Once upon a time, in a far away land, I went to high school and it was no fairy tale. I loved people as much as I wanted to love them because I had no idea you were supposed to limit that. I had no idea what normal was and while I never would have admitted it, I secretly knew deep down that something was very, very wrong inside of me. I worked so hard to hide it but it was very un-hide-able. Things escalated out of control. Kids at school noticed something was wrong and they poked fun which only made me act out in worse ways. They asked hurtful questions and called me names. Well-meaning adults asked me the same hurtful questions and planted the same doubts and insecurities in my soul. After awhile they got scared - they had never seen the likes of me before. I got scared because I had seen the likes of me before and I had no idea how to stop it. This thing felt like it was bigger and stronger than all of us and none of us knew what to do. This thing (the thing I now know as Borderline Personality Disorder) was rearing it's ugly head in a mighty way. The kids and adults in my tiny high school acted out of fear; they didn't know what else to do except to isolate me completely. They tore me away from friends, certain classes, sports, extra-curricular activities, and even my privilege of being around kids. Public shame and humiliation was my life for the next year and a half. Everyone knew what I wasn't allowed to do and they knew exactly why I wasn't allowed to do it.
When I truly consider all that happened, I am still amazed that God brought me through that alive. It was the most traumatic thing I ever experienced. He was very gracious to hold me up during that time but I was left with scars, deep anger and a broken heart. I felt devastated by people I knew and trusted. With each tear that fell I became determined to not let this pattern repeat.
But repeat it has, like a bad pop song on the radio, it has gone over and over in my life and it seems like I am unable to get that song out of my head. My life often feels like a car that I'm not in control of driving. I explained this once last year before I ever knew BPD existed (see post here).With each ended friendship I feel lost and devastated, alone and weak. So I build my walls higher, I make my resolve stronger and I become determined that I don't need anyone. Every action I take is my broken brain trying to learn what "normal people" boundaries look like so that no one sees that I don't have them. It hurts to be isolated for not being normal so I work hard to be seen as normal. It hurts to feel weak so I make goals to be strong. I created this goal to become self-sufficient if everyone leaves. Every action I take is working towards self-preservation, towards avoiding disappointment, towards being totally okay if someone leaves. I want to be fine without anyone's help. I want to be able to shrug my shoulders when someone's presence leaves my life.
When I start to love others, I feel so scared that I will be unable to meet those goals. I feel myself panic as I get close to someone new. The room begins to feel small and I begin to feel like I can't breathe. I want so badly to avoid repeating the pain again but my way of going about avoiding it seems to cause other pains in the process. I feel scared so I put all these rules in place to keep my goals alive of not needing anyone else. I put goals and rules in line so no one ever questions me like in high school or sees that something is very wrong with me or my boundaries. It's not just a casual thing - this feels in the moment like life or death to me.
When I start to feel warm fuzzies in my heart for others or when I miss them when they are gone, I feel angry with myself for being weak, for letting them in, for loving them too much. I feel absolute terror that I might accidentally let others see what's really wrong with me - the lack of good boundaries. I'm afraid everyone will find out and they'll be scared and they'll take everything away from me again like they did in high school. So I punish myself.
See Chart Above...through my BPD filter, I recognized that I am on the far left of the boundaries spectrum and I'm paralyzed with fear and absolutely terrified of anyone finding out since that has ruined my life before. So I run to the far right side and try to cling to it. When I feel myself start to move in the slightest even the tiniest ity bity movement towards the left direction (such as missing a friend when they are on vacation or wanting to sit next to them or being sad when our hangout day is ending), I over-correct and run as fast as I can to the Stonewall/Isolating Boundaries side of the chart. I would rather people think that's my problem. Healing from BPD, to me, looks like being able to land in the middle easily but I don't know how to ever make that happen.
I'm still lost about what to do with this and how to change the lens on this part of my glasses. I truly feel like this is my best attempt to be healthy, my best attempt at preserving my life. I don't know how to logic this one out because to me, it makes sense. I hope this helps explain why I am passionately friendly and then passionately resistant. It's truly only out of my great love for my friends that I attempt to push them away!
I don't know what the other option is. If I let myself love people, what if I can't stop? What if I move over to the left side of the chart and can't move back? What if my friends move away? What if they ask me to no longer speak to them? What if they decide they don't want to be friends anymore? Or what if they get other friends that they become closer to than me and then they don't have time to hangout with me anymore? I have to be able to be okay with that. I have to be fine when that happens. When I love people I don't know how to be okay without them, so the goal becomes just to not love people hardly at all. It feels lonely and isolating but I don't know the alternative. When someone insists on loving me anyways, I 100% of the time will do something self-sabotaging to try to scare them away. It's a lose/lose for both of us. I want to feel close to people but this happens and I don't know how to change it. I have learned that this doesn't make sense to a normal person but in my brain it is honestly perfectly logical. I get that I truly have a disorder because even writing this all out here it still looks perfectly sound to me! It makes sense to me!! But I have learned through the years that to a normal person reading this, it might not make any sense to them. This is the best I can explain it. I am open to questions or comments.
