Close friend and mathematical collaborator. Definitely stronger than me. Then he got into drugs (mostly marijuana, but some LSD and maybe other things, I don’t know). His judgment went south and his mathematics deteriorated. We remained friends until he had a coronary bypass. His personality changed completely, he got very angry at me and we never spoke again. He died maybe five years ago. Very sad.
My grandmother was always a very selfish, manipulative, intelligent, mostly evil alcoholic who knew how to push people’s buttons. She was brave and bold and even though she was barely 5’3 and 100 pounds, she wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. She had the kind of mind that could make her a super villain (and she did a good deal of damage to her entire family though out of malevolence or on accident, I don’t know). Now she has early onset Alzheimer’s, she’s like a child. She’s sweet and docile, usually lost in her own world, and pretty quiet and even pleasant at times.
I miss who she used to be and I’m sorry she’s gone.
I nominate me and my brother. In our teens our parents had a horrifying, brutal, life-killing divorce and my mother, who had never had a drink in her life (uber-conservative Mormon), became a rabid alcoholic at the age of 37. There were six of us kids, my father lurked out of making any meaningful child support payments, and we lost our home and went through a lot of “food insecurity” days, sometimes surviving on Welfare cheese.
Mom lived with and/or married a series of horrible alcoholic/druggie loser guys and imposed them on us as our new daddy.
I became a binge drinker a pot smoker, and a major depressive, all of which continued through my 20s; Frankie did a lot of drugs, stopped going to regular high school, committed a few minor crimes, and ended up in “juvenile delinquent” high school. I barely graduated from high school, as I preferred driving around and smoking to school and “graduated” with something like a 1.98 GPA.
My mother worked four jobs, continued drinking heavily, but managed to earn her R.N. degree. She’s now 64, retired, sober after 28 years of alcoholism, married to a great guy for 15 years, and a very calm, loving gardener.
I suddenly – inexplicably – became very determined and focused when I was 28 and went straight through undergraduate to grad school for my Ph.D. I’m now a tenured professor.
Frankie did much the same: earned his Ph.D. and now has a wonderful state biologist job where he gets to be at one with nature under very little human supervision.
I don’t know if I can label these “personality changes” or “growing up” (including my mother). My remaining four siblings are all pretty messed up: substance abuse issues, multiple marriages, kids-out-of-wedlock, psychological and steady employment problems. For me, it does feel as if a major, positive personality change hit me at 28 and basically saved my life; Frankie feels the same about his escape from what seemed to be our destined life paths.
My ex-husband. We married in 1995 and everyone will tell you that he was just the nicest guy they knew. Of course, nobody knew (or admitted) that he was bi-polar.
In 2003, he went through a prescription drug treatment study for Hep C. By the end of that treatment, he had sunk into a devastating depression. For a year after that, he struggled through depression, debilitating anxiety attacks, and frequent bouts of suicidal ideation. He had to quit working. I finally convinced him to get re-diagnosed–we discovered he was bi-polar.
The diagnosis explained so many things. We discovered that so many of the strange incidents in our marriage and prior to it were possible psychotic breaks. It took quite a while to get him on a course of meds that did not cause more trouble that they solved. As a side bonus, he lost a lot of cognitive function sometime during the Hep C treatment. Nobody knows why, but it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of several doctors.
I stuck by him as best I could. But he started to use his condition as a be a jerk card. I had no idea what a bigoted fuckhead I had married until after he got his “license to offend.” Last April, he kicked me out in a fit of snottiness and told me he wanted a divorce. I thought about it for a few days and admitted to myself that rather than me lifting him up, he was dragging me down. He wasn’t putting the work in, and it had killed the good in our relationship and was ruining my health. He filed for divorce within a week of kicking me out. I gave him his divorce and most of what we had. I pay spousal maintenance and will for 3.5 more years. It is worth every penny to have my life back.
Guilt is a pretty persistent thing. I used to have to remind myself that he chose not to do the things suggested to improve his life, he chose to do and say the things he did during our marriage and separation, he chose to kick me out. I’m getting better. I hope he is, too, but that is up to him.