The thing with being abnormal is that when you meet someone similar to yourself, enough to wonder if there’s some sort of chemical link – and often there might be – it’s surreal. You find yourself drawn to them so strongly, and you see all of this beauty in them that you’re not capable of seeing in yourself, but it’s kind of a funny thing since, kind of sort of, they are you.
It’s like you’re looking at the child-version of yourself, all growed up and what she could be and you’re happy to see it, even if she’s in pain, because to you, she’s beautiful and worthy and intelligent and has just simply been cursed. But she’s okay. She will be. You know it.
More so, you’re in amazement at the strength that she can exhibit, because even with the cursedness and the hard life and the torturous present, she’s still smiling and laughing at your jokes and rolling around on the floor with you.
And then, like 12 hours goes by and you’re finally falling asleep after talking and giggling and crying so much you’ve coughed yourself into a set of wicked abs and you wake up a couple of hours later and it’s like the past five years didn’t happen, almost – you didn’t lose any time getting to enjoy this person who is so like you.
But you did.
And the next twelve hours, it slips in, the bitter-sweetness of maybe having to go another five years without another you-fix.
Or maybe it’s that you’ve been looking in the mirror all night, seeing this person’s soul and cracks in the foundation and you suddenly, after a mid-afternoon nap, feel fucked to realize that this person, one of two you’ve ever met that is 99.92% exactly like you inside confirms the thing that you don’t want to face, just like the other one does.
Which leads you to write the following letter…
Dear Borderline Personality Disorder,
Fuck you.
I want nothing to do with you. I don’t want to fall under your diagnostic shroud. But it seems like all signs point to yes. It seems as though, if I’d had a different life, or a different parent, or a different brain, I might be in the clear, but instead, I have a psychiatrist who tells me that I’m cyclothymic, but that we need to discuss my apathetic relationships.
Dear Mayo Clinic,
You say,
Borderline personality disorder affects how you feel about yourself, how you relate to others and how you behave.
When you have BPD, you often have an insecure sense of who you are. That is, your self-image or sense of self often rapidly changes. You may view yourself as evil or bad, and sometimes may feel as if you don’t exist at all. An unstable self-image often leads to frequent changes in jobs, friendships, goals, values and gender identity.
Your relationships are usually in turmoil. You often experience a love-hate relationship with others. You may idealize someone one moment and then abruptly and dramatically shift to fury and hate over perceived slights or even minor misunderstandings. This is because people with the disorder have difficulty accepting gray areas — things are either black or white. For instance, in the eyes of a person with BPD, someone is either good or evil. And that same person may seem good one day and evil the next.
To that, I say, No Fucking Shit.
More so, you go on to point-form me,
- Impulsive and risky behavior, such as risky driving, unsafe sex, gambling sprees or taking illicit drugs
- Strong emotions that wax and wane frequently
- Intense but short episodes of anxiety or depression
- Inappropriate anger, sometimes escalating into physical confrontations
- Difficulty controlling emotions or impulses
- Suicidal behavior
- Fear of being alone
To that, I whisper Holy Fucking Shit.
I’m aware, dear broken brain, of my affinity of looking for myself in other people’s words, eyes, laps and hearts – a search not unextended to the Mayo Clinic, it seems. I know, as human beings, that we tend to see what we want to see.
But I so very much do not want to see borderline personality disorder. I want to see that I’m just a girl who can’t handle shit, who maybe needs to do yoga and find a god that works for her. I need to think that I’m actually normal, but maybe a little high strung and I’ve been misdiagnosed all along because simply, anything is diagnosable nowadays, even if you eat too little or not enough chocolate.
Instead, I see a fight that starts in a chasm that is the footer for a very large, insurmountable hill. And I’m already too tired to get to the starting line. I don’t know that I have it in me to battle for sanity, to try medication after medication – if that’s my future and this potential is my present and it’s typical in me like with others in the sense that it’s very difficult to medicate away – or one therapy style after another.
Brokenness, why can’t you just leave me alone? It feels like you’ve taken over whatever of a me there was.
Eternally,
The personality facet known as Zoeyjane.
