How to Fall in Love without Losing Yourself (When You’re Bipolar II and For the First Time Now Have Someone Who Challenges You as a Person):

1. Lose yourself. You were already lost; you didn't know it.
2. Come to realize this slowly. Agonizingly. While being incredibly selfish, because you have no self to give, so you just take, take, take...
3. Enter crisis. Doubt that anyone can love you, because who are you, anyway.
4. ^ Live accordingly.
5. Try to snap out of it. You know that's bullshit.
6. Fail miserably, often. Causing plenty of grief for your partner as ze feels ze has to walk on eggshells with you, and rightfully resents it. Hate yourself more than you don't, for being a pitiful amorphous blob or shell of a person. Hate yourself for fooling someone into loving you.
7. Ponder who you are. Are your impassioned political views just a way of avoiding your own self-hatred? Is it all just a ruse to feel like you’re a good person? Doubt everything else "good" about you. Doubt that it's genuine.
8. Worry that you've ruined your relationship. It was all a show from the beginning. You fooled hir into believing you were as wonderful as ze said. Think about this every day, because you’re all but convinced of it.
9. Realize some things that are genuine. Notice what you do in your spare time, or what you do in your not-so-spare time when you should be doing what you should be doing. Realize that this is probably something you.
10. Talk to your partner probably too much about all this shit, seriously bumming hir out and ruining a lot of good moods because you can't stop thinking of yourself. Have a lot of blowout fights because you’re both so raw and coiled all the time.
11. Try to reclaim those things that are genuine. Actively identify with them more, and show it. At least pretend to be proud of them. Hope that it gets easier.
12. Keep trying. Know that you always will. Know you’re being naïve perhaps. Reckless perhaps. Break down often. Come this close to losing hope. Try anyway.
13. Realize one day that something has gotten better with you, in your head and heart. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but one small part of you and your life is better. Feel wonder-full and somehow content with that.
14. Repeat Steps 3-13 ad nauseum.
15. Notice the good times getting better between you and your partner. Somehow. Notice your sense of self has gotten more substantial. Somehow. Start thinking about your dreams again. Not just your nostalgic projections.
16. Do things for yourself. Do them by yourself, do them with other people. Make more decisions (make any decisions, because you never have, really). You’ll feel like you can’t; literally are unable to. And you worry about what your partner will think of you. Do it anyway (ze loves you).
17. Feel like ripping your hair out (it’s already falling out, why not) because your emotions get ahead of your thoughts, running wildly out of reach -- wildly, crazily, stupidly out of reach -- never to be caught by your reason and intellect.
18. Regularly remind yourself that just because you don’t want to be irrational, just because you know one thing and feel another, that does not mean you can just shove it off and be done with it. You are all of it.
19. ^ cry.
20. Hysterically
21. All the fucking time.
22. Feel out of control every day; some terrible version of you powered by -- if you want to get Freudian about it (I don't really know a better word for it though) -- your id. Worry that it's all been latent, dormant. And it's all who you "really" are. Hate it. See 6 above.
23. Continue to be wildly in love. Don’t hold back.
24. FIGHT. Yourself, your partner, fight with your fighting. Fight against nausea, fight against complacency, fight against that wanting to just detach. DO. NOT. DETACH.
25. Outwardly trust that your partner isn't just fooling hirself; they've made the decision, knowingly, to be with you and to do whatever that takes. Believe, outwardly, when ze says you're worth it, you're a good person. Inwardly: you want to believe it -- you trust them -- but it's never enough to really feel it.
26. Until sometimes, fleetingly fragile, you might believe it. You want to. And you realize -- you want to, you want to.
27. That’s about as far as I’ve gotten.

This journal entry brought to you by the letters BPD, CD, SAD, ADD, and ED.