Mourning the loss of a favourite person

 

As someone diagnosed with BPD around 8 months ago, I still have a lot to learn about my own diagnosis and how it affects the people around me and myself. From anxious attachment style, which steams from abandonment issues to the search for external validation that subsequently goes along with hypersexuality having BPD has made it harder for me to navigate relationships with myself and the people around me. This disorder has caused me to be a furious person who is full of rage all the time. The way BPD has shaped me to see the world in only black and white has made it profoundly difficult for me to understand the grey areas that come along with things in life.

For as long as I can remember, I've always been someone who idolized people who I liked and moulded my personality in accordance with their likings. Later in therapy, I learned it was called; Mirroring. Mirroring is when someone with BPD changes their personality, attributes, identity or sense of self, to fit in with an unfamiliar environment or establish a sense of similarity with their favourite person. For me, fp or favourite person is someone who I look up to and find a sense of comfort in confiding all/any issues I'm going through. They are the most important person in my life, and their acceptance means everything to me. They are also someone who I hold upon a high pedestal which changes the way I look at them; as I would see no flaws in them, regardless of all the red flags they carry.

It took me a very long to realize and accept that ever since grade 12, I've always had someone who was my favourite person, whether someone I had a platonic relationship with or romantic. These relationships that I had built with my fps were always filled with a lot of compassion and love bombings (its a personal flaw, yes, I do realize it); I would go out of my way to do things for them that would make them happy, or shower them with materialistic things that would make them like me a little more or even do something that I intensely disliked just so I could see a smile on their face. It's weird, isn't it, how we borderlines are represented in media as this crazy manipulative person who hurt everyone around them. Still, all we ever truly want is people around us to like us and for whom we'd literally move mountains.

Nonetheless, the point being the last person I dated was my favourite person, the complexities of emotions that I had after we ended things between us made me feel as if I was mourning the loss of someone very close to me. It's unreal how a person I barely knew for 11 days could hold such a strong effect on me. Regardless of how things are at the moment, I'm glad we got to know each other the way we did. But it did teach me how much I sucked at prioritizing myself and how little I cared for myself. There were days when going on long walks, sitting with a friend in a cafe who smokes or even preparing my mom coffee reminded me of my fp and as guilty as it makes me feel to constantly carry the thoughts of them on my shoulder, I think the spiral of memories that my fp and I created is gonna follow me for the rest of my life. They were incredibly comforting, and throughout the time we saw each other, they made sure I felt respected and provided me with a space where I could learn and grow. But when that went away, it felt as if my whole world was crashing into the pits of hell, and there was no way for me to escape it.

For the following week, the feeling of emptiness reeked within me. I had no one to talk to about how bad my accounts class went, how I had to stand the whole way on a public bus cause I couldn't find a seat, or how a guy in my class continuously made misogynistic jokes that made me feel very uncomfortable. But here is the thing once I realized how negatively it started to affect me, I had no choice but to work on myself. And as my fp once put it, " If there is something about you, you don't like, change it…" and that's precisely what I did. I changed how I thought about them, It took time, but I accepted the boundaries for what they were and distanced myself from them cause I couldn't bare to sympathize with myself anymore. And eventually, I learned how to live without their thoughts interrupting my life, which felt liberating!

I started going back to things I loved doing, like running, watching my favourite TV shows and even playing my favourite game. And one of these days, I also ran 22k steps a day which was a personal milestone for me and made me feel very exhausted but accomplished. Looking back at how things started and ended also makes me understand how I'm on the wrong side of the story for wanting that emotional security from someone who already has so much on their plate.And how no one should bare the responsibility of being fp of a borderline if they do not have the energy for it.