The Opposite of Love Is Indifference | Amanda Montoni on Trauma, Bipolar II, and Breaking the Cycle

Amanda Montoni describes herself as the kind of person strangers tell their life story to in a grocery queue. At 32, married, newly sober, raising two children, and several months into her decision to go no contact with her mother, she has more than earned that description.Raised between South Carolina and El Paso by a young single mother, Amanda learned early to adapt herself to whatever environment she was in. Outwardly confident, top of her class, socially fluent; inwardly fighting an eating disorder and self-harm she kept hidden from everyone around her for five years. Her sense of identity was fragile, her sexuality was uncertain, and at 14 she was sent without warning from South Carolina to El Paso with no phone, no explanation, and no one who knew where she had gone.In this conversation with Andrew, Amanda traces the events that shaped her: the bullying that made her push down her attraction to girls; the older men who groomed her as a teenager and the distorted sense of power that made her believe she was in control; the unplanned pregnancy at 19 that changed the direction of everything; and the inpatient psychiatric treatment in 2017 that eventually led to a bipolar II diagnosis, and with it the most profound relief of her life.She describes the years that followed: the medication that finally stabilised her, the husband who did not flinch, and the slow, painful recognition that her mother was not going to change. She reflects on what it meant to go no contact without a confrontation, to notice the silence from the other end, and to arrive at something she simply calls indifference. Because the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.The conversation also moves through pansexuality and ethical non-monogamy; parenting as a third-generation estranged child who is actively choosing to do things differently; what it feels like to like yourself while still trying to meet yourself fully; and what she is building towards: finishing her degree, switching to zoology or biology, and eventually opening an animal rescue with her husband.One of the most unflinchingly honest conversations The Intimacy Inquiry has had.