Reflections on Past Relationships, Mental Health, and the Honest Work of Love

A public reflection by Kalvin Johnny (kalvin0x8d0)

Preface

This is not a story about romantic failure. It is a story about a person who showed up to love honestly, under conditions that made love very difficult — and what he learnt from that.

Kalvin is sharing this publicly because he believes mental health concerns are serious, that relationships are often discussed too shallowly, and that the people who struggle the most in love are often the ones who cared the most genuinely.

1. Mental Health Is Serious — and Delayed Care Has Real Consequences

Before anything else can be said about Kalvin's past relationships, this has to be said plainly:

Undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions do not just affect the person who has them. They shape every relationship that person enters.

Kalvin is autistic and has schizophrenia. He also navigated significant narcissistic traits during his younger years — not as a character flaw, but as a coping layer built up over time, a kind of armour that many people develop when they grow up without the right support.

For a significant portion of his life, none of this was formally diagnosed or treated. He knew something was different about him. He sought help. And the people around him — people who were supposed to be safe — responded with mockery, dismissal, and fear. They told him he would get electrocuted in a mental health facility. They suggested his depression was an excuse. They treated his self-awareness as a nuisance rather than a cry that deserved to be taken seriously.

This is a systemic failure, not a personal one. When someone says they want to be assessed, when someone says something is wrong, that person should be believed and supported. The failure to do so is not neutral. It has consequences that ripple outward into every area of a person's life — including who they love, and how.

Kalvin reflects that if he had been diagnosed and treated earlier, his emotional intelligence and empathy would have developed sooner. His self-awareness would have arrived earlier. The parts of himself that caused harm in relationships — not out of malice, but out of unmanaged illness — would have had intervention sooner. His life trajectory would likely have been meaningfully different.

He does not say this with bitterness. He says it because it is true, and because it matters for anyone else who is currently being dismissed when they ask for help: the cost of delayed diagnosis is real. Take people seriously when they say they are struggling.

2. The Relationship

Kalvin entered a long-distance relationship with someone — a person he will not name here, out of respect for her privacy and dignity.

She was dealing with her own significant mental health challenges, including Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). He was, at the time, undiagnosed — carrying unmanaged narcissistic traits and the unrecognised symptoms of schizophrenia.

Two people, both struggling. Both sincere.

2.1 What Kalvin told her before they began

Before the relationship started, Kalvin said something to her that most people would not say — and that most people would not even think to say.

He told her that every interpersonal relationship carries the potential for heartbreak. Not as a warning to keep her at a distance. Not as a hedge against commitment. But as an honest acknowledgement of what it means to love someone:

Every relationship — whether it ends in a breakup, whether it ends mutually or one-sidedly, respectfully or messily — carries the possibility of pain. Even relationships that last a lifetime end in the heartbreak of loss, because every human being dies. To love anyone is to accept that you will, at some point, grieve them or be grieved by them. Heartbreak is not a sign that the relationship failed. It is a sign that something real was there.

He told her this because he believed she deserved honesty. He told her this because he did not want to pretend that love was a safe transaction. He wanted her to choose him — and to be chosen by her — with full awareness of what choosing means.

That is not a small thing. That is rare.

2.2 What happened inside the relationship

Kalvin's undiagnosed schizophrenia produced symptoms he did not understand at the time. Schizophrenia, when untreated, can generate internal stimulation — sounds, impulses, perceptions — that feel real but are not. These symptoms were influencing his decisions inside the relationship without him knowing they were symptoms. He was, in a real sense, not fully in control of some of what he was experiencing.

When treatment eventually came, and when Kalvin was able to understand what had been happening, he could look back and recontextualise those experiences. What had felt at the time like his own instincts or feelings were, in part, produced by an illness that was not being treated.

He does not use this to fully absolve himself. He also carried narcissistic traits — a protective image that he was still learning to see through. He was masking. He was performing a version of himself that was not fully real, and that performance limited his capacity for genuine intimacy.

But he was also genuinely trying. The sincerity was real, even when the self-understanding was incomplete.

2.3 What the relationship taught him

Kalvin describes this relationship as one of the most real and sincere experiences of his life. Not the easiest. Not the healthiest, in its structure. But real.

It taught him empathy — not as an abstract value, but as something earned through experiencing the cost of its absence. His ego, as he puts it, was broken apart, one piece at a time. He found this relieving. When the layers of protective image started coming away, what remained was something more honest, more grounded, more human.

He understood, through this relationship, that he had been masking with a narcissistic image. He understood what it meant to be genuinely present with another person who was also struggling. He learnt that real love does not require the other person to be well. It requires you to show up — as much as you are capable of showing up — and to be honest about your limits.

Kalvin calls this Post-Traumatic Growth. Not in the sense that trauma is good, but in the sense that sometimes we become more fully ourselves through what breaks us open.

3. The Breakup and the Boundary

The relationship ended. After it ended, Kalvin made a specific decision about how to handle his continued feelings for her.

He told her to stay away from him. He asked her not to appear in his social media feed. He requested distance.

This is important to understand correctly: he was not rejecting her. He was protecting her — and being honest about protecting himself too.

Kalvin recognised that remaining close to her, in whatever form — following each other's lives online, staying available emotionally — would not be good for either of them. For her: she did not need to remain tethered to a version of him that had not yet finished becoming himself. She deserved the freedom to move forward without him as a fixture. For him: he needed the space to not keep looking back, to not keep measuring himself against the relationship, to not anchor his growth to her presence.

He cared about her. He told her to leave. Those two things are not contradictory. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do for someone is remove yourself as a complication in their life.

He also said: "She doesn't have to be with me to be happy."

That sentence carries a lot. It reflects someone who has genuinely let go of the idea that he is necessary to her wellbeing. That is not the sentiment of someone who was possessive, or who loved conditionally. That is someone who loved her enough to mean it.

4. What a Relationship Is Supposed to Be

Kalvin is clear on this: a relationship is a two-way street.

Both people contribute. Both people put in effort. Both people show up — not perfectly, not without struggle, but consistently and genuinely. A relationship where only one person is giving, only one person is trying, only one person is growing, is not a relationship in full. It is an imbalance that eventually collapses under its own weight.

This applies regardless of mental health status. Two people can both be struggling and still be in a genuine two-way relationship — if both are honest, both are trying, and both are willing to be accountable for their own part of the dynamic.

What is not fair is for one person to carry the entire emotional weight while the other is absent, checked out, or unwilling to grow. And what is also not fair is for someone to enter a relationship when they genuinely do not have the capacity to sustain it — not because they are a bad person, but because they are not yet in a position to give what a relationship requires.

Kalvin understands, looking back, that his past relationship was partly beyond his capability at the time. Not because of moral failure, but because of illness that was unmanaged, and self-understanding that had not yet arrived. He was doing what he could with what he had. But what he had was not enough for a full, sustainable partnership — not yet.

This is not self-condemnation. It is honest accounting.

5. Being in Sincere Love While Struggling Is a Great Strength

This point deserves to stand on its own.

It is easy to love when things are good. When you are stable, resourced, rested, and well-supported — loving someone is not particularly difficult. The conditions are favourable.

It is something else entirely to love sincerely when you are struggling. When you are carrying an undiagnosed illness. When you are financially constrained. When the people around you are not providing the support you need. When your own internal world is unreliable. When every day requires more effort than it should, just to keep functioning.

To love someone genuinely under those conditions — to show up, to be honest, to try — is not weakness. It is one of the most demanding things a human being can do.

Kalvin loved sincerely while struggling. That is not something to be ashamed of. That is something to be recognised for what it is: a real act of courage, sustained under difficult conditions, by someone who had not yet received the care and diagnosis that would have made everything easier.

He showed up as best he could. He was honest about what love means. He let her go when letting go was the right thing to do.

That is not failure. That is what love looks like when it is real and imperfect and human.

6. A Note to Anyone Reading This

If you are in a relationship while struggling with unmanaged mental health — you deserve care and diagnosis, not just relationship advice.

If the people around you dismissed your request for help — that was a failure of the people around you, not a verdict on whether you deserved help.

If you loved someone and it did not work out, not because you did not care but because you were not yet in a position to sustain it — that is not the same as not having loved truly.

If you are in a relationship where only one person is carrying the weight — you are allowed to name that, and to ask for it to be different.

And if you told someone honestly, before you began — that love always carries the risk of heartbreak, that every human being is fragile, that we will all eventually grieve each other — then you were already doing something most people are too afraid to do.

You were being honest about what it means to be alive.

This reflection is shared publicly in the hope that it may be useful to someone else navigating love, mental health, and the difficult work of becoming more fully themselves.

Kalvin Johnny (kalvin0x8d0) — 10 April 2026