The Silent Suffer
Nearly 6 years ago I was officially diagnosed with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder). This had come after years of various diagnoses including, but not limited to- OCD, manic depression, chronic depression, anxiety, mild schizophrenia- and thousands of pills, and dozens and dozens of different drugs. When I was finally diagnosed with BPD, things in my head just started to click. I read pages and pages of information about how BPD affects your decision making, affects your personal relationships, affects every part of your life. And it clicked. It clicked that I could see these behaviors, these scenarios that had been happening my entire life. It clicked that there were times I just had absolutely no control over my reaction to something or did something and 3 hours later wondered “why the hell did I just do that?!” Forming long-lasting relationships with anyone has always, always, always been difficult. The fear I’ll form a connection with them and they will abandon me is very real and very constant. Allowing myself to be bossed around and walked on by people who should be my friends is very real. Not standing up to these people, even when I can’t stand the ridicule and the ‘you need to do this and this with your life’ tirades. I want so much from a person so fast that I either smother them with my neediness, or I sit quietly and see if they will message me, call me. And if I don't hear from them in a few days or a week, I can almost feel my heartbreak. I obsess over what I may or may not have done to make them not want to be my friend. And my heart fractures a little more, a little more of myself that I put out there begging for acceptance is gone. I’m far too caring and kind-hearted for a casual friend with benefits relationship. As much as I want to continue the one I’m in. Same ol’ story- boy meets girl early in life, boy runs into girl in a bar on a random Saturday night having not seen girl in forever, boy’s been drinking, girls been drinking, boy says “Let’s go back to my place”, girl follows with a racing heart, unsure, and a little scared. Boy leads girl into the act, girl is completely nervous. Boy thinks the night was great and hey, “We should do this again sometime”. Girl goes home thinking, “That was wild, I can’t believe I just did that! Why did I do that? Will he text me? Does he really want to see me again? Is FWB really a sustainable thing? Could there be something to this in the future?”. A few more hook-ups down the road, a couple nights spent sleeping over, and girl begins to think “There really could be more to this and oh my gosh, I have a feeling. I caught a feeling! Shit!” And then boy gives girl hope there's ‘more there’ when he comforts her after a terrible, horrible ordeal, he holds girl in his arms, he wipes her hair out of her face, he makes a soothing ‘shhhhhh ssshhhhhh’ sound while rubbing girls back. Boy does and says all the right things. That was 9 days ago, girl hasn’t heard from boy since. Abandoned. Heartbreak. And he wasn’t even a boyfriend or even much of a guy friend. We talked about trivial things, we screwed -a lot- and we lived our separate lives. Abandoned. Heartbreak. Hermit.
My 16-year-old moved out a few months ago. I only have the one child. I wasn’t ready for him to move out at 18, nevermind at 16. I wasn’t ready for him to just decide one day that he would rather live with other people than living with me, his mother. One day, he was just gone. This came a mere year and a half after my husband had left, mover clear across the country, started over fresh, while leaving me behind on bills, final notices, and only 7 weeks from Christmas day. I dealt with the husband leaving in style. I threw out all the random crap he’d held onto in our home for the last however many years. I de-cluttered his massive clutter. I threw out garbage bags of crap. I didn't cry. I felt a newfound freedom that lifted my heart and my soul of an intense burden I had been carrying for a long time. My child leaving though, my child leaving was so much different. I couldn't bring myself to go into his room because it was all him. From the blanket on the floor, the Marley poster on the wall, and the swords he had made in woodshop class. It smelled like him. Dirty socks, boy sweat, and the air freshener he discreetly hid from his friends. It took me two weeks to pack his stuff and move it into the other empty bedroom. Some of it hasn’t even made the move yet. Some of his things are still on his wall, I can’t bring myself to take them down, even after 4 months. This boy I carried in my body, this boy I raised the best I could, this boy who I love so damn much, the one person in the entire world I never feared would completely abandon me, did.
I struggle with the emotions and crazy effects that BPD has on my life every day. I struggled through emotions, some crying, writing all this. I’ll struggle through my wide expanse of emotions later today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.
I will struggle with the impulse to go the house my child currently lives in and drag him out by his belt, kicking and screaming if I have to, and lock him in his real bedroom until he agrees to have a nice long conversation with me. I will struggle to keep my cool when I walk past my child's closed bedroom door knowing my child isn’t in there, and he may not ever be in there again. I will struggle and tear up every time I walk past my child’s portraits in the hallway on the way to the bathroom, to my bedroom, on my way to bed to sleep. I will struggle with the impulse to check my phone to see if ‘boy’ is online and when he was last online, and to drive by his house and his bar, just to see if he’s there. I will struggle with the impulse to take pills until I forget and no longer feel anything. I will struggle with the knowledge that I am so very incredibly lonely that I go to bars hoping some stranger will talk to me for 5 minutes, and that will be the only human contact I’d had for 5 days.
I will struggle to accept that there are people out there who DO know my struggle. As I said, I am so very incredibly lonely that my own loneliness hurts my heart, right down to my soul, and I can feel my soul cry. It cries for me, for my broken heart, for my misery, for my loneliness, for no longer taking joy from the things I once loved to do, for the constant silence, for the memories that are fading, for the girl I once was. My soul cries for the empty shell of a person I have become. My soul weeps for itself.
