Dating Someone with a Mental Illness

I am mentally ill. Every day I wake up and take prescribed pills to make me want to not jump into traffic or think everyone is talking about me. I hate taking these pills, so some days I refuse. On these days, I think everything is normal and I made enough progress to stop taking the pills. Then, after a couple days of not taking my pills, I begin to spiral. During these days I start to think there is no point in life and there is really no point in leaving the house, even better yet the bed. These days never mattered. Until I met my partner.

I am currently in the longest relationship I have even been in, after having a time limit of about one month, or less, for every previous relationship. I have also fallen in love truly for the first time in my life. My partner is now one of the most important people in my life, and everyday I feel like I am poisoning their life just by being in it. I do have good days, and we have the best days together. However, I have bad days too, and the bad days continue on for sometimes weeks.

During my dark days, I have two thought processes in my head. One side tells me that my partner, who has completely changed my life, is the worst person in the world and has never loved me. These thoughts lead me to fight and hurt my partner, and for my partner to fight back and hurt me. After this, I hate myself for being the cause of their pain and suffering, and the way I know to fix that is to hurt myself. I deserve all the torture in the world for putting the person I love most through the hell of being with me. Despite that, torturing myself in the multiple ways I do still hurts them because for some reason, which I will never understand, they love me too.

This leaves me stuck in a never-ending cycle of pain, watching the person I love most constantly be hurt over and over, knowing I am the one orchestrating their torture. All I want in this world is to give the person I love most the world, and instead it feels like all I do is drag them six-feet under to the place I am damned.