The wick inside me that should be setting me alight is sodden and impossible to ignite.
I feel, yes, but not enough. I care, of course, but not about much.
Nonchalance and apathy comes as naturally to me as anger.
What’s harder for me to internally maintain is love and happiness.
I am impossible to deal with. I bite my tongue and pretend to be alright with things that I’m not in order to maintain relationships, and when I stop doing that and let people see the complete and entire real me, whether it be the soft, vulnerable part, or the dark, sadistic side, I lose them. They either take advantage of me and I push them away, or I offend or frighten them and they go on their own.
I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve loved and trusted completely in my entire life. Each one of those people has fucked me, in my mind, and proved themselves unworthy.
I don’t mean the trust that I give to everyone. I am someone who will trust in anyone unless you give me reason not to. It’s not earned with me, that sort of trust – it’s automatic – but it can easily be lost. I don’t mean the love I have for most – the casual, friendly love those I ‘click’ with garner instantaneously over talks of music or movies.
I mean the trust in which I will let them sneak through the cracks of the wall around my heart and mind and get in there deeply, where even I don’t go often, never without reason or provocation. Those that I will tell not my secrets to because I don’t have many of those, but will share with my feelings. I’m not very emotional, as a rule, but there are things that stir up pain in me and not many people have truly seen that. Everyone who has, can no longer.
I mean the love that would make me kill for them or die for them. That makes me want to protect and shield them from everything, and that which makes me feel as if my life without them would be utterly meaningless and desolate. The love that, if I’m being completely honest with myself, I don’t know if I’ve ever completely given to anyone. The love that I’m not entirely sure belongs to my daughters and hope is never tested because I do not know if I am so cold that I would not pass.
So…“Why do you want people to think you are mean?”
Everyone has betrayed me. Everyone that had the opportunity to has broken my heart. Not in the romantic sense – I mean that they have each removed an irreplaceable chunk and left me with a mangled mass that barely passes for a center, making me more and more detached and impossible to please or handle. I show everyone my worst in an effort to turn them off before they have an opportunity to damage me. I am afraid, deathly afraid that they will leave me after they have me. That they will abandon me in some way. Yet, every single one of these perceived wrongdoings against me? They may have been all in my head: only extreme to me.
I have Borderline Personality Disorder. A very mild case and some aspects of the basic diagnosis do not apply to me, but I have it and it’s made me unlovable:
People with BPD often have highly unstable patterns of social relationships. While they can develop intense but stormy attachments, their attitudes towards family, friends, and loved ones may suddenly shift from idealization (great admiration and love) to devaluation (intense anger and dislike). Thus, they may form an immediate attachment and idealize the other person, but when a slight separation or conflict occurs, they switch unexpectedly to the other extreme and angrily accuse the other person of not caring for them at all. [source]
Why am I this way? It’s suspected to be environmental, stemming from growing up with the knowledge that neither of my parents wanted me and never ‘dealing’ with it, but it’s not known for sure. What I do know is that this condition directly influences who and how I am. I am manipulative, and hard to handle. I am mean and callous but it’s all tied directly to how inadequate and empty I feel, and how I really cannot get across how much you may have hurt me if you have – only how much I hate you for it.
I have learned, somewhat, to deal with my issues. To keep my rushing wave of irrational fears and feelings to myself, swirling around in my head. I try to deal internally with my feelings toward criticism or disappointment – neither of which I handle well. I may very well be impossible, but I do not know. Sometimes, I think am. I watch and I hear myself constantly doing things that will turn away those that care for me and I sometimes can’t control it. I am pathetic in every sense of the word.
There is no mending me, I am sure of this, so I must protect what’s left of my core with all my might. I must shield it from all intruders, and reiterate constantly to those I let in how vulnerable I am, no matter how much it may seem the opposite.
So, can you love me? Knowing that I’ll love you more than life itself today, but may hate you for no apparent reason tomorrow? That every small thing you do might be insanely big to me? That I am the epitome of abstruse – a paradox personified?
I do not expect the answer to be yes.
If you leave me, it’s perfectly fine. I never really expected you stick around anyway.
If you don’t, part of me will always be waiting for the day you do.
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