So part of being borderline is that I can't help basing my identity on my network of social relationships in a very delicate way. Losing a friend makes the whole thing at least temporarily collapse, and that's why I've been so broken since Saturday. Basically I have to hard restart my sense of self and reload my identity from backups a piece at a time.
Yesterday all I could do was drive home to safety, physically rest and activity and sensorially ground in the familiarity of my apartment. I spend all of today reading in coffee shops and bookstores, drawing energy from the people around me and reminding me of my interests and habits of thought. Tonight I'm tentatively trying to reacquaint myself with the main facets of my personality and motivations as well as hopefully some basic emotions other than desolation and emptiness.
I've always had a very fragmented sense of self, enough so that identifying as multiple in my late teens and early twenties was super helpful for understanding myself even though I was never quite sure it was literally true. What is definitely true is that I have three main pieces that wax and wane in their influence day to day and minute to minute. Each has different desires, interests and goals and each may have different emotional responses to events in my life and different attitudes towards specific people in my life. But they shade into each other and at any given time I'm usually an uneven blend of all three. Still they go deeper that merely moods because having any common identity behind the three of them always involves explicit negotiations. Whenever I pretend to be a unified person I find I am leaving something out.
In recent years I have come to substantial accord with myself, though I still need to explicitly consult each component in turn before making important or controversial decisions or risk the regret of currently subordinate parts. I have retained the skill of speaking explicitly as one part only that I honed in the multiples community. I remember our consensus and no doubt will be able to replicate it sooner or later, but right now it is only theoretical. Right now I'm loading each component separately and given each space to reassert her self-concept.
Tomorrow night I'm scheduled to run a gaming session. The players know people who know the ex-friend in question but do not know her themselves which feels like adequate distance. I hope that that game will be a good first practice at working together with myself. Running games has for a long time been a very harmonious internally cooperative activity with each part of me contributing to different GMing tasks. The emotional content is intense but mostly unrelated to the ex-friend; it could be a good kickstart to my emotions. It's ambitious to run a game so soon, but I don't want to wait too long to have positive social interactions and creative collaboration, given that they supply most of my self-esteem and that isn't likely to change anytime soon.
I've actually been handling this pretty healthily I think. I haven't self harmed or anything like that; the most self-destructive things I've done is to spend a bit too much money on comforting food, and new books and journals. But all of that is reasonable extraordinary circumstance self-care budget.
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