Living within the confines of borderline - Part Three

Introduced by Lyn Jenkins

Part One of Emma's Story can be found here.

Part Two of Emma's Story can be found here.

This is the third and final part in Emma's incredible recreation of living with borderline in written form...

Truth, you want to talk truth? Whose truth, yours or mine? Is there a truth between? No, my truth is truth. Your idea of truth is a lie. I don't lie. If I don't lie and our truths aren't the same that makes you a liar. Does so...just does. If I am right then you are wrong. Yes you are. No I'm not. If I am good then you are bad if you don't agree with me or see things my way. My way isn't just right, it is the only way. What matters is what I want and need. That's my truth. And my truth is the truth. Don't you even try to lie to me, don't...

I know things but they seem fleeting. What is real and important one minute is fragile and or gone and or misunderstood-misperceived and misinterpreted by me the next minute. I don't know why? You were here a minute ago and it mattered. But then you left. While you were gone for three minutes and fifty-four seconds (clock time -- forever in my own sense of the reality of time) I forgot that you mattered to me and now I find it incredibly impossible to believe that you could love me and leave me just like that for three minutes and fifty-four seconds...to wait and to suffer like that, alone, isolated and afraid. Don't ever do that again. Promise me! Do you have any idea what you put me through? My parents left me like that. It's not alright for you to just be you and not be me -- while I'm being you too. I know things seem fleeting. Things keep changing. I can't hold anymore than I am whether I am holding anything or not.

You live in a 'big picture'. Life, so I am told unfolds in some 'big picture' of reality. I live in millions of little pictures. Millions of pieces of reality. Snapshots from the whole, fragmented seconds of minutes that seem to encompass hours. I can't tell what is going on around me like you do. No, it does not make sense to me. Part of this picture lined up with part of that one...what am I supposed to see? What can I know from these mixed up jigsaw puzzle messages? I get part of it. I don't understand the rest. First you seem to make sense, then you don't so I get angry and frustrated. In one part of the picture I care about you but in another part of the picture I remember out of context when you said this or that and then I can't trust you anymore, or not until the next moment when two picture pieces fit briefly together.

This is my experience.

So one minute I want you close, from a distance and the next minute I want you distantly-close.

This is what is going on inside of me. I don't want to hurt you like I do. I just don't know how to make sense of all of these jumbled messages and fragmented pictures that bombard my mind constantly with images and thoughts that do not fit together, not now, not ever, hardly ever anyway. If memories are pictures of the way things were (or the way things are?) then my memories, like strewn screams, echo to a voided-abyss in a cavernous canyon. Imagine all that sound overlapping itself.

Could you hear me then, any better than I can hear you now?

Welcome to my world,

Em xxx

Image: Free Digital Photos

Comments

[Ems]

I too live have borderline traits. Your writing is the first I have read that truly makes me feel 'yes, you know what I mean'.

It describes so well all the things that I want to say and can't. And it's interesting that Lyn found it difficult to read at first, to me it's what I hear in my head, as if I could have written it and I hear your words in my voice.

It's something I'm going to print out and keep to hand and reread at the times I feel most alone. It's also something I'm going to give to those closest to me who know I'm borderline to read. It says more than I can ever get out. Thank you.

[Linda]

Ems, thank you so much, good luck to you and thank you for reminding us why we wanted to set this blog up.