Session Six
I Feel Everything. And I Mean. Everything.
Moving on has got to be one of the worst things in the world.
When you grieve for lengths of time, unimaginable thoughts – detestable thoughts start creeping up on you like a killer in a slasher film.
Just when you think you’re safe…
GAME OVER. THE MASK MAN GOT YOU. DECEASED.
Living with BPD has made me feel like the pretty girl who dies first –
Every. Single. Time.
And I say pretty, because I’ve been called that often enough.
From people at the grocery store, to boys who pulled my panties down with the urgency of a starving lion.
I felt everything, you know.
The way their eyes would drag across my chest imagining what was underneath my clothing. How they’d lick their lips and ogle like I was their own personal temptress.
Only to forget my name (or had they really known it to begin with?) after the deed was done, and I was wiping their victory away with a last place medal.
Oh, Blu. If only you learned sooner that lust is the cheapest currency of all.
It moans in the dark and disappears when the sun rises.
A coward, hiding in shaded corners. Come out, come say it to my face. Come tell me I wasn’t good enough, come tell me you’ve had better.
But lust isn’t brave.
Neither are men.
“Not all men,” Stacy once said. To level me, that is.
Not all men, I’d repeated. But enough to make you second-guess your reflection. Enough to make you dissect yourself in the mirror like a specimen in a petri dish.
Enough, to make beautiful people convince themselves they’re impossible to love.
Too big. Too small. Too lanky. Too curvy. Too wrinkled. Too little.
Not all men, no.
But enough to make me doubt.
***
I’ve been told I feel too much.
That I feel everything. And I mean. Everything.
I’m sure you can guess who said what. But there was the Blu before my diagnosis, and the Beatrice after.
The only thing that changed was the label.
People live with untreated mental health for decades. They live whole, full, functional lives. Yes, they snap. But that’s part of the deal. I work a lot, but I give you money. So shut up, Brenda!
And then it’s vacation photos and yacht rentals and pretending nothing ever cracks because Brenda, I’m fucking fine!
When I asked for Jace to see me, I mean really see me, this is what I meant.
I no longer wanted to be the girl who snapped, blew their casket and spent their tax return on Burberry perfume. Especially since he liked it so damn much, that fuck.
My Sephora bill was through the roof in my Jace periods. All for what, a boy? Do they even realize how much we spend to impress them?
Anyway, sorry. Back to my thought. See? Too many.
Confident Blu on the outside, boiling Beatrice on the inside. Always ready to spill, to implode, to burn.
When Stacy gave me the diagnosis of BPD, it was unbelievable because I didn’t want to believe she’d actually come back with something.
I thought those silly little questionnaires therapists gave you were just protective measures. You know, for lawsuit purposes.
But no, it was real. Three words, right in front of my eyes.
A name for everything I’d been my whole life.
Borderline personality disorder.
It sounds scarier than it is. It’s quite manageable, actually. I’ve managed. And I mean that, okay?
I’ve struggled a great deal in my life. You know that, that’s why you picked up this book. Why you’re reading my pages. If it didn’t feel impossible at times, you wouldn’t be human. But here you are, flesh and bones, fingers holding onto something tangible – something real, and you feel.
I want you to feel.
Everything. Anything.
As long as you do.
For a while, I couldn’t. I was numb. Paralyzed. Loving the state of being unloved, no longer defiant to the pain but a traitor to my happiness. I had no parents, not in my eyes. In fact, if I lift my head right now, as I write this, I can still see my mother’s door closed.
Dad’s not here to open it.
He’s not around. She’s unable to function.
And for a while, I wasn’t either.
The cold hard truth of feeling everything is that when it gets too much, when the world weighs heavy, you power down. Let everyone take from you in the moment, and disappear from you later.
Love doesn’t mean much when other things take over.
And so there was a selfishness to the way I let men treat me, and a cruelty to which I treated myself.
I still bear the scars from those days.
Thing is, mental health, just like physical health, doesn’t vanish into thin air. It urges you to understand it. Urges you to become it.
Urges you to breathe.
I envy the people who are always calm, who don’t struggle with their inner-person turning up every fear and desire to max volume. If only there was an off switch, we wouldn’t feel so empty inside all the time.
Because in that emptiness, we forget to breathe.
And then, we drown.