Spring, 2020. I was enraged at my professors’ ineptitude to navigate online learning. Already starting the semester off as self-proclaimed “old-fashioned teachers”, they didn’t even know how to post grades on the school’s online platform. Granted, there was not enough time given to the professors to adapt. They figured it out alongside us, the students, but we were the ones being graded and paying for it. The professors weren’t held accountable in any way so, naturally, it was a chaotically miserable time.
Suddenly following no schedule at all, with assignments and tests due inconsistently and lectures uploaded days after they were promised to be, everything was thrown off. The professors, just like with the bed bugs, weren’t understanding of connectivity issues which spoiled my entire online learning experience. Only being allowed one sole wireless provider specified by my apartment complex’s abhorrent management was tricky and Wi-Fi abundant public spaces were no longer open. Add in the overuse by everyone in my building and you get an issue, even after hours of talking to customer service, learning about Wi-Fi via YouTube videos, and running analyses through different apps, beyond my roommate, Al and I’s control.
In the middle of this volatile transition, both my psychiatrist and therapist leave their practice. This was the first therapist I had seen for more than one appointment. I had been with both for a little over a year and it completely shattered me, learning at the end of March that I was actually in for my last appointment. My psychiatrist, also without warning, left shortly after. I had to now open up to new people, which has always been the hardest part of finding mental health professionals (and also life) for me.
It felt like everything was falling apart, but Alex was there trying to hold it all together. I was fragile during this heightened state of anxiety and Alex was taking care of me. He made sure I ate, knew that he loved me, and was doing okay when we weren’t together. I was just trying to get through each day. We were accelerating at hyper speed because of COVID-19 and became even more intense than before. Online classes meant spending more time with Alex, so much so that it felt like we were living together.
Earlier in our relationship, I pointed out issues I had with codependency in relationships. Alex always contested me, saying it wasn’t as bad as I made it out to be. It’s something that happens over time and there’s no need to be afraid of it. So, I finally allow myself to depend on someone, feeling incredibly burdensome the entire time. You don’t mean to use someone you love as a crutch but when you pour all the love you have into them, and it’s almost unbelievable that you did because you’ve never done this before, you’re the one left vulnerable and exposed. Still, I lessen my grip on my sadness and start giving Alex inches of my trepidation, after he had been asking for miles this entire time.
Despite Alex’s help, I become very depressed and am advised to stop taking mood stabilizers. (PTSD is oftentimes misdiagnosed as Bipolar disorder, so I was convinced I wasn’t actually Bipolar.) In hindsight, that only made my mental state worse. Without the guidance of my therapist or psychiatrist, I was left to manage my medications alone. I was suicidal, spending a lot of time alone in my room, not even calling Alex to tell him what was going on. I felt perpetually stuck in crisis mode, trying to hold it together for the sake of good grades and for us. I didn’t want Alex to carry any more broken parts of me. The weight was already too heavy for him and I didn’t want to punish him like Zeus did to Atlas.
One night, Alex and I were arguing about yet another discordance (no surprise there). We had more and more heated political debates (think about the times) and he got louder and louder, something I can’t handle very well (like I told him numerous times before). There were even times I refused to continue our conversation until he lowered his voice while speaking to me. This was me, for once in my life, setting boundaries, but it took something as extreme as feeling muted (ever since November, mind you) to push me into distinguishing what was okay and what wasn’t.
Once again, Alex proclaimed he had a lot of “hot takes”. He was convinced undergraduate education was a “forced indoctrination” (and he was very outspoken about it). Spending a lot of time inspired by Jordan Peterson’s lectures and the depths of (other) right-wing media, he believed leftist professors imposed their political ideologies on him every day in class and he couldn’t speak up against it without being (feeling) chastised. I don’t know why Alex couldn’t just ignore it or distinguish between what he was taught objectively versus subjectively. Alex, enraged by this, often regretted his choice of degree. Still figuring out what to do after May, Alex, to my surprise, decided he would go to graduate school.
About nine months into our relationship, Alex is comfortable enough to finally tell me that he voted for Trump in the most recent election. This was something I didn’t want to hear. Everyone I told (totaling two people) were disgusted. They couldn’t believe Alex would support him. He would say, “There are always-Trumpers and never-Trumpers. I’m a sometimes-Trumper.” And I thought to myself, “I’d never be anything but a never-Trumper.” Subtle comments turned into full-blown conservative rants and his hidden political identity, in addition to the borderline-conspiracy theories, led me to stop introducing him to my friends. From this point on, Alex only ever saw Al since I lived with her.
Alex was insistent that I was just picking fights, creating issues when there weren’t any. He said I overanalyzed him to find the most minimal flaws to blow out of proportion. And maybe he was right, here I was questioning something that I should have been blindly grateful for: someone who loved me unconditionally. I had grown to love him back even more. We cooked together and danced in the kitchen to songs like “Hide” by Rainbow Kitten Surprise. He consoled me after vivid nightmares and night terrors. He treated my pets like his own. He made me feel warm and overjoyed to see him. Holding onto the good things, I tried to hide from the rest.
I’m praying for signal or a sign that you haven’t sent
Running from a place where they don’t make people like me
I keep the car running
I keep my bags packed
I don’t wanna leave, just don’t wanna leave last
I’ve been praying for your touch, your glance, your hand
“Hide” by Rainbow Kitten Surprise
Alex’s ability to care so much for me made me think that these differences were only superficial. He is someone I truly love. I feel like my secrets, now shared with Alex, forged a lasting connection. Now, I don’t imagine my life without him. I never meant for this to happen, but I’m too sentimental for it to go any other way. At least I’m not the only one thinking like this. Alex mentions how he’d have a lot of family members at our future wedding. He tells me he wants to be with me forever. We can put our differences aside, because love conquers all. And this kind of love, never having felt it before, was absolutely paralyzing.
“I’m going to make this relationship work,” you think to yourself. Oh, the sunk cost fallacy. And so, slowly, you go through this metamorphosis, shape-shifting into who you think they want. By the end of it all, you can’t even recognize yourself. You start wanting kids because he says it’s a deal breaker if you don’t (but you’re not sure if you ever want to get married and these hypothetical kids will never speak your mother tongue because they will never learn it). You decide you won’t ever be living in Italy like you had dreamed of for years (because America is everything to him) or backpacking through Southeast Asia (because he would never be interested in visiting your parents’ homeland). You let him choose over and over again, when a fight is over, when an issue is resolved. You stop hanging out with your friends because you can’t imagine a world in which they and him could coexist. You only spend time with him because after dealing with your issues, you don’t have any effort remaining to pour into other relationships. You disappear into not yourself, but him. You find yourself the most disconnected you have ever been.
I’m projected to finish up two degrees by the end of the Fall 2020 semester. However, in the middle of final exam week, I apply for August graduation, having already missed the May deadline. I reduce my second major to a minor, despite being four classes away from graduating with not one, but two pieces of paper that validated my self-worth. Shifting to online learning, I didn’t think the cost of education matched the quality anymore (and it’s arguable if it ever did). But still, I loved learning (isn’t it beautiful that knowledge is infinite?) and intended to go to graduate school one day. Now that the semester from Hell was over, I could think again. I could turn off auto-pilot and refocus. Reassess. Are Alex and I really meant to be together?
