I just want to hug this whole group
Hello. BP1 here. I've been stable for a couple of years now. Good medication cocktail, good sleep hygiene, and a partner who somehow stuck around long enough to watch it all click into place.
I stumbled into this subreddit and I've been reading your posts with this specific kind of ache. Because I remember being the person your posts are about. The one who burned through goodwill like it was a renewable resource.
It wasn't. My partner was not a renewable resource. She was a person who chose, over and over, to stay… and I didn't always make that easy or even possible to feel good about.
Reading your stories is humbling in a way I didn't expect. You're not background characters. You're carrying something real, and you're doing it largely invisibly, in a world that hands out a lot of "but have you tried telling them…." advice.
I also want to say this, for whatever it's worth coming from the other side of the diagnosis: your decision to stay, to set limits, to leave when you had to: none of it was wasted. Even when we couldn't show it. Even when we were convinced we didn't need any of it.
I take my medication every day. Partly because I've done the work to understand what happens when I don't. But also because someone loved me through the version of me that existed before I did. That's not nothing. That's actually everything.
So, I just want to hug this whole group. You deserve a lot more than a Reddit post from a stranger, but here we are.