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.