Longness

I free wrote in abnormal psychology, came up with almost 4 pages of funness

I think I’m definitely getting over this.. memories are less painful, more not felt. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.. it’s like with my brother. I know that he was alive once, that he loved me, that we loved each other, that we spent time together. I know we had happy times and sad times, I know that we had times at all. It just feels like it never really happened.. I used to attribute this to the fact that it has been so long, but it hasn’t been very long since Mandie left my life. It just feels like… she was never real. Like it was all just a dream, a dream of part good and part bad, but a dream none the less.. Now I’m awake and in reality and Mandie doesn’t exist here.

I feel like she left me because she moved on so quickly. I talked to Ross about it, about whether or not she ever really loved me, and something he said struck me. He said that when you really care about someone, you try to work things out.. The first couple of days after our break-up I didn’t think of this as the end of our friendship, I wanted to save that.. I wanted to communicate, like many people said we should do.. Then, after talking to my therapist, I realized that communication would be impossible in this situation..

She wasn’t even interested in repairing our friendship. We were best friends for four years and it just ends like that? A single conversation, and it’s all undone… When I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind I cried a lot, because I really wanted a goodbye like that, even if it was only in my mind.. I wanted her to hug me once more and to see her look at me with affection and caring, not what we had. It was very sudden, very hard.

When I was on the phone with my dad crying he asked what I normally did when I was this upset, and I said that I talk to Mandie and that made me cry even more. Just like that, it’s gone. She started dating someone else in about a week. She left me because she was completely uninterested in making anything better.

She said I was unreasonable in expecting her to talk to me when she said she would in the first week we were broken up.. I’m sorry, when she broke up with me last time I had about an hour before I went and laid down next to her and had to talk to her the rest of the night. She expected me to be okay hanging around her and watching her date someone else..

Being angry is not productive. Regardless, whether or not it’s realistic, I feel like she left me.

My abnormal psychology teacher just said that most people with personality disorders don’t get better, and he specifically named borderline personality disorder.. Most people with borderline personality disorder don’t get better, they don’t have a lot of healthy relationships. They just learn to live with it.. but it never goes away.

I know that isn’t a rule, set in stone, but I’ve never heard anyone say that before. I don’t think he’s being cynical, just realistic. But.. I think I can get better, I am getting better. I want to be normal, I want to feel things like normal people do. I want to not feel abandoned every time someone cancels plans or says something about caring about someone else. That is what I’m fighting for, that is why I’m forcing myself to take medicine. I am fighting to be normal.. and I don’t think I’m going to let what he just said stop me.

I talk to my brother more and more lately, does that make me crazy? It’s not like he talks back, but I noticed little signs. Other people might say they’re not signs, but I say they are. I’ll hear a song, and it will make me think of him, and then I’ll hear it three or four times that day in different forms. Like Angel, by Sarah Mclaughlan (sp? I have no freakin clue how to spell her name), I associate that song with him, I have for years. When I was really down one day it came on one radio station, then another a few hours later, and then I saw the live concert playing on the TVs in Best Buy. Then, I saw it a fourth time, in a movie I believe.. I firmly believe that was him letting me know he was listening.

I don’t talk to TJ as much anymore, and I think it’s a good thing. I called her a lot before because I felt this constant need to be talking to someone, connected to someone, to not be alone. God I was so terrified of being alone, I got so upset. Now, I’m kinda okay when I’m alone. I’m trying very hard.

My abnormal psychology teacher is saying now that when he talks to people with borderline the hairs on the back of his neck stick up, and he just kinda senses that there’s something off.. I wonder if he felt that when he talked to me?

I hear him talk about it and I just see myself going down those paths.. I do it every time and I don’t realize it as I do. I would idolize Mandie and then demonize her. One second she was great and the next I felt like I hated her. But, no matter how mad I was at her, I didn’t want to lose her. I’ve always done that, saw someone as perfect, sweet, my world. Then, they do something that upsets me or hurts me, or just my mood swings, and I can’t stand them. They do all these things that drive me so crazy and I just want to scream. I’ve always had one person to cling to.. also kinda like dependent disorder. My teacher said that many people have more than one, but the others will be less so.. So they mostly just diagnose with one thing.

My therapist is honest, I’m going to ask her about the success rate that she has seen with borderline.

I think I’m going to look for something that helps get rid of scars, they have like creams and stuff. I don’t like other people seeing them and thinking that they know me, or possibly even actually knowing me. They’re my scars, and I like them, and they’re there for me. I just don’t like that it makes people think, what I know they’re thinking.

I was reading in my Encarta, and 10% of people with borderline personality disorder kill themselves by the time they’re 30. I can see why sometimes..

Borderline personality disorder people are supposed to draw a lot of attention, from people not being able to handle it anymore.. I guess I’ve always contained myself pretty well.. only my dad has seen the full force of it. You wouldn’t believe it if he described my fits.. I scream, I gesture, I run around the house, I say very dramatic things.. Mandie has seen some of it, in the ways I get mad at her and then idolize her, the swinging. Mark has seen the anger side, many of the sides actually..

What I’ve experienced more than anything is not people wanting me to get help, but people getting mad at me. Being mad because I can’t trust, because I’m too clingy, because I’m always so.. difficult.

The girl who is sitting next to me has very pretty curly brown hair, and she’s resting so her eyes are closed. I’d like to take her picture. She looks very naturally beautiful. Heh, she opened her eyes and I was looking at her, I wonder if she thinks I’m weird. I commented on the fact that she looks sleepy, maybe she’ll think that’s why I was looking at her. I like typing my thoughts, it’s somewhat liberating. I can’t write this much when I have to for a grade.. It’s too bad I can’t express these thoughts to others, then they might think I’m actually alive and thinking.

I just live inside my head.. that’s how I learned to be. My parents were busy with their jobs, or fighting, or with Tyler.. I learned to be alone once, very alone. I lived inside my head and talked with me. It wasn’t that I was happy like that, well maybe as a little kid I was. Mostly, I just accepted that that was life, and that sadness was normal.

When my mother first shifted from a day job to a night job I used to cry for her at night. For the first while it was because I forgot she switched, and then I just missed her. I would go sleep in her bed on her side, so that she’d have to wake me in order to lay down, so I could talk to her and be close to her. I slept in her bed much longer than other kids slept with their parents. I just wanted to feel like she was there and I wasn’t alone.. It’s so hard to remember.. I spent a lot of time alone and a lot of time afraid of being alone. How do I know how I felt? I can’t even remember.. there were so many different feelings. I remember feeling both.

I lived in that memory for a moment.. I know when I experience something more because when I stop writing about it or thinking about it I feel like I was just doing something. I feel like I had just been watching a movie, or talking to someone.. Like I had something I was experiencing and doing. I wasn’t here for a moment, I was laying in that bed. I used to stare at her and wonder what I would do when she died. I was obsessed with death before I was even in Kindergarten. I would always think about how horrible it would be when she died, what I would do, how I would live. I thought about my brother’s death a lot too, how I would react. I wondered if I would be dedicated enough to cut my hair like his in honor of him, I guess I wasn’t.

Reading about borderline also makes me see things that I know I think and feel and don’t want to admit.. Like being manipulative. I have those thoughts.. like when I fight with someone my first reaction is to call someone else crying and bring them to my side.. I don’t do this, I stop myself, but the thoughts and urges are there. Also the fits of anger.. the uncontrolled anger.. where I scream at my father and tell him I hate him and he has ruined my life.. I go into my room and cut myself, and sometimes I come out and scream some more, blood running down my arm. I’m so ashamed of it, of the way I act, the way I think.. The black and white thinking I’ve always had.

I’m reading myself in words on a screen and it makes me feel so ashamed.

He’s describing of the switching of someone’s role from good to bad, I love you to I hate you.

This all gives me a certain sense of pride too, because I can’t believe even now that I managed to end it with Mandie. It was like my entire world was over afterwards, I was so upset.. So unbelievably upset. I cried and screamed for so many days..

The thing I’m still most afraid of is people telling me “no, you don’t have that disorder, you’re just fine, stop acting stupid.” All my life I was just being stupid, being weird, being bad.. Now I have this explanation, this order, this light. I see that I’m not just stupid or weird or bad, I’m like many people who have a problem.. I hate it when people want to take that away…

It’s like my hope.

So many people with this disorder have just been given up on.. therapists are often afraid of treating them. Apparently they’re very good at seeing the weaknesses of others.. it’s like that game I like to play when I’m walking in the hallway. I like to look at people and imagine what their fears are. Well, I always said I was imagining what they were like, but mostly I just like to think about what they’re afraid of. When I talk I’m always analyzing.. I like to have a back-up, if someone decides to take what knowledge of me that I gave tem and use it to hurt me, I like to have a way to hurt them back…