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.
I’m aware that this blog has become a vortex of suck lately. Forgive me, I’m surfacing slowly. I’m still ruminating on some stuff and in my experience, the best way to get out of my head is to get it all out of my head. Now you know why I started blogging in the first place. And why my writing will likely never be more popular than it ever has been. </self deprecating apology>
He said, “I don’t think you need medication. I don’t like you on medication. It’s like you’re dead,”
and the damn broke.
Before I knew it, I was choking on snot, covered in tears, practically pleading for him to bless me with his okay as I said I can’t handle it anymore.
I let it all out, I gave the enemy my trade secrets and the script to the season premiere – the things that are always meant to be kept in your back pocket when you’re talking to the person who wants to hurt you 15% of the time, who might alert the media or call in the people in white jackets. Especially, the whys and hows of your daily life that might be misshapen and bruised into something quite ugly should you ever meet face-to-face in a family court of law, again.
The lack of connection, the need to portray myself as a good mother, but not the inherent need to be one.
He said, “You love her. I know you do. Don’t try to convince yourself that you don’t,”
and I explained that yes, I do love her, just like I love him and her and her and her and him and everyone else I’ve ever fallen in my kind of love with. And I reminded him of how I can not love anyone at any time as well. And when he said she loves me, I reminded him that she didn’t know any better, yet.
He didn’t understand how medication could help anything, he said as he took a sip from his third glass of wine after preparing to go outside to smoke a joint. And inside I laughed at him, at his naivete and ability to turn anything into an argument against help. But on the outside, I was focused on the cause of getting him to clearly see, because I’ve never given him a minute glance at me without some form of filter. So I kept talking.
And when I was about done and he was shell-shocked and had finished trying to convince me that people have told me my whole life that I had a void inside of me because my mother left me not because there’s truly nothing in there, there was silence. Except for the sound of my foot tapping and my eyelashes chaffing against each other with each slow-to-come-around blink while I stared at the wall.
He said, “you’ve been comfortable with people. You’ve been comfortable with me,”
and I sneered and told him that I’ve been comfortable with his reception of my current portrayal. That I was comforted that I had done a good job because I’d read him well enough to assert whatever role I was playing. I was a good actress, therefore I was comfortable – that was it.
“That must be why you like to read so much,” he half-questioned, half-stated.
I said, “it’s like studying. Learning how to be a person I’m choosing to be. Learning who is most closest to me and what their next progression might be tells me what it is that people might expect from me and how to present it.”
The personality, the flux of personalities, really, he’s always just chalked up to me being on some kind of a kick. But then he remembered a time years ago, when he’d made fun of me for coming home after time with Stargirl and being an entirely different person. I spoke with her exuberance, I touched people when I talked to them, I was calm and collected and positive – I was the Stargirl he’d witnessed and he’d thought it so funny that I’d absorbed her essence so easily.
“That’s what I do. I become alike to the person I’m with. That’s why you and I drink, why I swear more when I’m around certain people, why I feel a need to do yoga after others. I take them on and give them back what I know they’re comfortable with – not all of themselves, because that would be too much and no one wants a friend who is identical.”
He got it. And I was left anxious. He apologized for making me feel bad, for bringing the tears, for my anxiety. I could taste the feeling on the back of my tongue, as if I’d said too much to someone too weak to handle it.
By his fifth glass of wine, the suspicion was confirmed. He went outside to smoke, coming back red-eyed and swaying a little. All I wanted was to get away from him, but I didn’t want him to be mad at me, so I told him I didn’t want him to leave, just that I needed to get out of my head.
He said, “go down the block and have a few drinks,” and I countered with, “I don’t like to drink alone.”
He said, “have some wine,” and I made a face akin to wine tasting as sweet as a pile of dog shit might.
He asked, “what do you want, then?” and I said to go out for a few hours, but that he was well lubricated and I couldn’t leave her with him, like that. It wouldn’t be right. He defeatedly said he was going to go to bed soon enough so I might as well, and then he poured his next glass and I looked at the clock and I checked my morals and they screamed that I couldn’t be so selfish, even if she would sleep through the night and never know.
Then I continued tapping my foot. And staring at the wall. And chewing on the inside of my cheek. Blinking very slowly, infrequently. Until I saw that he was getting pissed off. I was harshing his buzz.
So again, the show continued and I put on a mask, cracked some jokes and initiated a dialogue that he would feel comfortable with. He felt better, until he passed out.
And I was back to not loving him while I watched television until 5am.
