Living with Hyde

So this is where I start. This isn't the beginning and I certainly hope it isn't the end so I am very aware it's a strange place to start. Well let me be clear, it's not the start of my old life, and it's not the end of my mortal coil, but it is a turning point. I have recently (thirteen hours as of this moment to be precise) lost a great deal. My fiancé has left me, I no longer have a home, and my finances are at nothing. I am once again a thirty year old single father. What differentiates me from so many other single baby daddies is that I have suffered for quite some time with bi-polar. I have fleeting moments of absolute hopelessness where I feel that for one reason or another the world would be better off without me. Now this may seem quite a depressing read but stick with me, I'm not all doom and gloom.

I have coped with my condition for quite some years, flitting between sadness, repressed anger, and bad choices to moments of manic behaviour. Wild benders, massive amounts of self-confidence and love... as well as more bad choices (can't seem to escape them whatever mood I am in).

I find it difficult to communicate my feelings in speech and instead tend to lock myself away, both physically and mentally. I will walk around smiling if I need to but have very little trust for people even those closest to me so I hide any negative thoughts at the fear of looking weak. I can spend hours on my own with nothing but my daughter as company and when she sleeps I cry, I think off all the mistakes I have made and mentally torture myself. It's lonely and sometimes my only vent is to write and hope that someone can associate with my feelings. As a teenager, I used to allow my feelings out as pure and unadulterated as Game of Thrones. I would drink, fuck, and fight, not always in that order (reading it back seems sexually aggressive) but something to that effect. I always had dreams I wanted to be a vet, I wanted to work with dogs then I wanted to be in the police but for every dream I chased there at the back of my mind was Hyde telling me I couldn't do it. That I would never succeed. People will laugh when you fail and then you will look an idiot. Then came the mental torturing... then came Game of Thrones season two with the dvd extras, then came the regret for my actions and the next dream always following the same cycle.

It wasn't always this way though. From what I remember I was a happy child. My days were spent with friends (three of which I still hold very dear to me to this day), out skating and smoking things I probably shouldn't. Out in the woods building forts smoking things I probably shouldn't, you get the picture normal kid things plus marijuana usually, but it was good. I met my first girlfriend when I was maybe sixteen, in a group of loud people I was the quiet one so to meet a girl was amazing and we had for the most part a great relationship. I was sixteen so obviously we would get married and have kids and live forever while we recreated the final moments of Grease. I was wrong but hindsight is a wonderful thing. At sixteen the world is never going to change and this will always be how it is except with jobs and other cool adult things like driving, legally buying alcohol, and the ability to buy pornography with a straight face. Obviously it changes; there are break ups, fall outs, or you just lose contact and that is the way life goes. But I did well I kept a small close group of friends which to this day I have and would honestly say I would be a lot worse off without. I kept going after my break up but shied away from girls at the time it was a rough break up... if only I knew the joys that would lie in store in the future.

I lead myself to believe at the tender age of 17 I would die alone. No children. No loved ones. No amazing speech chronicling my life as I waited for cremation (do the world a favour and think about it... one less zombie). No one to make awkward small talk around my modest buffet. But I was ok with it. I never needed others' company to be fair, but it just happened I would awkwardly string words together with others as I floated through my day . My next sexual exploit was not an easy one to discuss in fact I bottled it up for thirteen years. Still a quiet young respectable male, I went down to my local pub as I enjoyed a game of pool. It was a game I had great difficulty mastering but oh boy when I was off I was just below average and I loved it. I ordered a soft drink as alcohol was never a massive allure for me and played my games. Things then became distorted the night all blended in to one I wasn't quite sure about how the rest of the night turned out but I woke up cold. As I forced my eyes open I saw exposed stone work all around me. I was naked on a mattress confused of where I was I rolled over me and there was a woman lying next to me and as I scrambled to wake, I realised I was wearing a condom. I grabbed my clothes and left the strange house. Passing people on the sofa still asleep, how the tits did I end up at a party?! I left the house and walked towards the town centre. Men don't get raped so what happened to me? How would I explain it? Nope, you're going to keep your mouth shut and pretend this never happened. I carried on in life while my dark secret ate me alive. It made me distrust the people I was in relationships with.

Sex was either the most engaging act I could have with someone that led me to instant infatuation or a hollow meaningless experience where I left feeling nothing but regret. Sadly I mostly felt the latter and when I felt the former it was very rarely reciprocated and was just a bit of drunken fun. I continued but as a shadow of myself. Sex was a drug to me. To feel the closeness of someone that wasn't a hollow experience I searched for not knowing the more I looked the more hollow I made it. I started drinking. Probably more than I should but I was just entering the best years of my life it was fine everyone did it. I hit my twentieth woman by the time I was twenty and I carried on shunning real relationships feeling that this is what I needed. Empty dirty gropes in a nightclub before stumbling through another strange door into another strange bed. I never joined the dots until recently but maybe... just maybe bottling up waking up in that basement wasn't a good thing.

So this is where I first started emotionally isolating those that cared for me but in my next piece of writing I will discuss the one positive in life. My daughter and life as a single father.