How?

My brain is evil.

Ok, that’s maybe a bit harsh, and every mental health professional will tell you to avoid self deprecation even in jest as it still reinforces negative self perception. But, frankly, most of them don’t live with BPD.

I want you to try a little thought experiment with me. Imagine, if you can, that there’s another thing in your brain with you. Personally, my thoughts are generally laid out in sentences with no innate connection to anything. They’re not written, or heard or felt, just words. I say this because I know not everyone’s thinking really works the same and I want you to really think about how you perceive how you “think” before getting to the next part.

Now imagine, going about your day, making breakfast for yourself and a partner, and they don’t finish their plate. A bit of toast got left behind and you know they can’t always eat as much bread as they thought they could, it’s a nothing moment.

But another thought, occurs to you. What if they actually hated the breakfast and only ate as much as they did because they knew it was important to you? The thought is indistinguishable from the rest of the way you think, but it wasn’t “you” but how do you ignore that thought? Well you can try to counter it logically?

Like you said, it’s nuts, your partner often can’t finish all their toast. But, then again it does happen at home but when we went out for breakfast last week they ate all the toast.

Wait, was that another “not you” thought or were you just remembering details that happen to fit the conclusion you’re trying to avoid? But wait, if you’re actively biased against a conclusion, can you even trust yourself?

Well obviously the next step is to just ask your partner, “Hey, have you been secretly hating the breakfasts I make for you?” I mean, sure you could phrase it better, but it’s ridiculous, right?

And then you see the hurt in their eyes as you realize they have to now deal with the fact that you’d think they would do something like that to you. So while you might not have actually made a breakfast they hated, you did just hurt them.

Of course, that’s just one situation. See the truly evil part of my brain, is that this happens every time I have an interaction with someone where they have anything short of a great time for reasons that could even remotely be considered my responsibility. If every time someone you cared about had a rough day, a part of yourself knew exactly how to point out how you caused it. Think about living with that and what do you do when they come up constantly? Do you stop questioning the people around you and just internalize the horrible things? Or do you hope the people around you can understand you truly aren’t having these thoughts but you need their help to kill them, and hope this time won’t be the one that hurts them too much?

Folks who take the former are extremely vulnerable to abusers. They don’t even need to do anything, because the BPD person already believes they’re scum. So any positive affirmations are desperately welcomed, and the abuse is just, what we deserve.

The latter isn’t really better. Often being perceived as erratic, overly sensitive, that we make wild assumptions, use BPD as an excuse, and like we’re incapable of managing our own emotions and need others to do it for us. Not to mention the times someone reacts angrily or hurt when you ask. Suddenly you have to deal with having caused discomfort that seems just as likely to push someone away as the thought you’d asked them to counter implied they were already pulling away.

Obviously it’s actually a spectrum. I think the human psyche would just implode if you tried to handle a week’s worth of BPD thoughts exclusively externally or internally. Less than a day if you were trying to be a “productive memes of society” at the same time.

So, how would you live with that? Something inside you, that feels in so many ways like you, but isn’t, popping in to point out every little detail that might lead one to believe every person you care about is going to leave. Or would at least prefer others to you. Or how their lives would be improved in ways they haven’t even noticed if you weren’t with them. Because even if it isn’t “you” you still have this thought in your head. And after a time or two you’ve figured out the self-fulfilling prophecy. One way or another you’re going to either get abused and not realize or you’ll be too much and they’ll leave.

Im sorry to say this isn’t an essay about answering that question, because I’m the one asking it.

I’ll bet that some of you probably think, “well, the right people will stay through anything!”

Maybe. Would you stay with a partner who has on multiple occasions come to you crying because they failed to handle a BPD spiral and they’re now convinced you want to leave them because of these exact situations. Hell, the answer might even be yes, but in the moment, when you’re woken up suddenly by that, do you think you can instantly communicate your love and care for them in a way that the demon in their head’s won’t spin in the future? You look unhappy or tired, well yeah, because you’re dealing with this gross pile acting like a person. You look quickly happy, of course, because what they’re thinking is true and they’ve finally realized you’re better off without them.

I don’t mean this as a condemnation. How could I ever even think of making another person handle that abyss? But how do I handle it alone either?

I don’t know.

From my experience, a lot of BPD folk try to limit our own choices or decision making power as we can’t be blamed for things we didn’t pick. Favoring more decisive people, a general lean towards submissiveness as a concept, but especially towards kinks that remove agency or responsibility from the sub, pet play, hypno, somno or cnc, and of course the big one, drug use.

Almost every BPD person I’ve heard talks about how drugs and alcohol just… do something to us. Even now, I’m not exactly sure how to explain it.

To return to the abyss metaphor, everything else I’ve tried slows the crawl of hateful things out of the abyss.

But a hit of weed and it’s just gone.

The things crawling out, vanished.

The abyss that spawned them, gone.

The thing that isn’t me but is in here with me, it’s just gone.

I can tell the difference between a partner being upset by a headache, and a partner being upset because I exist.

But then it wears off and we once again have to contend with the abyss. Worse, now we and it know how to get rid of it. Just get inebriated. Because that’s a solution that won’t have long term consequences.

Nothing makes you question how friends feel about you when you tell them the only time you feel emotionally stable and don’t feel like all of them are looking for a chance to abandon you is when you’re drunk or high. Or how you feel about yourself. Are you really living when you’re free of the abyss, it’s inevitably abated temporarily by drugs? Or are you living when you face it, looking at what it’s done to you already and knowing that it will continue. Forever.

Yes, the answer is they’re both living. But I challenge you to think about looking down those barrels for the rest of your life, and really try to understand what that would do to a person, and anyone they cared enough about to fear losing.

BPD is cruel. It’s cruel to those of us living with it. It’s cruel to those we love.

So I ask, one final time. How is someone supposed to live on this knife’s edge, limiting choices without giving up freedom, loving partners hard and fast fearing a self fulfilling prophecy of being too much for them one day, knowing the yawning abyss that causes it all can go away, but only when you’re inebriated?

I wish I had the answer, because this shit isn’t me!

It won’t win!

But I am really fucking tired of having to walk that edge.