What happened to her, anyway?

I don't know why I'm writing this now. It's late, and I'm far from sober. If I want to write a think-piece, much less an analysis of someone's personality, I should take time over it. I should have all my wits about me. Right?

Whatever.

To this day I cannot give a satisfactory answer to the question, What the hell happened to Wife? How did she morph from this into that? Honestly, it looks like magic: I don't know how else to explain it. And since magic was her whole métier, back in the day, I guess that's an appropriate explanation. Any way you look at it, it's bizarre.

Back when I met Wife, she was strong, energetic, and magical. We were both academic nerds, and of course the normal question then — even before you get as far as a pickup line — is What's your major? If you want to be really classy, you can ask, What's your research about? Her research was about the Arthurian legends and the character of Merlin. She knew, seemingly, everything there was to know about King Arthur and Merlin, and could trace both figures effortlessly back into the prehistory of Celtic mythology. She had ambitions to pursue these topics through a Ph.D. and into a tenured professorship somewhere important, and the same passion also fueled her dedication to learning real magic and her commitment to achieve a third degree as a Wiccan High Priestess. Even then she could be difficult, but she was invigorating to be around. Her conversation crackled with a tangible passion and energy.

Today? She's tired, spent, cranky, and totally self-centered. Everything wrong in her life is the result of bad luck or ill-treatment by others — none of it is ever her responsibility. (Just ask her!) Everyone picks on her, and then they abandon her. And wait, wait — let her tell you about all her physical ailments! She's got these debilitating headaches, plus of course her doctor tells her that she's permanently disabled so it's not like she could work to earn even one thin dime. Basically she's helpless, completely helpless — also miserable, but in a way that precludes her taking any steps on her own behalf, to make her own life better. Life has just been really difficult for her, you see, and it doesn't help that her ex-husband is such a heartless son of a bitch ....

And so on.

What the hell happened?

Part of it was that she got so sick. I mean, even back when I met her, she would sometimes get sick with weird symptoms that no one could really identify. Somewhere around the year 2000 (when we had been married for 16 years, and when the boys were respectively 4 and 2) she was finally diagnosed with systemic lupus. Probably a decade before that, she had been diagnosed with depression and put on Prozac. 

Privately I suspect she suffers not simply from depression but from bipolar disorder — a diagnosis she got just once, and which was never repeated, and which she has resolutely denied. But the phenomenology of bipolar disorder includes those marvelous, manic highs as well as the deep, depressive lows; and I think those highs are exactly what made her seem so magically exciting and attractive back in the early days. In any event, she denies that she suffers from bipolar disorder but these days she is treated with mood stabilizers that are normally reserved for bipolar patients. Her excuse is that these are the only medications that work on "treatment-resistant depression." Sure, babe. Whatever.

Anyway, I think the combination of physical and mental illnesses knocked the stuffing out of her, and convinced her that she was never going to achieve any of those great things she'd always dreamed of. Certainly there were years when she achieved almost nothing. Back when Son 2 was about three years old, he drew a picture of her and then ran to show her. "See Mommy? I drew a picture of you! I drew you lying down in bed, because that's where you always are." She absorbed comments like this into her own self-image rapidly, indeed almost eagerly.

On top of her health issues, she ran into a lot of obstacles in her professional life even before she left work on permanent disability. 

• Some of these obstacles may have been health-related, like when she did unexpectedly poorly on her qualifying exams for her doctoral program, as a result of which she failed to get a second master's degree and left school forever. 
• Other obstacles resulted directly from her execrable social skills, that led her to get fired from one job after graduate school and almost fired from the next. (In the end she went out on disability because of her lupus just before her boss lost patience with her forever, so they agreed to call it "permanent disability" and avoid the ugliness of termination-for-cause.) 
• Strictly speaking, these same execrable social skills meant that she had burned all her bridges back in graduate school, so when she did (as I say) unexpectedly poorly on her qualifying exams she had exactly no leeway with the department in which to lobby for retaking them, or working for another semester and trying again, or any other reasonable accommodation. No one was willing to extend her any more than the strict letter of the law; and the letter of the law was that she failed. Too bad, so sad. Goodbye!

In case it's not obvious, these are the same execrable social skills that I described earlier this evening — the ones that have left her virtually alone for Christmas, because nobody wants to spend time with her. 

And so she gave up.

Over the years — back before I, too, gave up and decided to leave her — I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile these two different pictures of her, Before and After. Some days I settled for a simple explanation: that her anti-bipolar mood-stabilizing drugs did indeed smooth out her emotional affect, but that in the process they also eviscerated all the energy and power that had made her so attractive back in the old days. 

Other times I explored a more metaphysical explanation, that there is some correlation between (on the one hand) an openness to the gods, to divine revelation and to magical experience, and (on the other hand) an emotional fragility or instability that easily collapses into mental illness and pathology. For what it is worth, I think this principle is true: that is, I think there really is such a correlation. Think of any of the great prophets of the past: if they lived among us today, I think we'd find them emotionally fragile, and we'd probably consider them mentally ill. But, as Nietzsche pointed out, just because they are sick doesn't make them wrong. [I don't have a reference to hand, and it's too late at night for me to want to look it up. But I know he said it somewhere.] Or, as the Who once expressed the exact same idea, "Sickness will surely take the mind / Where minds can't usually go / Come on the amazing journey / And learn all you should know."

Anyway, I told myself that an openness to the gods required this mental and emotional fragility. And therefore, I went on, it was just bad luck — but totally predictable — that Wife's mind and emotions collapsed under the strain. In every generation, so I told myself, there are a few people who are able to access the divine, who can communicate with the gods more clearly and easily than any of the rest of us. But they pay dearly for this gift, and Wife's collapse was an example of what this payment looks like. [Compare also, if only for sheer preposterous grandiosity, this post here.]

I spent years telling myself these things. But were they true? Or was I just making excuses for her, the way I made excuses for her emotional abuse over decades and refused even to call it what it was? Honestly, I have no idea. 

What this means is that, to this day, I can't give you a good explanation of what the hell happened to her. I don't know how she changed from this to that. 

All I know for sure is that it was bad.