the ughs and the blahs

My psychiatrist also said that I had been on remission since May of 2016 because the root cause of my disorder was a concern of my safety and wellbeing, and being home with my family, my (then) boyfriend, and my friends was temporarily medicinal for me. It was like putting a tape on a cracked glass.

Then I got married.

Now here’s the thing. Z was the first person in the world (literally) who knew that I had panic attacks & anxiety disorder. I texted him the day I had some of the worst panic attacks. I texted him the day I was diagnosed by the psychologist. He knew I was crying all day and night even when my then flatmate did not. I didn’t really understand why I told him. Maybe I wanted his attention. Maybe I needed a non-judgmental friend and he was just the right kind of person. Every time I ran out of explanation for this decision, I simply shrugged and said, “Maybe God wanted me to tell him.”

Anyway, he was the first person ever to know. He have been playing a massive role in the drama that is my struggle with mental disorders since the very beginning. I’m sure he did not want to, but I roped him into it and I am happy I did. So in my head, the journey of my mental disorder is very much associated with his presence. And on top of everything, I started to become better around the same time we started dating, even though the two things might not even be related at all because it was also around the same time of my first therapy session. Nevertheless, I consciously and unconsciously credit him for my recovery process, which made me psychologically attached to him. Which is not the best strategy for both of us had we known what would happen a bit further down the line.

But we did not know what would happen. We only knew that we were getting married. And we would be together forever. And the damned disorders would never come back to haunt me (and him) again after that. So I let the attachment became stronger and I formed an ever deeper bond with him mentally, especially after we became husband and wife.

Now pausing a little bit on the tragic mental disorder part, I want to share with you the mushy part of this all. The title does have the word ‘marriage’ in it so you know something mushy will come up somewhere in this post.

The deal with being married is that I experienced the kind of love I never thought existed. I did not know it was possible for human beings to love someone like that. I mean, I loved him before we were married, long before. But immediately after we were announced husband and wife and we had signed the marriage book, I looked at him and it was like something exploded inside my chest. The thought of seeing him as a ‘husband’ instead of a ‘boyfriend’ was strange and exciting and beautiful and everything else. It was like the love I had for him infinitely multiplied just because we signed those little marriage books. Makes no sense, but it was really true, at least for me.

And everything about him came into view, clearer than ever, and I was so in love with every single one of those things. I remember when we were in the car on our way back to his house right after the wedding ceremony. We sat on the back seat with his mother on my right side and him on my left side. And he asked me to kiss him on the cheek. That cheeky brat literally asked me to kiss him for the first time EVER in a car with his mother on my right side and his father in the front seat. With a stranger driving. In the modern, western-like dating scene, this might be nothing to fuss about. But for us, for me, it was big. I remember grinning like a Cheshire cat all the way home after the kiss and there was a rush of adrenaline and serotonin in my brain like I had never experienced before. We were holding hands throughout the journey and he kissed me on my cheek several times. We were disgustingly PDA-ish and I am sure his mother was more than slightly put off by our behaviour (as his sister just recently confirmed to me). Even as I am writing this I am feeling extremely giddy from the memory.

Like I said, it is the kind of love that is hard to explain and harder to understand. It is the rarest kind of feeling to experience, to be this head over heels for someone. In a spectacular book titled ‘A Man Called Ove’, the writer explained that Ove looked at his wife Sonja as if she was the only thing in the universe in colours, and the rest were black and white. I read this book before we were married and I thought this line was incredibly sweet. A bit of an exaggeration, but sweet and romantic nonetheless.

After I was married, I knew it was true.

“He was a man of black and white.

And she was colour. All the colour he had.”

In all honesty, nobody really knows how hard this LDM has been for me, especially because not many people know or understand that I have mental disorders. To tell the story, I must first flashback a couple of years and tell you how, coincidentally, my mental disorders and my relationship with Z started at around the same time.

I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder a couple of years ago. The main trigger, my first psychologist and I concluded, was the Paris bombing in November of 2015. I was living in Manchester alone for a postgraduate study, and everything had been perfect until then. The minute I heard about the Paris bombing, I had a severe panic attack. I suddenly felt like the whole of Europe was not a friendly place for me. My heart was beating as if it was going to rip through my chest. I was nauseated, cold sweating, and all out bawling until very late in the night. I still cannot remember how I stopped the panic attack. I probably just passed out from the exhaustion.

The next morning I thought, okay, last night was bad, I had been in severe shock, so the panic attack was nothing worth making a fuss about. I went to the Uni and the panic attack happened again as soon as I stepped out of my front door. I was under the impression that people were being hostile towards me, or that they were looking at me funny, or that they suspect I was a terrorist with a bomb in my flowery Cath Kidston backpack. If it sounds silly now, it certainly did not sound silly then. I was so overcame with fear and anxiety that I cried hysterically as soon as I got back home, and I could not muster up enough courage to leave the house for too long or too far about a couple of weeks after that.

I realised it was a more serious issue when I started having frequent panic attacks. Mainly in the night just before I had fallen asleep or even sometimes in the middle of my sleep. I was becoming jittery and jumpy. The clang of the mailbox in my front door could easily send me into a swirl of extreme anxiety and panic. I was constantly crying and it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to come to classes and do assignments. Luckily, my Uni had excellent services for students. I was suggested by my personal tutor (which was also one of the best lecturers I have ever met in my entire life) to come see the Uni counsellor/psychologist.

It was during those early days of my discovery of the anxiety disorder that I started intensively communicating with Z. We had been close friends since high school, but something sort of changed that November. I told him of my mental disorder and he took it really well. Most people with whom I share my stories would tell me that I was just being dramatic, or that I needed to pray more, but he listened to me and did not say anything offending or patronising, and to be honest I was awed. I thought, you know, this was a respectable, reliable man. So I asked him, half-jokingly, if he would marry me if he could not find anyone in the next two years. He obviously thought I was fully joking because he brushed it off. But I was half-serious. I knew this man was a special one, but I also knew he was not interested in me, so I made use of our close friendship to mask my intention in a half-joke. I knew that even if he rejected me, we were close enough to brush it off as a joke and remain friends. It was a 50:50 chance, so I took my shot.

And thank God in heavens that I did because about a month later, just a few days before the end of 2015, he asked me to marry him.

It was a weird transition from being very close friends to boyfriend and girlfriend. We spent about ten minutes just awkward-giggling the first time we had a Skype date. In January he went to my house – in Indonesia, while I was in Manchester – to see my Dad and tell him that he was serious with me and he fully intended to marry me. Pretty ballsy move, was it not? I was shocked. My parents were surprised because they had always heard stories about Z as a friend, but to actually have the lad showing up at their front door asking them if he could marry their oldest daughter was understandably a pretty bizarre event. Even Z was shocked at his own bravery – or recklessness, as he would say nowadays.

So anyway, I went home in May to do the research for my dissertation, and he brought me home to meet his parents. I had to come back to Manchester to finish my degree until September, but he insisted something ‘formal’ should happen before I did. Therefore, in July, just a few days before I departed back to Manchester, he and his parents came to my house to formally ask my parents’ permission to have my hand in marriage. We were engaged in December of 2016, just a few days before our first dating anniversary, and were married in April of 2017. Everything flew by in a blur and ever since I went back home in May, my anxiety had been in remission. I was still anxious from time to time, especially in the days leading up to my wedding, but I had never had severe panic attacks and my mental condition was completely manageable.