients in mental hospitals (there are staff who are exceptions, but I’m mostly referring to patients), I decided to try and be his friend. Even though he was genuinely kind, he was deeply troubled. I never got to know his whole story, but this young man had my sympathies because he was so young -he couldn’t have been over twenty-one- and he was homeless. He had a scraggly beard with very long, untrimmed nails. There was vacant look in his eyes most of the time, and he would talk to himself, or to whatever he was seeing that was not really there. Experiences like this would made me wonder what was going to happen to me. This dose of reality was sobering, as was my entire experience at mental hospitals, reinforcing lessons of gratitude, especially for those who actually do care and aren’t faking it.

Some time after being discharged, I was abandoned by my husband because I refused to leave with him when he wanted to up and hit the road again. There was a moment, when I was looking at him, that I knew what he was doing. Somehow, I knew that this man I called “husband” was extremely controlling, and that he needed to feed off the misery of others to feel like he was alive in some way. When I realized this, I held back, and I didn’t leave with him, and that’s the last I ever saw of him, and now I’m stuck with the aftermath of these memories he’d left with me.

My first marriage ended because of another woman. This marriage was ending because my husband was an abusive maniac. There was still hope, and I kept running after it, breathless, resolute, afflicted but not undeterred.