Halcyon

 I hope not to drag on and on when I recount my childhood, but I love the coming-of-age film that it was. I think it was normal, because nobody has had the same sociological nor psychological experience as anyone else, thus even if I do deem it strange, it being strange is, in fact, what makes it normal.

I won’t wonder about each and every experience I had; though I could go on for hours about the shade of purple of the walls of my first bedroom, and I think there are several instances of recurring imagery or symbolic events that could be poetic. It would be taxing for me, and for you, to endure every crevice of my memory. I will be conservative; yet forthcoming still.

Some of my first and most prominent memories are that of loss. I recall the divorce, despite my parents’ success in sweeping the arguing and the changes under the rug; I remember the split. At the same time, almost, our lovingly overprotective childhood dog Max was given away, her attitude and needs too much for any recently divorced, still-in-college, parent-of-two to keep. But, for a three-year-old, it’s like a knife to the stomach and then an extra twist, even though my parents still got along, and even though life was still yellow. 

My parents tried so much harder than many parents out there do. Especially as single parents, however, things remained difficult, and no one can eliminate every threat. Our first homes as two separate families were cramped and cheap; our sink drains were earwig nests and our clothes borrowed from cousins. But we were happy. My brother and I, separated by three years and connected by a genetic psychiatric disorder, had a mutual love of imagination and backyards. I can’t recall an early memory of playing that wasn’t outside. We liked Tonka trucks and digging up worms and laying on our backs with our limbs in the air, imagining gravity turning off. 

My early years in school were also kind and bright. Because it was such a tiny town, the kids in my age group all knew each other by name and, largely, all liked each other. A few of them were ostracized for being different, but I wasn’t different then. I did say weird things, and struggled with communicating sometimes, but other young kids hardly pick up on awkwardness. I tended to morph into whatever social situation I was in; I wasn’t sure of myself, but easily projected a person that they could like. I remember a budding friendship between me and a boy who was quite the troublemaker; I wanted to impress him and didn’t have any understanding of healthy boundaries. I wanted to know what it was like to kiss a boy, and I remember morphing into his ideal playmate in order to make that happen. 

One day he contrived a plan for us to “prank” another boy, who quite a few allergies, by petting a dog outside the fence and chasing him with our dog hair-infested fingers. After serving our subsequent detentions, my fantasies of kissing were met with a few pecks on my hands. But I was forced to face the consequences of my malleable behaviour as well. I thought I was just playing, in the only way I knew how to play; by not being myself. The only “me” that I knew was an amalgamation of curiosities and exploring. Which I do believe is relatively normal for a kid. But that trait didn’t stop in early childhood.

My mother, having met our soon-to-be stepfather, uprooted my brother and I to a town an hour away when I was going into the fifth grade. I did still have attachments to my old friends, as my father still lived in that town, but I’d be at a new school and thus at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and in a town with a much higher population count at that. But I don’t remember the nerves, so maybe I was okay with it. 

Memories of that first day are confined in two interactions: meeting Zoe, and meeting Brodie. Two oddity kids who took to me quickly, for whatever reason I don’t know, but it was clearly meant to be. Zoe and Brodie, as well as a few others who were similarly different to the majority, shared with me a carefree exploration of our childlike interests. We didn’t much care about the opinions of anyone else, and I think that made us more likeable. We weren’t hated by the other groups of kids, I think they just saw us as proudly nonconformist, in the sense that we weren’t growing into society’s tendency to care about appearances. I tried dating a few times, but most of the boys then weren’t like me at all. They cared about social drama and puberty-related things that I just didn’t understand. That, and I was growing steadily more uncomfortable with my physical presence by the day. Being looked at by people other than my closest friends, like Zoe and Brodie, just felt like I was being instantly misunderstood.

For the two years I lived in that town, most of it was spent roleplaying various novels that we were infatuated with, making shitty home videos and 50-page self-inserted fantasy stories, and renewing my love for freely exploring my surroundings. When Zoe moved away, she was quickly replaced by Kali, who took my place as the “new kid” and took Zoe’s place as the best friend to Brodie and me. Like it was decided by fate, she loved the things that we loved and didn’t look at me like people looked at people. She, like both Zoe and Brodie, looked at me like people look at souls. Truly, I don’t think I’ve ever been known better by anyone but them.

Borderline

 In some ways, I feel very drained and of no good use. I feel like a sore on the souls of everyone else I’ve had the pleasure of knowing; in the sense that I take from them what I wish I had. Now, let me clarify that I am not claiming to have had an astoundingly difficult life, nor was I underprivileged. I was more privileged than most in plenty of areas, and I had ample opportunity to utilize all of it to my benefit. I simply fumbled my chances; I was a strange, lost, childlike mind stuck in an aging body. I broke away from my social circles over and over again, willingly subjecting myself to instances of complete isolation and misery. Not because I wanted to suffer, but because I have never understood myself; and being alone with that feeling is what creates the scariest periods of time I have ever experienced.

My tendencies since childhood have been to mimic that which I see and envy in the lives of others. My brain chooses happy people with desirable traits and societal glory, and I adopt their lives as part of my own. It’s all I’ve ever known to do. I remember doing it since I was 11 years old.

As a child this is somewhat expected, but now that I am twenty, this habit of mimicry has left me unable to look in the mirror without distress. I begin to spiral, to wind myself up in wondering whether all the significant parts of me that I used to love are borrowed, unoriginal, invented. Sprung up from within me due to a lack of individuality. Stolen from someone else who once made me feel loved.

I don’t know if the emotionality of this condition, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) specifically, can ever be properly expressed through language. As it is, emotions are unique and not a creation of humans, thus we can never properly encapsulate them through a human invention such as language. They are often best expressed through other “love languages.” Despite that, I will try in earnest to explain, however futile it may be. Being understood is, as I’ve come to realize, what I need most from society. From you.

Sometimes I over-rationalize, play into delusions of grandeur in order to find some, any, sense of belonging. If I am a god, or the sole true consciousness on Earth, and everyone else is either a subconscious creation or simulation, I have good reasoning to explain why I end up feeling alone time after time. If I accept the reality of me being too ill to relate to people and too caught up in coping mechanisms to actually go live my life, then that reality alone consumes me, and it leads to disastrous results like my suicidal or homicidal ideation. The issue is, at least in part, failing to recognize that multiple realities can be true all at once. I may well be a god, or part of one; but I am also here among others who look and feel like I do, and I’m ignoring them too much, and it’s making my ephemeral body feel bad.

I feel inadequate because I feel that my life wasn’t traumatic nor different enough for me to truly be this sick and lost. And thus, I end up blaming myself, my own chemistry, my inability to suddenly get better, for all of my shortcomings. However, I prove myself to in fact be gravely sick; for I continually express intense symptoms of disorderly thinking, which often result in self-sabotage. At this point I often ask myself how to improve, what things I need or want, and keep them with me as extra skills I intend to practice and perform. But in order to do that I need to accept the reality of what I am, and where I am in life, which comes with so much baggage attached that I simply cannot look at it all in the face at once. It feels like dread, like looking at three tall snow-tipped mountains of untouched schoolwork all due in a few hours that you haven’t started. I feel all at once the urge to destroy every last piece of paper with my own hands and fire, as well as the urge to fall to my wobbly knees and just sob. 

And the worst part, as I said, is that I don’t even feel wronged by the world. What I have been through, millions of others have too, and if I were to tell them that it traumatized me, they’d blink at me pitifully and call me selfish. So, I retreat into that hole, a dank lonely cave covered in overgrown vine and rotting flesh, to escape to a reality where I don’t exist in this body or in this life. Where I am formless and untouched by dimensional bounds. Where I think, and slowly die from the inside out. And the cycle of inadequacy, dread, and failure begins anew.

I’m growing tired and impatient of myself, of that urge that I entertain where instead of shedding off these false layers of identity that I’ve created, I instead drown myself in drugs, in video games, in fake social media, in my perfect personally crafted versions of unsuspecting people. 

Escapism has healthy limits; we all do it to a certain extent. But you can do it too much, with the wrong aids, at the wrong time, or with the wrong issues; I’ve done that all. You can’t escape from loneliness or a missing identity with more loneliness; that’s just what has driven me to idolize suicide, as well as murder. Suicide is one end to loneliness, and murder is another; either destroying the self or destroying another’s self to make it mine. Both of these options, however, would leave massive lacerations across my empathetically driven moral compass, rendering it completely unusable and broken. I don’t want to make others feel how I do; I want to be more like them instead. I want to find escapism in the presence of other people, in food, in pets, in travel, in work. Is that how the rest of you do it?

So, the poetic prose I present to you now will hopefully give me catharsis, or answers, once I work through the logic of my psyche with my gift of language. Where I lack social skills, direction, and identity, I flourish with expressionism, feeling, and philosophy. These will get me through the rest of my life, and they will always be here. I propose that you, reader, strengthen your own understanding of these aspects too, and dig within yourself; because over the course of this lifetime, you are the only constant. 

Hope and Despair

Earlier in this year, I had written a long manifesto in which I explained why I may commit an atrocious act of murder, because my homicidal ideation was at its peak again. But I don’t want to hurt anyone, not truly. I know I am not that person and my heart couldn’t take it, so I deleted that document as impulsively as I started it. All that it was at the time of its deletion was a summary of my life from childhood to now, as well as my possible motives and future wishes. 

I do however still want to write out something similar, because I think my neuroticism is extremely misunderstood and studying it is imperative to preventing many issues in society. I don't expect this blog to have many viewers of the relevant demographic, but I hope to provide insight into why and how these issues form and how to recognize (or psychoanalyze) these issues in others and yourselves. And get help.

I will explain the tragedies of my life, the halcyon days, as well as my personal opinions, my sufferings, and my paradises. I care deeply about many things such as my own invented and personal "religion", which involves primarily regarding ourselves and nature as equal and part of one interworking system part of a much larger living being, as well as politics, sociology, true crime, and the search for happiness.

I don’t want my suffering to fade away when I do; I instead hope that it will be used to prevent future tragedies. I think that by analyzing what I write here, some of you may be more prepared to understand issues like mental illness, societal prosperity, trauma, drug abuse, homicidal ideation, and more. In summation, that is why I am here. To prevent further suffering and confusion, to teach, and to find catharsis myself.