The Inexistent Line Between Care and Codependency
"Our culture doesn’t teach us how to take care of ourselves while also taking care of other people."
By Louise Meyer
Louise Meyer is a writer and a student of clinical social work in New York.
I only realized that the relationship was over during his third Adderall withdrawal in eight months, when I went over to his apartment in the middle of the day and found him in bed, sleepy, with a glassy look in his eyes. He was still himself, still making me laugh, but I didn’t want him to be alone that day. I got a Lyft to take us the mile to my house so that he could rest there, safe and sound.
I can’t remember when it all started. He had never flourished, per se, but I realized before other people did that he really wasn’t doing well. Once I realized it, and as it dawned on other people too, I had to decide to what extent I was willing to support him. I found myself absorbing messages about how much to take on, and those around me encouraged me to see any caretaking as a problem—as an impingement to my own well-being and even to his growth. But that idea—that supporting him was a problem—unsettled me, and I started to question it.
The withdrawal incidents accumulated slowly in the months before we broke up. I remember the day I drove us through the empty streets of a small town in the Berkshires. It was the fourth of July. We were speeding to the last open pharmacy because he had forgotten his SSRI at home and had decided to leave his Adderall behind too. He didn’t want to be on it over the holiday weekend. I get it—he wanted to be present. But it never worked out that way. Instead, he was feverish, nauseous, brain-zappy; he threw up and lay on the dock. I was furious and said let’s get in the car.
The incidents consumed more of our energy as they became more frequent. He was trying to manage OCD, ADHD, depression, anxiety. Substances—SSRIs, Adderall, weed, kratom—helped and hurt. The kratom helped him decompress, wind down at night from the Adderall. But in the wintertime I became convinced that the kratom was causing a newfound obsession with his skin. I had heard horror stories about the drug and delusional parasitosis, and had also heard it was a bitch to get off of. I started pressing him to get off it, as did his family and a doctor at the ER. Meanwhile he had gotten more and more worried about skin infections, about fungi and worms and parasites, about threads coming out of him, kind of like Morgellons which Joni Mitchell had. He started picking a lot—superficial wounds that didn’t heal because he picked them. Sometimes I would barge into the bathroom and command him to stop picking. Then he started shaving the beautiful hair on his chest and legs.
When he did finally get off of kratom, he took a break from the city and went to his parents’ place. I went over to his apartment to clean things up, so he could return to a cozy room. I dusted and wiped down the blades of the fan like he taught me to, tossed the dollar store tweezers and nail repair kits, and hid the tea tree oil and Egyptian Magic he lathered on himself each night. My stomach didn’t turn until I used Windex to wipe down a layer of hairs that he had plucked and stuck up on the mirror. My face was watchful—afraid—when the mirror was clean again. Something was very wrong, whether in his mind or his skin. I had always loved his knowledge of and attention to overlooked detail, but now he knew an encyclopedia’s worth of information on little-known pathogens. His family and his doctors and I kept telling him everything was fine, which only made him feel crazier. We spent several late nights on WebMD searching for the symptoms, and on Zocdoc, looking for an in-network doctor who might give him the time of day.
So it took a long time to understand how deep in it he was, and how deep in it I was by extension. I kept trying to support, to steer, sometimes to meddle. But all of a sudden things ground to a halt. It became clear that there was no longer room for two people in the relationship, and perhaps that there hadn’t been for a while. I wanted to care for him, but wasn’t in a position to stay in a relationship with someone who couldn’t care for me too. And thus we separated so he could focus on taking care of himself, and so other people—family, namely—could take on a larger role in that process.
This decision was difficult not only because I loved him immensely, but also because I feared he would not be alright without me. It was clear that our relationship had been tasked with too much, that I had been trying to single-handedly ensure he was okay, happy, that New York was working for him. Ultimately it was too much pressure on both of us. So it ended and he went home to the suburbs, to his family’s love and support. And that was good. He was so lucky, and I was unbelievably grateful for that.
For a time I was angry with his roommates, with his friends, with mine. For how little I felt they did for him. When it was so obvious he needed more. It felt embarrassing—enraging—to ask repeatedly. People should have gone over and kept him company, watched movies, played music. Why did no one make him a lasagne? I will never understand that.