‘Can you call it? I don’t like talking on the phone.’
‘Oh for FU—’ She hung up.
I ended up at Mum’s house at about 3am. Straight away, I could tell the Devil was gone. I was in the bubble of murder immunity. My soul would be safe, at least for that night.
I saw Mum putting some blankets on the couch. The couch?
‘Oh,’ I said, looking longingly into her room. ‘Can’t I sleep in your bed?’
‘JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, ROSANNA.’
I’ll never end up with someone like my dad.
(I was in it before I even realised what was happening.)
I couldn’t believe I was walking the streets at 10pm, looking for someone who was passed out drunk in the gutter. I also couldn’t believe that someone was my boyfriend.
Actually, at that stage, he was my ex-boyfriend. I had been trying to avoid him, but when he called me – so plastered he was barely coherent – and told me he was around the corner, I just told him to walk to my house. I figured I could get him home from there, or at least let him sleep it off on the couch. An hour later, when he still hadn’t shown up, I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went looking for him. I found him in less than a minute, about a block away from my house, passed out in the gutter outside someone’s front gate.
I immediately had flashbacks to my dad. My dad, the alcoholic, who I’d found like that so many times in my childhood. My dad, who made me sick with anxiety until the day he died. But I was a little girl then – I had no choice. If Dad collapsed while crossing the street or in the bathroom of a restaurant, I couldn’t just leave. I was tethered to him, not just by blood, but also by need. He was the only dad I had, and often the only person taking care of me. I had no choice but to stay.
It wasn’t like that with Mike, though. When I started dating him, I was twenty-seven. A grown woman with the power to choose what people I would allow into my life. I was the one in charge now, tethered firmly to those I loved by choice. And after a childhood filled with dysfunctional, neglectful and abusive people, I was very strict with my choices.
So why did I choose a man who passed out in the gutter just like my dad?
Mike felt like a safe option when we got together. We had met years earlier, in my late teens, and he’d had an adorable, massive crush on me at the time. It felt lovely to be so admired, but even then, I just had a feeling about him. Something was a bit . . . off. He seemed sweet and naïve, but every now and then a huge ego would flash through. Each conversation I had with him, I felt like I was talking to a real-life Holden Caulfield. I suppose at the time I sensed an arrogance, or a nastiness, but I was young, so I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
We occasionally kept in touch over Facebook through the years, and one night, sick of being single and missing the warm feeling that comes from knowing someone has a crush on you, I messaged him. We met up later that week, he kissed me in the rain, and we were a couple almost immediately. Even though he lived almost two hours away in Wollongong, we spent almost every day together. I didn’t think about why I had rejected him years earlier. I suppose I didn’t want to think about that; I just liked not having to be alone.
But the warning signs started pretty early. On our first few dates, he talked a lot about his wasted potential. He’d always wanted to be a writer, or an actor, and he considered himself exceptionally talented at both. But it hadn’t worked out for him, and now he was toiling away in a call-centre job that he ‘just knew’ was beneath him.
‘Do you ever feel like you just know, you just know, that you’re better than other people?’ he asked me one night.
I laughed. ‘What do you mean?’ I was hoping he was joking but scared that he wasn’t.
‘Well, sometimes I just feel so lucky, because I know that I’m more intelligent, and more talented, than, like, ninety-nine per cent of people. It’s not . . . I mean, I don’t mean to sound like a dick, but . . . it’s true. It’s just true. Don’t you ever feel that? I mean, you’re talented, and funny.’
‘Um, yeah, I guess,’ I said, not wanting to rock the boat in a very new romance. ‘I know I’m good at what I do. I’m definitely a talented writer, I guess.’
I didn’t quite know how to answer. I was making a living off writing then, but I felt like a fraud every day of my life. I was constantly waiting to be found out, like every piece I wrote was going to be the piece that would finally make somebody say, ‘Wow. We really shouldn’t be paying Rosie to write anymore. This is just awful. Why did we ever think she had any talent?’
I was living my life waiting for someone to notice I was actually terrible. Mike was living his life waiting for someone to notice he was actually brilliant.
‘It’s bullshit, it’s fucking bullshit, some of the books that get published now. That should be me. I could be this country’s Jonathan Franzen.’
Smile. Nod. Agree. I told myself that his confidence was a good thing. It’s not like my low self-esteem was a positive; maybe I should try to have more faith in my abilities? Good on him, right?
It wasn’t until he started comparing himself to Robin Williams that I started to worry a little about his narcissism. ‘It’s just so fucking sad,’ he said, talking about his death a year earlier. ‘It really affected me, the day that he died. I had to call in sick to work, because I just kept thinking how easily that could have been me. I mean, I know how it feels to be so talented, and for that to overwhelm you, you know?’
‘Um, yeah.’ Wow.
That kind of talk should have turned me right off, but we were right in the middle of the hours and days of talking and learning about each other that everybody does when they think they’re falling in love. So, in the grand scheme of things, it was easy to ignore a few comments in which he revealed he considered himself equal to Robin Williams and Jonathan Franzen. Oh, and ‘just better’ than ninety-nine per cent of all people.
What I really didn’t want to admit at the time, although it was glaringly obvious, was that Mike actually had less reason to consider himself brilliant than most people I knew. Despite insisting he was meant for greatness, he never really did anything to achieve it. He also, shockingly, wasn’t as talented as he thought. His writing was . . . not terrible, but not great.
He once decided, since I made money writing online, that it should be easy enough for him to do as well (a subtle dig I ignored). He tried submitting a single piece, once. It was rejected. When I looked over it for him and gave him some gentle suggestions, he couldn’t have been more dismissive. ‘I’m not going to compromise my style,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’ll never work online, I don’t want to. It’s just about pandering for clicks.’ I was an online writer at the time, so that was another subtle dig at my expense. He seemed to really resent my success. I was sometimes approached on the street by people who had read my work, and it always made him quiet and sulky. When I signed my first book deal, I called him immediately, crying with joy, excited to tell him the news. He was the first person I called. There was tense silence on the other end of the phone.
‘Yeah. That’s great,’ he said, not even trying to feign enthusiasm. ‘Really great.’
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. ‘Are you okay?’ I knew he hadn’t been happy at work – maybe I’d just caught him at a bad time.
‘No, no, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Just tired.’
I started to tell him more about the deal, but he just didn’t seem like he wanted to be on the phone.
‘Seriously, are you okay?’ I asked. ‘You don’t seem yourself.’
He took a deep sigh. ‘Yeah, look. It’s not a big deal. It’s just, you know that I want to be a writer, and that my job is fucking depressing, so you just can’t . . . You must know that it’s just hard for me to hear this, because I’ve always wanted to write a book. You must know that.’
‘Oh,’ I said, a little taken aback.
‘Please don’t be annoyed, okay? I just thought you would have realised that, that’s all.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I quickly replied, terrified that I’d screwed up by being so selfish. ‘You’re right, this would be hard. I’m sorry I didn’t think about it . . .’
The call didn’t last much longer. I wasn’t sure how to react. Was I annoyed? Or was he right – should I have considered how my good news would affect him? I think he was right. Yes, definitely right. I really should have considered his feelings.
I felt like the excitement had been sucked out of me. I called my best friend, the one person who I knew would react to the happiest moment in my life the exact way that I wanted. And he did.
‘OH HOLY FUCKING OPRAH GURL! YOU GONNA BE FAMOUS! YAS YAS YAS YOU DESERVE THIS YOU FUCKING QUEEN! I’M SO EXCITED CONGRATULATIONS I WISH I WAS THERE ARRRRGGHHHHH!’
Tony did not stop screaming for a full minute. I stood, beaming, in the middle of the street.
‘Did you tell Mike? Is he flipping out? How are you guys going to celebrate?’
‘Um, yeah,’ I said. ‘I told him, but . . . It’s just really hard for him, you know, because he hates his job and he really wants to write, so . . . I get it. It must be hard.’
‘What’s hard?’ Tony snapped.
‘Just, me doing so well at the moment. It’s kind of selfish, to rub it in his face, you know?’
‘Uh, fuck that, Ro. Seriously. Fuck that.’
I knew Tony was right, of course. But I didn’t want to see it. Or maybe I couldn’t. Mike had been belittling my career and writing ability since we first got together, constantly making it clear that he thought what I wrote was mainstream and superficial. He even told me that he thought it was unfair I got a book deal ‘just because you had a bad childhood’.
‘Well, I’m also a good writer,’ I feebly responded. ‘They don’t give book deals to just anybody.’
‘Yeah, but you have to admit that you’re lucky you have an interesting story to tell. Why else would you get a memoir deal when you’re so young?’
He really thought my success should have been his, and it got to the point where I felt guilty that it wasn’t. He told me one night that he had always dated women who were beneath him; that he had always had the upper hand in his relationships because he was the more ‘valuable’ one in the couple. I was the first woman he’d dated, he said, who had the upper hand over him. He said it made him uncomfortable, but he was working on it. He just needed my understanding.
So I gave it to him. I put all of this down to his insecurity about his failed career ambitions. I kept encouraging him to write. I gave him pointers on how to submit his work. I wanted so badly for him to have the career he wanted, so we could be happy. Because a lot of the time, we were really happy. But he seemed to spend more time complaining about having no opportunities than he did trying to create any. He just seemed determined to be miserable and bitter.
Then there was the drinking. Mike really liked to drink, but he could not hold his booze. Every time we went out, he would fall over, or yell at someone, or cry. And it would happen so suddenly. One second he’d be a bit tipsy along with everyone else; the next, his face would turn bright red, he’d start swaying and slurring his words, and before you knew it, he was screaming at a bodyguard who was asking him to leave.
But I ignored that too. He didn’t drink all the time; it was just that when he did, sometimes he didn’t know when to stop. We’ve all been there, right? My alcoholic parents had drunk all day, every day, so I equated drinking problems with constant, consistent excess. I didn’t recognise what Mike did as a problem at first. Even though when he drank, I would start to get nervous about how fast he was going, and whether or not he would embarrass me in front of a crowd of people. But it didn’t happen all the time, so I figured it was okay. I could ignore it.
Plus he blamed a lot of his drinking on his parents, and his relationship with them really did seem to be deteriorating, so I was trying to be supportive about that as well. He would go on and on about how they were affecting his mental health. How his mother was manipulative and nasty. He would sometimes call me on the verge of tears, having just argued with them about something.
I wanted to help, so when Tony moved to Texas to study for a semester, I told Mike he could take his room. Sure, it was fast (we’d only been together a couple of months), but I just kept trying to think of ways to make him happier. If he left Wollongong and moved in with me for a couple of months, that would fix everything, right?
Mike moving in didn’t fix anything. In fact, it made things a lot worse. I hadn’t realised how much of his dysfunctional behaviour Mike had been hiding from me. Or maybe, in my desperation to ‘keep’ him, I’d been ignoring it. But when you live together, those things are impossible to ignore. The red flags turn into neon signs that are flashing right in your face.
His moodiness started to get worse and he struggled to complete regular, adult tasks, like paying his bills, or cleaning or shopping. He didn’t seem to have the first idea about how to support himself. When I’d ask him to maybe contribute more around the apartment, he’d sink into a dark mood and say something like, ‘See! My mum’s fucking right! I am useless. I’m sorry I’m fucking useless.’
I started to feel nervous about coming home from work, but also worried that he’d be annoyed if I didn’t. It wasn’t that he wanted to control where I was; it was just that he seemed to resent anything work-related that made me happy, and I didn’t want him to resent me. Like having an article go viral, or making a radio appearance. ‘Must be nice to have a job like that,’ he’d say, like I was doing well just to make him feel bad.
But I kept going. I kept ignoring. We could make it work, if I just figured out how to make him happy. When he was happy, things were so good. But his bitter moods were so hard to predict. I never knew which Mike I was going to get, and it was making me anxious.
Then, sitting on the couch one night, he suddenly burst into tears. He told me that he’d never been so depressed. That he felt worthless as a person. That he thought about killing himself. That being with me made him feel like a loser. That he hated the fact that life had not given him the things he wanted.
He was hysterical, and it petrified me. I had grown up listening to my parents break down like this. I had grown up feeling the brunt of their erratic moods and instabilities. I had grown up with their drinking and collapsing. I had grown up feeling alone and confused, and in that moment I realised that is what I had been feeling since I started dating Mike. Suddenly I was seeing my parents in front of me. I panicked.
‘I can’t deal with this,’ I said. I told him that I was scared, and I was really sorry, but I didn’t think I was the person to help him. Being around him, particularly in this moment, was triggering my PTSD, and that wasn’t healthy for either of us. I asked him to spend the night at a friend’s house.
The next day, I felt awful. His breakdown had explained everything. He clearly had some kind of mental-health problem that he needed to deal with, and mental health was something I understood. I’d spent years in therapy, trying to overcome the anxiety and PTSD from my childhood. I got it. I was so angry at myself for freaking out the night before – me, of all people, should have empathy for his situation. Managing mental-health problems isn’t easy, but it can be done. I knew because I was doing it myself.
I asked him to meet me after work so we could talk about what he’d told me, my reaction, and how we could handle it and get him the help he needed.
I was really surprised when happy, confident, funny Mike turned up. He seemed like a completely different person to the one who had been hysterically crying on the couch the night before.
I started by apologising, telling him I’d been triggered and freaked out. But after having a night to think about it, I was okay. I really wanted to help him. I didn’t realise he’d been so depressed that he’d thought about killing himself.
‘I’m not depressed,’ he said. ‘Seriously. I just had a bad day. I promise you I’m fine.’
‘Mike, you’re n
ot fine. You said you had thoughts about killing yourself. I’ve been there. I know how awful that feels.’
‘I don’t know why I said that,’ he casually replied. ‘Honestly, I feel fine now. I’m really sorry that it scared you.’
This wasn’t the conversation I had expected.
‘Mike, you may feel better today, but you’re not fine. You were hysterical last night. You said you’d had suicidal thoughts. I understand that the feeling may have gone, but something caused you to break down like that. And looking back over the last couple of months, I can see a pattern there. Your moods are so erratic. I just didn’t realise how bad it was.’
‘It’s not bad, though!’ he insisted.
‘I think you need help,’ I said, ignoring him. ‘You need to see a psychiatrist. Maybe even go on medication if they think that’s what you need.’
‘I’m not going on medication,’ he snapped.
‘Look, you might not have to. But you definitely need help, Mike. After last night . . . You’re not well. You may feel better today, but you’re not well. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of! Getting help is so doable. We can work on this together.’
‘There’s nothing to work on, Rosie. I’m fine. I just had a bad day.’
He was flat-out refusing to acknowledge that anything was wrong, which really scared me. I understood mental illness, and I had empathy for what he was going through. But he needed to be willing to take steps to get better. He wasn’t.
So, I told him we had to end it. I didn’t want to, but I knew I couldn’t be with someone who refused to acknowledge their mental health as an issue. I couldn’t relive my past.
I held my head high, walked out of the bar and never saw him again.
Ha.
When I walked into my empty apartment, I immediately regretted my healthy decision. I wanted to go back to ignoring everything. I didn’t care; I just didn’t want to be alone. Any relationship was better than being alone. I called him, in tears.
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