Depression, Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) are a few of the diagnoses I’ve been labeled with. That being said, my day to day life is different than most individuals. I struggled with self-injury since I was ten-years-old, and I’m only two years clean as of April 14th of this year. Two years ago when I was hospitalized from a failed suicide attempt, I started the long road to recovery from my destructive tendencies, abuse and being sexually assaulted.
One of the largest factors of my suicide attempt was a dark secret for a long, long time. When I was underage, I began talking to an older man online. I was not aware of my BPD traits at this time, and even if I was I wouldn’t have stayed away from him.
Him. Let’s call him X. This grown man conditioned me, a child, and manipulated me—He began trying to mold me into the woman he wanted me to grow into. The addition of my BPD traits only made this worse. For those of you who do not know, BPD is defined by Mayo Clinic as “a serious mental illness that causes unstable moods, behavior, and relationships. It usually begins during adolescence or early adulthood."
Most people who have BPD suffer from: Problems regulating their emotions and thoughts.” Many individuals with BPD attach onto people in a very dependent way. The people we latch onto are referred to as our FPs, or “favorite persons.” These people can be defined as people that we place on a pedestal and idolize; people we crave attention from in an unhealthy way.
X was my favorite person.
As I mentioned, there was an age difference between the two of us, so our relationship was kept a secret from everyone. It is hard to express my feelings about him, but at the time he made me feel loved and genuinely happy for the first time since I began self-harming. So of course I became attached to this fantasy that we were meant to be together.
I wish I would have gotten out when I could. A year and a half into our relationship, he began withholding affection until I did whatever it was that he wanted. His actions and words quickly became abusive.
So now, many of you may be wondering, “Well why not leave? Just block him.” Or maybe you’re angry and thinking, “This relationship isn’t real because you’ve never met.” My mental illness had me bound to this man in such an unhealthy way that even the thought of leaving him sent me into frenzies of panic attacks.
And while I don’t expect everyone to understand, I do expect everyone to stop victim blaming.
I’ll beg the question of WHY? Why are people who can’t just up and leave abusive relationships called stupid and ridiculed? Often times the people victim blaming have never experienced an abusive relationship, do not have mental illnesses like BPD or have always been in a healthy relationship. You do not get to project and speak on matters that you have not been through. You do not get to invalidate the victims’ feelings.
My abuser was not abusive 24/7. This man who lived across the country from me had me wrapped around his finger, and he made me feel wanted. Which, at the time, outweighed the damage he’d done and continued to do. I am shamed for staying in that relationship. It was instilled in my mind that— he was the only one who would ever love me, no one would ever care about me, I’m too dramatic and I’m overreacting or crazy.
I couldn’t just leave. Believe me, I desperately wanted to get out and forget all about the time I was pulled into an abusive man’s orbit. But this catastrophic solar system was all I had ever known.
I knew I loved him when I began making up excuses for the way he hurt me, and for someone with BPD, I only know how to love with my whole heart. I thought the panic attacks he gave me were butterflies. No matter how true my emotions were, my relationship was never real to them. It wasn’t real because it was long distance phone calls and sparks across wires. It was voices over space time and pixels on a screen, laughter mixed with beeps and words that twisted my spine.
But those calls soothed my anxiety when he wasn’t the one inflicting it. Those sparks created memories that I cannot ever forget. His voice spoke sweet syllables into my ear and drowned me entirely. The pixels have learned every crinkle in my smile, every upward curve of my dimples and named each of my crow’s feet. They have seen more of me than the tangible objects around me. Those beeps made me relax and finally feel at ease with the constant storm I was trapped under.
His words, though they broke my vertebrae, made me flexible so that I could love him from every angle. From fifteen to eighteen, from thirty-one to thirty-four, it was real. Or maybe it will only be real to you when I tell you that those floral comforters suffocated me and he showed his love by stringing me up over the balcony of a cheap motel, telling me to never leave again. It was no less real when he acted like he wouldn’t care if I left the brittle remnants of my bones at his feet.
Leaving him was the hardest thing I have ever done. I felt my aorta severing itself when I deleted every photograph and pixel he embedded into my life.
Maybe it will only be real to you if it’s like the relationship after, where I ran into the arms of someone just as cruel. No matter how tender he was at first, he changed when I— well there was dirt and dried foliage welling up in the ditch and I was dizzy from his water; wine? Christ…Salt that got lost in the sea with tears that put the coast on drought notice. I was abandoned and I saw my “NO” written out for him in the constellations as I looked up. My back was broken again. Powder. Sticky. I didn’t mind bleach rinsing my insides because I wanted his existence out of my system.
So where did I run? Right back into the arms of X. Despite him telling me that I’ll never be as beautiful as the girls on television, through bubble tears I asked him why he loved me and he said that he’d leave if he wanted. That was comforting to me. If that kaleidoscopes and shows how much he loves me, that’s sad. The night he told me he cheated I told him I was suicidal. To which he told me to go ahead.
Yet on my birthday he bought me a necklace made of a real shooting star. It stays locked away because my love for the sky cannot touch him or it will be corrupted and avalanches of asteroids will fill this planet. I ached whenever I thought of the future, because we were long term. Weren’t we? Wasn’t I going to stand at his casket weeping?
I was so attached.
Wherever and whenever he goes, he carries my xiphoid process and my eyelashes in his pocket. Part of me, for better or for worse, is always with him. Leaving him hurt worse than drinking bleach, slitting open my veins, flinging myself into the walls, setting myself aflame.
Now I live in fear and in shame because I am told that none of it was real. People roll their eyes at me because it “didn’t matter.” However, I have scars to prove them wrong. Knowing that the types of abusive LDRs like mine are being validated and exposed will ultimately help me heal— and despite being put down by the people who invalidate my relationships, I am trying to love myself and learn that there is someone out there for me. It’s someone who will not reach into my esophagus and snatch out my budding sunflowers—but will rather shine so bright alongside me that my sunflowers tower, instead of wilt.
