My apologies for not writing sooner. With the beginning of summer and the end of the school year it has taken a few weeks to adjust to my new routine. It has been an evolving one and given my usual resistance to such things I believe I'm doing as well as can be expected.
So, I've wanted to write about Borderline Personality Disorder from a slightly more academic perspective for some time, but somehow I just can't seem to do it. I simply cannot wade through millions of words telling me what I already know.
Still, I know that I need to explore what this illness has done to me from a different vantage point. I need to find my own answers, to bring a spiritual voice to the scientific one, to know that there is an inherent gift within the madness that balances the destruction of the fury. Simply put, I need to see G-d within the storm.
So, the other day, as I delved even more deeply into the memories of my past, during a therapy session, I saw the core place of brokenness within myself. I've long dealt with a crippling belief that in order to keep the peace I must sacrifice my own wants, needs, and desires to be happy so that the other person(s) I am in relationship with will love me. It is a debilitating condition that has led to hurt feelings, mistrust, anger, resentment, depression, and a host of other complications. It has always been my job to make others happy, and throughout my life it has usually been at the expense of my own happiness. One of the most devastating memories resurfaced during the EMDR session and I saw that it was still playing out in my day to day life even though the event occured nearly 25 years ago.
I was a young 14 year old, a freshman in high school, awkward, and with massive underlying mental, physical, and emotional disturbances that were yet to be diagnosed and my family had just undergone a radical upheaval. My grandfather had passed away less than 4 months before and that summer I had been biking around town and found my father embracing a woman, who was not my mother, at my special beach. There in plain view it was obvious what was happening, and after getting his attention I pedaled home as fast as I could to tell my mother what I'd seen. They soon arrived at the house and the lies began. Everyone knew they were lies. But they continued anyway. Within a month, this interloper was living in the apartment above our home along with her son who was only 8 months older than I. Suddenly I was living in an obviously polygamous home that no one dared claim for what it was.
Within a few months my mother finally garnered the courage to confront my father and his mistress about the truth. I had gone to my grandmother's house next door, and was working in the basement shop to feel connected to the grandfather who had died too soon. I was sad, but also hopeful and expectant that this hell I had been plunged into would be over. Once the truth was out, there was no going back, and I would be free from the nightmare of this love triangle.
As I sat and fiddled with the tools in my grandfather's workshop, I heard my mother come in and she sat down on a wooden stool next to me. "So?" I said, and she stated the truth of the affair, all the gory details of the confrontation, ad nauseam. "So when is he leaving?" I asked 15 minutes later as her ramble had slowed to a dull roar. "He's not." she said. "WHAT?!?!?!?" I screamed? And in her Borderline Personality Disorder reality she explained why he was staying, that she had been unwilling to force him to make a choice between the two of them. In fact, I remember the comparison that he gave to her, saying that having to choose between his wife and his mistress would be like having to choose between vanilla or chocolate ice cream.
Seriously. Even at 14 years old I knew that this was a blatantly ridiculous and infantile response to being caught breaking your wedding vows and that any damn fool who believed it was as pitiful as the one who said it to them. Yep, my 48 year old parents had reverted to being 4 year olds, unable, unwilling, and irrational toddlers who along with a 40 something year old mistress had decided to throw a collective temper tantrum in the sandbox of my already horrifying life.
I was put into an untenable position, informed that my happiness was not important and that if I wanted any attention at all I had to play along and sacrifice what I knew was what I wanted and needed in exchange for "love." This message was the one I incorporated into myself and have continued to play out all these years later. The why of it all became clear as I saw the "adult" players in the drama.
My mother was incapable of facing the truth that her marriage was over and that despite the financial hardships that were possible, she actually had monetary and emotional support from her extended family. But the beast of BPD stood its ground and bellowed and hollered at the prospect of being abandoned one more time. It was in that moment that the person whose only job was to protect me from harm had decided to abandon ship and save her own warped security over mine.
My father's mistress, a woman who had her own traumatic past and mental illness was driven to believe that this arrangement was a perfectly viable option.
My father, the adult alpha male of the pack, not wanting to lose out on the attention and sexual rewards of finally having 2 women fighting for him chose to hide within the perverted gratification of his new life. Having grown up knowing he was unplanned, that his mother wasn't supposed to be able to have more children, that his older sister was the golden child, and going through puberty at the age of 8, led him to crave the all of the encompassing insanity that passed as "love." Now, at long last, he had 2 women, the madonna and the whore, the replacements for the mother and sister who treated him as less than, and he held onto it for 6 long years clinging to belief that he deserved this reward for all that he had suffered and sacrificed. My father once confessed to me that he had moved away from his academic opportunities, friends, colleagues, and his own parents, because a doctor had told him the only way to manage my mother's instabilities was to move her as close to her parents as possible. He bought a house 1/8 of a mile from them and regretted it until the day he sold it more than 25 years later.
But here is where I can start to see G-d in the storm. In all of this madness there was a home, next door to me, the very one I was sitting in that day, where my grandparents moved when I was 3 years old. It was my refuge. It was my sanctuary. It was my safety. And there was G-d enfolding me with the love that I needed through my grandfather and grandmother. Although Grampa had just died, the love and caring he gave me still filled my heart. And my Grama, who was literally right above me at that moment, continued to support me for the next 3 1/2 years before her own death. I was loved, and it was in part because my father had taken the advice of random physician so many years prior. Were it not for that act of Divine Intervention, would I have known the grace that my grandparents gave me? I don't have an answer to that question, but I am grateful and grace-filled regardless.
So why now? Why am I revisiting all of this now? Why did it come up in therapy when I felt that I was nearly done with this mess? Probably because I have almost finished emptying out the house that my mother drove away from nearly 6 months ago. I've been packing, cleaning, hauling, dragging, loading, selling furniture, planning several yard sales, online sales, and picking up the pieces of rubble that surrounded her home. I have literally collected the broken shards of glass, seashells, plastics, etc. that were spewed around the building, one by one, and I have thrown them away.
During one of the last times I was there, I was cleaning out a dresser and found a sandwich baggie filled with pennies and glitter wedged behind one of the drawers. Inside were maybe a dozen coins and over a hundred beads, and multicolored stars, doves, and angels made of shiny plastic and metal. It was the perfect metaphor for my mother's life. This see through plastic bag, tied off with a weird knot, full of valueless items mixed with sand, grime, and who knows what else stuck in an obscure location, almost lost and forgotten had someone not chosen to clean up the mess. This discovery said it all. Her life has always been in full view for everyone to see, and it is filled with things that a child reveres, but an adult knows to be too little to support a life. It is shiny and filthy all at the same time and the painful emptiness of it is hidden away from the outside world. Her beast had stashed it away from the peering eyes that could have seen the truth of who she really is. And it was I who found it, just as I always have, and always will. And this is where I truly find G-d at the eye of this storm. It is my nearly 40 years of living on the edges and often in the middle of the whipping winds of her hurricane that I have learned compassion for others with mental illness. I have struggled through my own beast's madness, and I have absorbed the only gifts my mother was truly able to give to me. Her crazy has made me tolerant and accepting of individuals who have fallen victim to their own beasts' sadistic ways. More importantly though, it has given me the compassion and love for myself and my own beast that she could not. I can finally see the crazy in myself, accept it, tolerate it, love it, and manage it because I know that G-d is present. As I reprocessed the traumatic event in therapy, my therapist asked me what the 14 year old me needed to know to help deal with the event and the subsequent pain. I said aloud "Little One, you are already loved, and you will make it, you have made it, you are surviving the madness, and you are choosing to live in spite of the deconstruction of your life around you." I continued on, "You are so loved, you will be able to show and give this love to others who need the compassion that no one else will give them. This is a gift. You will spread out your grand white wings, surround yourself with G-d's love, and then be able to enfold others with the graceful feathers that will soothe and comfort each and every person you meet." I told that 14 year old kid to know that the 38 year old was ok, and that in time those horrible years would be relegated to the past. "Hold fast, Little One, you are loved." And those are the words I say in my heart each day when I meet grown and little ones who don't yet know that there is hope for them. That is my gift. I thank G-d for being in that storm of my life and in the lives of others, letting us find our own wings to prevent more damage to our fragile selves. I thank G-d for the chance to embrace each person I meet with my wings, and to attempt to help them find their own in the process.
And with that I begin the process of freeing myself from the madness that was only surrounding me. And I can finally unpack my own sandwich baggies of mental illness and search for the gifts my beast and G-d have hidden away for me. Thank you for sorting through the pennies, glitter, and angel wings on the journey. Be well, love your neighbor as you love yourself, and remember to actually love yourself. -Ari |
