All Clear.

So …. Remember I said that dating a schizophrenic would be easy? Famous last words, right? Okay, admittedly I’m being a tad overdramatic here, but Bear is pissing me off a tad. Just a tad though, nothing to worry about. Yet.

I’ve been super busy, and pretty under the weather too. There was nothing wrong, I just go through phases where I want to be left alone. I don’t want to go out and socialise with people. I don’t want to listen to how great other people’s lives are going. I don’t want to answer my sister’s ridiculous questions about how she pees in a wedding dress. Nor do I want to be belittled by her as we go wedding dress shopping / fitting / bridesmaid shopping / various other humiliation rituals designed to make me feel shit about myself. I’ve just been a bit of a grump, I guess. Shall we blame the weather? It’s been shit, right?

But I’ve thrown myself into work. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve been busy, tapping away, doing what I need to do to earn a living. You know, because that’s what I do. I haven’t been right by my phone waiting for him to call like I usually would. I’ve ignored the ‘bing’ of my message tone. It was nothing against him – Bear – I just needed a few days to enjoy some me-time. In short, everyone should probably back off and leave me the fuck alone. I’ve retreated into my woman cave.

I guess Bear just hasn’t seen that side of me yet – the side where I don’t want to talk to him, or sing to him, or tell him jokes and funny little anecdotes of things that have happened throughout my day. I just want to be left alone. There’s nothing wrong. I’m not backing away from him. I just need a few days to be left to my own devices. I’d needed a couple of days to bury myself in my laptop and get some work done. He just didn’t get it. He doesn’t get it.

Things have been a little strained. Strained probably isn’t the right word … I think he’s frustrated because he doesn’t really get what’s going on, and because he has too much time on his hands, his mind is working overtime. That, combined with the fact that he has an actual mental illness – schizophrenia, means that he gets paranoid. In short, he thought my woman-cave-retreating was a sign of me seeing someone else. He’s been cheated on before and the “signs were the same”. In fact, it sounds as if he has been treated like utter shit by the women he’s dated before me, but he doesn’t make a big deal about it. Not like BE did – he wanted to shout and scream about how fucked up he was after those women left him. Bear has more dignity than that, more class perhaps? He’s not looking for sympathy, they’re just little snippets of information that fell into our conversations.

But he kept asking if I was okay? Had I been having second thoughts about us? Did I want him to back off? Was he too much of a dick? Did I still want to see him on Tuesday? It was like a revolving door of doubt and self-loathing. As though my three-day quiet period was a sign that he wasn’t good enough, that he would never be good enough. The moment I wasn’t there to diminish any doubts, he spiralled into this pit of despair. A pit that I then found it really difficult to pull him out of.

I know dating a man with a serious mental illness like schizophrenia is going to come with its fair share of struggles. I’m not naive, and I’m certainly not stupid. I knew I would be up against it, I just didn’t think I would be accused of cheating on him so soon. I have a hard time dealing with being accused of that. It’s so offensive. Not that he really accused me at all, more sort-of hinted at it with odd, probing questions, and what felt like snide comments. Like when he text me on WhatsApp rather than iMessage because I was “always online” on there. I’d not responded to his text message, but had been online on WhatsApp … mostly because I have clients on there. And then when he later asked if I talked to my mama and my sister a lot on there. It just felt like they were odd questions to ask. Like he needed to know what I was doing all the time in order to feel secure. Like that’s the only way he’d know I wasn’t cheating on him.

He apologised afterwards, of course. I brought it all to his attention. He didn’t want to seem so “controlling”, and he knows he needs to work on a few things, his paranoia being one of them, but he definitely doesn’t want to do anything to push me away. That’s when he told me he was “falling in love with me”.

I have very strong feelings for Bear, but falling in love? I don’t think I’m there yet. Plus, there’s the whole mental-illness thing we need to consider here. I need to know I’m definitely down for doing this if I’m doing it. We haven’t even slept together yet. I’m worried that this has started to speed up far too much for my liking. We’ve been ‘dating’ (talking to each other and not talking to anyone else) for a couple of months. Surely it’s too soon for all that? Is history repeating itself? The tattoo, the controlling nature, the accusations, the questions, and now the L-bomb … ?

But now I’ve ran out of time so I guess I’m really doing this. Because today is Tuesday, and he got his results back. All clear.

Guess what that means …