You and Yours

I have tonsilitis for the second time in a month, and the forced inactivity and constant feelings of hard-done-by self pity are leading me to resurrect this blog. Aside from which I feel I have more to say now than I have done for a while. Recently I have been doing things I never would have thought possible, which brings its own set of problems- usually of the "sweet jesus, this is still impossible" giving up variety. I have a job. A flatmate. And a date, of sorts. Almost indestinguishable to the naked eye from a sane, sober, normal person. I also have a sore throat- but that's a side issue. I'm just out for the sympathy vote now.

So, let's talk a little bit about the problem of relationships in a pathological, mental diseased sort of context. I am reliably informed (although my own experience is necessarily limited) that the early stages of a relationship between two completely healthy people are a tense time, fraught with possible pitfalls and ways of putting the desired right off the desiree as fast as you can say post-traumatic stress disorder. I am also told that these same early sstages are (and I quote) "fun", ""exciting", "charged"- but I frankly refuse to believe such obvious, transparent lies. Now imagine that coupled with this you also have to broach any of the following subjects, with someone you don't know very well, who you quite want to like you and think you are really very normal:
i) scars (having them)
ii) scars (how you got them)
iii) where you spend the missing portions of your week (in a mental hospital)
iv) what you have been doing with yourself for the last two years (see above)
v) fear of being touched arising from childhood abuse
vi) the need to sleep in the far corner of the bed, surrounded by pillows, with the radio on (see above for reasons)
vii) why it's all a lot funnier than it seems, really, truly, if you like that sort of joke
Really, it is a veritable minefield. And in this particulr instance the old education adage (that if you can just get this person to read a bit about what it is you've got then they wont find it so terrifying after all, and will see that it is a perfectly manageable condition which will in no way affect your healthy, happy life together, and by the way if they doon't propose marriage right this instant then you are going to beat them over the head with a hammer, keep them in a freezer for a fortnight, and intermittently fry up bits of their forearms with onions to serve up for lunch) just doesn't work that well. Confess to borderline personality disorder, and then fear, fear that your object of passioon will go and look it up on the net. Almost all definitions include lines such as "a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships", "relationships and the persons emotions may often be classified as shallow", "a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation", "frantic efforts to avoid real or perceived abandonment". And so on. And so forth. And that's without the general, social stigmitization surrounding personality disorders which seems to have got worse, not better, in recent years. A focus on the severe and untreatable category leads to a general suspicion that the whole lot of us are hopelessly incurable, baby eating, criminally hardened, sociopathic headcases. I would like to put it on record now, once and for all, that I have never eaten a baby. NOt even a little bit. Not even a toe.

It gets worse. The most commonly recommended books for those trying to learn about a BPD in a friend or partner have such inspiring titles as "I hate you! Don't leave me!" and "Stop walking on eggshells: taking your life back when someone you care about has borderline personality disorder". In the literature, as in the online support communities for carers of someone with BPD, the emphasis is on how difficult it is to live with someone who is impulsive, manipulative, volatile, flighty. Far from reassuring a prospective canditade for twosome bliss, I can personally imagine few things more likely to get me to back away from a prospective single white female with a penchant for boiling houehold pets.

And this, of course, is no help for the sufferer, who is, by this point, already scared witless and trying to think of ways out. Because, using the standard borderline model of rational thinking, anyone who doesn't know I'm crazy can't really love me because they don't know me, and if they did they would leave me, ergo, I am unloveable and everyone leaves me. If they do know, and they still want to go out with me, they must be dangerous and or demented, or only doing it to hurt and mock me- only somoene crazier than me would love me, and I'm pretty crazy, so they must be really crazy and don't count, ergo, I am still unloveable and everyone leaves me (possibly through sectioning). And soon you convince yourself that this possiibly quite nice and kind person is oonly trying to hurt and leave you, so you start to become cold, and agressive, and then they do hurt and leave you, and so the whole cycle perpetuates itself, a little worse each time.

I know this isn't the fault of the internet, and I know it isn't the fault of the books. But it might be a bit easier to negotiate the beginning of a new relationship, in borderline terms one of the most traumatic things there can be, which is already put under additional stress because of the skeletons in your mind, which is already put under aditional stress because one of you is actining a little crazy all of a sudden, if some emphasis was put on the benefits of loving us- and if this was explained not just to the sane half of the equation, but for the sufferer. The truth is, we can be difficult, but can also be more appreciative, more loving, happier, more thoughtful, more self-aware, than anyone with diagnosis normal.