I was always waiting for the day when someone would run away after I told them about my diagnosis. I was lucky enough that it took nine whole months for that to happen.
It's funny how you can meet a person in the most unexpected of places and really hit it off. I wasn't planning on hitting it off with a graduate student from Connecticut while I was in a bar watching football. But I did.
You really seemed to care. You even called, from 200 miles away. I thought to myself, "Boys don't do that. Men do that." You seemed open about trying things out. You wanted to come down and see me. You had me excited. You had me thinking I could like someone and not be confused or scared about my feelings again. You had me feeling like I had it all together. Like the last missing piece of the puzzle of my formerly messy life had finally found its place.
I have a semicolon tattoo on my wrist. It's small, but always noticeable in a short-sleeved shirt. You wanted to ask about it, because you knew it had to be important to me. And when I was ready to tell you, I was stupid enough to give you an out.
"This is who I am. This is a part of me. If that's the deal-breaker for you I get it. It would suck, but I get it."
I deserved more than that.
After that you walked away. You said you couldn't do this. You said your experience in the past with people who shared my diagnosis wouldn't allow you to "be there for me" and that you were "sorry you couldn't be the man I wanted you to be." Well you were right there.
You see, you aren't a man at all. Sure, you're a few years older. But the fact that you chose to judge me based on an imperfection shows that you are nothing more than a boy. If you were a man you would know I wasn't some helpless little girl who needed you to take care of me. I've been on my own for a while now, taking care of myself. I was never asking you to do that.
The best part of it all is that you met me and got to know me and shared part of yourself with me...without knowing this small fraction of who I am. Yet somehow, that became the only thing you would see. You forgot about everything else I had to offer and only cared about the thing you saw as crippling, the thing you seemed to think would hinder your quality of life: my diagnosis.
I don't miss that boy. I wasn't sad that I had been rejected. I was angry that someone had let their past define me. I was upset that someone else allowed the thing I had stopped letting define me consume their perception of me.
I am not a crazy person. And I believed that until one ignorant boy, yes boy and not man, made me feel like I was crazy for having a chemical imbalance in my head.
I am not my diagnosis. And you couldn't see that. But honestly, I'm grateful to that boy I met in the bar for showing me that I need to work even harder to educate about the diagnoses most people think make you "crazy."
The girl you met in the bar wasn't crazy. And just because now you know her biggest secret doesn't mean the girl from the bar has changed. She's still not crazy.
But you are still just an ignorant little boy. And you were when I met you in the bar. I just didn't see it.
