Tom Waits: hoist that rag

Yesterday I decided, for reasons which I find it fairly hard to fathom, to wear my scars, or at least those on the lower portions of my forearms, out for the first time this year. A winter spent believing that summer would never come means that they are significantly worse than they were last year. On back of my left wrist is a large red scar in the shape of a trefoil; I gave myself a third degree burn with the iron one tuesday afternoon for reasons I can honestly say I have now completely forgotten. The rest are the long, pink and raised marks of the razor. I look a mess. Still, most people are too polite to comment and I'm damned if I'm going to spend all summer wearing sleeves which reach my knuckles; that'll just make me a sweaty, grumpy, cross bitch. More so than usual. So I decide to go for it.

What I fail to factor into the equation are the rest of the clothes which I have chosen to wear. I dressed in a hurry; I was having a bad morning- hungover, miserable, world-shy. Going to meet an ex-boyfriend over for a few weeks from his new home in Chicago was the last thing I felt like doing. I wandered round the house picking up parts of outfits I knew I'd liked at some stage. A pair of black high heels. Electric blue tights. A gold lace puff ball skirt. A t-shirt which says "DIE YUPPIE SCUM" on the front. A cropped jacket with three quarter length sleeves. Not only did I look mad, I Iooked angry. Let's consider the external signs of being a MURDERING FUCKING PSYCHOPATH shall we? Short, punk hair? Check. Bored expression? Check (I can't help it; it's a musculature thing). Too much black eyeliner? Chheck (I was going for fifties film star. I failed, as always). T-shirt emmblazonned with death threat? Check. Arm full of agressiive looking scars? Ceck, check, and check-a-roo. It's od,, given that I on occasion look like such a nutter, that if you asked me to describe myself I would say- a little odd, maybe, but I'd get on really wwell with your grandparents. I would. Once they'd emerged from behind the sofa. On the tube, people do not sit next to me. I try and pretend that my body doesn't belong to me. It gets worse. I decide to hide behind a book. Unusally for me, I only have one with me- Marya Hornbacher's excellent psycho-cultural memoir of anorexia and bulimia, Wasted. So now I'm sitting there, obviously crazy, reading a book about another crazy. People avoid making eye-contact with me. I try and make eye-contact with people because I haven't eaten for a long time and I'm beginning to feel slightly hysterical. At Embankment a woman comes up to me. -Are you okay? she asks. -Yes, I reply.

I meet the ex-boyfriend for tea. I am horrible to him. I am always horrible to him. I am horrible to him because his care for me is too uncomplicated, too simple, too demonstrative. He is too easy. He loves me too simply; it seems to come as easy to him as breathing. I don't understand it. It frightens me, and I resent it. He doesn't understand, and never did, the complex and convoluted paths of my own emotions, the way I can screw myself round and round until I break, and then lash out at those who try to fix me just because it hurts too much to be touched. Being loved hurts an awful lot; people should, I feel, at least have the good grace to find loving me hard. He never understood the way I ran away from him because I loved him and he loved me and I knew that had to end. One morning, after phoning him at three a.m. and dumping him- again- I cried and cried. I couldn't stop. I was about fifteen; my mother was still alive and living here. She asked me what was wrong, and I told her, and as she held me and rocked me she asked why I had done something which had made me so unhappy. Then, as now, I had no answer for her. The next morning, I bunked school, turned up on his doorstep in floods of tears. His father opened the door, let me in. They put me to bed. I slept most of the day.

Now, he makes me aloof. I am supercillious, hurtful, my words tart, slightly bitter, tasting of coffee-grinds as they roll out over my tounge. It hurts me that he loves me. I want him to stop. At the same time I want him to take me in his arms and care for me like a child. fuck knows what I'd do if he tried. Hit him, probably.

The hard thing about BPD- particularly for those dealing with BPD in others- is the way that we hurt the people closest to us. We lash out at people closest to us, just to get in there first. Feeling certain that people will leave us, we make them leave us, just to prove ourselves right. And then we tell ourselves that we didn't need them anyway. When being alone hurts too much, we rattle to the other extreme, become like babies, incapable and made prostrate by blank, faceless Need- for touch, for soothing, for kindness, for love. Which will be withdrawn. And so the cycle starts again.

I can see myself being cruel. I can see myself being fraustrating. I can see people patiently try to explain things to me- how emotions are valuable, how they can tell you things, how people can leave the room without it being abandonment. I feel myself not understanding. The words are made meaningless by the screaming, whining, utterly engrossing cycle of my own emotions. I hate myself for being cruel. I hate myself for being needy. I hate myself for not being able to understand. I fraustrate myself. Living with my emotions is like living with a body which wont move when it is told to, or which moves wrong; it's the emotional equivalent of a severe physical disability. You know what you want your mind to do, but how in god's name do you make it happen? It's fraustrating, it makes me furious. There is nothing wrong with my intellect, but I have simply no control over my emotions; they are like a foreign body in my mind, a black bear to which I am shackled, which will not obey me, which is determined to hurt and sometimes to kill me. I can't run away from it, because it is there, inside my skull. I see people bemused by the way that I smile benignly and talk about the principles of utiitarianism as blood drips softly from my forearms. I must seem like a retarded child sometimes. You can say what you like to me about emotionality and human interation and love and need and kindness; I will smile blankly at you, nod, tell you I understand (because I do, intellectually) and then retreat to the bathroom and keep on carving up my skin. No wonder people leave us. No wonder therapists don't take us on. No wonder hospitals dread us. The only way to have sympathy for us, to understand why we behave so erratically, so capriciously, so loving/hating, so kind/cruel, would be to try being inside our heads. And I really wouldn't recommend that.