I am a very, VERY nice person. There are PLENTY of people from all walks of life who can tell you this, but as I am human just like everyone else, and at times I can be an ass. There. I admitted it. Moreover, there are two people who have experienced this in the last few months, and no matter how I justify my behavior, it’s not right regardless of whatever the circumstances may be.
IN RELATION TO BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER
As stated by the Mayo Clinic, “Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is an emotional disorder that causes emotional instability, leading to stress and other problems.” Moreover, they also state that people with BPD have: “…relationships [that] are usually in turmoil. You often experience a love-hate relationship with others. You may idealize someone one moment and then abruptly and dramatically shift to fury and hate over perceived slights or even minor misunderstandings.” Oh yeah. This is so true.
LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP #1
A great example of the “love-hate relationship” that the Mayo Clinic talks about would be between me and a guy named Paul. Paul is a musician who was involved in the rise of 1970s British punk, and he was someone who, for the most part, was a really nice person. We’ve had many conversations about all sorts of things, and thought we have been in the same room, this relationship began later VIA the internet.
Previous to this, Paul was in a relationship with another woman for around 25 years that resulted in a marriage and two children. Then he met the Swede, a fellow performer, at a show. After recording together, he took up a relationship with her, and suddenly dumped his wife.
After this happened, I tried to still be friendly to him, but I thought what he did was really shitty. I was friends with his wife and she was VERY loyal to him and later told me that their breakup was a very surprising, very sudden thing. I couldn’t help but to be sympathetic to her, especially because she suffered from Multiple Sclerosis and had said a few weeks earlier that the act of walking only a few blocks would tire her because of the MS.
This was a conflict for me. I was still friends, for a period of time, with Paul after he left his wife, but I felt bad for her. I was split.
Well, after a few months, the sympathetic feeling turned into a small amount of anger. How could he have done this to her, especially because she’s ill? How could he leave his family for someone that’s young enough to be his daughter? The questions kept swirling in my head, until finally I erupted and expressed my feelings to him. Not surprisingly, after this we stopped being friends. I tried to, nevertheless, keep a casual attitude towards him on message boards and whatnot for a band I enjoy that he used to be in. Unfortunately, he later trashed me on one board, using my Borderline Personality Disorder as the reason I was an asshole– which is probably my biggest urk in the entire world. Then, contact with him, no matter what the dynamics were, did not exist anymore.
Previous to this, I was also very verbal about my dislike over HIS decision. I just felt that it was very wrong and that fucking over his wife like that was not acceptable. I vented on Facebook and probably Twitter as well, and I know that some of my “friends” had ratted me out and told him exactly what I was saying. It was just a big, old mess…. but did things really have to be like that?
LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP #2
The other love/hate relationship I’ve found myself mixed up in was with a woman named Gina. Gina is a musician/activist from my hometown of Chicago who I had started having contact with a few years ago. Basically, I was into a band she was involved with for a second, and after she left, I found out about her then-current band. Chatting on message boards, we never had a friendship but we exchanged words a few times. I thought that she had potential as a musician, and I was a fan, no doubt. Then the ping-pong game began.
After she totally went nuts over something stupid I posted about another person on a message board that I had a brief sexual relationship with, I was hurt and pissed at the same time.
Fast forward a few years. Since the incident on the message board, when I’ve been bored I would surf her band’s website to waste time. This was not a regular thing by any means, but just a way to entertain myself for short periods of time. After she accidentally got pregnant, she broke up her band and a few months later, she started her activism after a traumatic Cesarian Section that she says was not necessary. This is also when she started blogging, and every so often I would read it, once again, when I was bored.
About three years ago, she found herself in an online “battle” about breastfeeding… no, I’m not kidding (it IS a serious issue, btw). The conflict was between her and a couple of radio DJs in Los Angeles. In her regular fashion, she became fanatical, and this conflict just totally blew up both on the internet and on the air. I saw this as my chance to get “revenge” over the shit she pulled on the message board a few years previous. Yeah, I know how petty revenge is, but I’ve definitely had a subtle fondness to it in the past…. and this time I definitely was successful in my venture.
I wrote an email to the DJs where I stated what other people have said about her: “She doesn’t like to hear anything that she doesn’t agree with, no matter what…” In this email, I also ripped on her ability to be a good mother as at that time, she was working full-time, going to school full-time, and was running an illegal cake business from her house in the Chicago suburb where I just happened to grow up. Also, I mentioned the fact that her commute to work was an hour each way and her commute to school was an additional 30 minutes to an hour long. As the email stated, I said: “…how can she be a mom if she is NEVER home?” This added fuel to the fire and totally pissed her off.
CONCLUSION
The love/hate relationship that many people with BPD have to deal with is something I battle with as well. My behavior in these situations is questionable. Going off on Paul and his new relationship only caused more harm than good and the ping-pong game of revenge that exists with Gina is just stupid, pointless drama.
This is behavior that I’ve been trying to correct for a while, and while I still trip up, I have improved. An example of this exists between my ex-fiancee and I. I LOVE THE MAN VERY MUCH, but I also get seriously pissed at him as well. I used to vent about the negative side of our relationship on places such as Facebook where his co-workers and some of his fellow students would see, but I don’t do this anymore. Every now and then, he’ll do something that angers me and I may post on Facebook that I’m mad at him, but that’s it. Even that doesn’t happen very often anymore, and he has noticed this himself. I take pride in this, and like I’ve already said, I’m still working on this part of my illness and my life, and it seems as I am actually winning much of the time.
