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ON NIGHTMARES AND DAY DREAMS

I ’m starting to be so closely attuned to his moods, moreso than I am to my own.

If he’s having a good day, we’ll both have a good day. If he’s having a bad day, we’ll both have a terrible time. And it can change with the wind.

He’s found a new way to torture me.

His foot is getting wigglier and wigglier.

Whenever he’s anxious about something he says I did, he will shake his foot more aggressively until the entire bed is rattling so hard I think it would probably show up as a reading on the Richter scale.

“It’s anxiety,” he says when I mention it. “I can’t help it. Stop making me feel bad for something that’s part of my mental illness, something I’m unable to control. That’s just mean. You, of all people, should know better. Imagine if I said that to you. You would go crazy.”

I feel sympathetic—after all, I suffer from anxiety too—but there’s a point at which Timmy’s behavior gets a bit much, that it feels like it’s more of an intentional act than a real symptom of an underlying anxiety issue.“Well can you please try not to shake it so hard, baby?” I keep my voice soft and low, careful as possible not to set him off. “Let me know how I can help you. But shaking the bed is pulling me out of what I’m doing.”

“Fuck you, Margaux. Talking to me like that.”

The foot shaking intensifies.

I’ve never experienced someone else’s mental health issues be so destructive to my day-to-day life.

He seems angry when I ask him to work.

He seems angry when I work.

He promises repeatedly to help me with my work, but rarely seems to follow through.

I look up the mood disorder he says he has, and I don’t see any symptoms of that. No visual or auditory hallucinations. If anything, he’s more controlling, more rageful, more vindictive.

I try to understand it, so much so that I join a group online for sufferers and allies of people who have his supposed mood disorder. It’s a highly active group, and I seek to understand where he’s coming from. But these aren’t the same symptoms he’s describing at all.

Sure, he has periods where he seems more excitable—possibly manic—and others where he seems more down. The people in this group, however, primarily describe voices in their head.

He says he has none of the typical symptoms, just seems to use ‘I have a mood disorder’ as a blanket excuse to behave however he wants, and to never take any constructive feedback, no matter how carefully I time it, how precisely I word it, how much I emphasize that we’re in this together and I’m not judging him, just trying to help make us a stronger couple.

I’m not a psychiatrist though, so what do I know?

And the foot situation just gets worse. To the point that every time he gets even slightly upset, he shakes his foot more.

The entire bed will bounce, and it feels a little bit being on a trampoline.

And then he’ll let out these little moans, grunting noises like an animal in pain.

It’s torture, sitting here listening. Being bounced up and down while I’m trying to sleep, and then even more when I try to work. He’s depriving me of sleep, depriving me of being able to concentrate on writing.

And I go through this cycle of feeling like a bitch for asking him to stop.

But it’s like he knows it annoys me, so he does it more. He puts it on, in addition to whatever might be real.

Sometimes he starts off the day shaking his foot and moaning, and the moans are actually traumatizing to listen to, like a wounded animal crying in the night. I almost expect Sarah McClachlan to start singing with a voice-over asking us to donate to animals in need.

Those are generally the days where he describes having had a bad nightmare that will typically impact his mood for the rest of the day. He’ll be short, irritable, take everything extremely personally, start fights for no reason, find excuses to storm off.

And when he’s in the apartment, resentfully sitting on the bed next to me, he will shake that foot harder than a blender on the highest speed setting.

And I get it. I have nightmares too, and mornings where I wake up screaming because something terrifying happened while I was asleep. But, after a moment of disorientation, I’ll realize it was just a bad dream and I’ll move on with my day.

But with Timmy, he wakes up in a mood and he lets it pervade every aspect of both of our days. Like he’s wearing his nightmare like a badge, and justification for bad behavior. It’s almost like he’s saying ‘because I had a bad dream, you have to endure me dragging it into our day and making you have a real, living nightmare’.

And then other days, it feels like I’m able to catch him at just the right time.

“Timmy, let’s watch the movie you mentioned. We can hire it.” Or, “Yes, we can add that extra streaming service I can’t afford.” Or, “Let’s go to the store and you can pick out what you want.”

Many days, when I give into his never-ending list of wants or needs, usually resulting in financial cost to me, he’s nice for a spell. And the foot shaking stops. But it never lasts. The good periods seem to be getting shorter and shorter. His wants and demands seem to be bottomless, ever-expanding, illogical, greedy.

I feel like he’s training me in some ways. Giving me positive reinforcement whenever I give into his spontaneous whims. Punishing me when I don’t.

Sabre can be like that, sometimes. If I give him a treat—especially if it’s a Churu—he’ll purr and rub himself up against my leg, cuddling me as a thank you for the treat. When I don’t give him a treat, however, he’s prone to biting my ankle.

And Timmy is starting to act a lot like Sabre. Sleeping all day, being selfish. The reward and the punishment.

But the difference is that Sabre is a cat.

And Timmy is a nearly 40-year-old man.