Archive for the ‘The Diary’ Category

Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – Mirror Without Reflection – My borderline mother, my mirror without reflection. My borderline mother, blank face, blank stare – angry. Always so angry. How many more times will you reach out to her only to be abandoned again. Only to be rendered just a little more invisible? How many times? She hurts me. I hate her. She hates me. I love her. I hate her. I need her. I can’t stand this.

She says, when I ask if she loves me at all, oh so disengaged, “Well … let me put it this way, you know how you can love someone but not really like them?” Oh sure, mom, sure. I know. I thought to myself as it felt like I had literally disappeared. Standing in front of her bearing way too much,  again, essentially with my heart in my hands, she just smacked my hands together. She squished my heart. A heart that hasn’t ever been whole. A heart that has always been so broken. A heart that she fragmented so many years ago.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – Mirror Without Reflection – Invisibility’s Painful Perfection

July 17, 1994

3:20 am

Okay so here I am again writing stuff down. Remembering so much stuff. It’s all bad stuff. It’s all stuff that hurts. I am learning so much in therapy. So much I just never knew before. Never understood before. Never could have withstood before. Can I bear it now, really? Will I get through this pain? Really?

I don’t know why I saw my mother last night. What a useless visit and conversation. What a pain. It still pisses me off beyond description only now I don’t just feel the rage there are also tears. Tears of a little girl. I was that little girl seeing my mother’s face. A face, a mirror without reflection. A blank slate most of the time. An unhappy and often rather blank stare on a face that definitely hated me the more she saw herself in me.

She hates me. I hate her. I love her. She sees in me the little girl in her who she was taught to hate. So hate me mom, hate me. I hate you too. I love you – I hate you. In times when I have tried to say I love her or reach out for something more – for something – she lashes out with a violent vengeance. She can’t tolerate the thought of us connecting or of there being any demonstrated love. This seems nuts to write but I feel abandoned when she spurns the love I have tried to give. The times when I have extended myself to care for her and look after her in ways that she has never been able to do for me.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

She hates me. I hate her more. She hates me more. I love her. I’m lost. She’s busy. She’s raging. She’s drinking. She tells my father lies and he beats me right in front of her. Silently still she sits condoning his violence. Powerful she must feel in these hateful choices. All my life my fantasy was to beat her to a pulp. I so wanted to punch her head in. I still feel it. I dream about it. I feel urges to do it.

For years I really believed the only reason I didn’t beat my mother silly was because if I touched her my father would kill me. But really, that wasn’t the reason. The real reason is because fail me as she has, hate me as she does, beneath my rage, my abandonment, and my hatred of her, my wanting to punish her, under it all, there is this love. This love that I wish I could get rid of. I can’t.

I have tried so hard to make her insignificant. For years it worked. Now, now though, not so much. Hating her is just hurting me. But so is feeling any love for her. No win.

I am learning so much about this “self” this part of me that I am supposed to be or something. I don’t quite get it really. It is frustrating to have the therapists continue to tell me I know what they mean when really I have no clue. At least I don’t think I have a clue?

This whole concept of self and the mirroring stuff I’ve been reading about is confusing. But really, seems to me right now that for a self to be reflected there needs to be light. There hasn’t been any light in my life where my mother is concerned. Just that damn dark disconnect and pain. Her rage. My rage. Her hate. My hate. Her punishment of me and my punishing her right back. It has been such a circle. A circle that has wound itself tighter every time it has spun itself around between us. Millions of times we’ve traveled that circle.

I am just beginning to really understand it I think. There is so much pain. How could she say to me that she loves me but she doesn’t like me? That has to be crap. Has to be. I think it’s like pick one or the other. All I know is that what I’m learning in therapy about myself is that you can’t really have anything both ways at the same time. You can’t just say two opposite things and have either one of them really mean anything or be real or honest. You can’t love someone if you don’t like them. God, I don’t like her at all and I guess if I was shoved to answer a question like that I’d say that I do love her sort of. It makes no sense to me.

She has said so many things that I don’t think anyone should ever hear from their own mother. So many things. Her favourite thing to say when I’d ask her for something all my life, when I needed anything, even when I was real little was, “Some day I’ll be dead and gone and you’ll be dancing on my grave.”

What!? I still shake my head at this. I know when I was a little kid that would scare me a lot because it was like she was saying she’d be dead soon. Odd though, she didn’t die. She didn’t go away. I was spared that type of abandonment. She stayed in the house, in my life, in my face, but she wasn’t really ever there – not emotionally. It was like she didn’t really have a personality a lot of the time. Just disinterest or raging anger but nothing in between.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

Last night when I asked her why I was never good enough for her as a daughter she said, “Oh shit, I don’t want to talk about this crap.” As she got angrier she then said, “It’s not that you weren’t good enough, it’s just, well, tell me, when weren’t you causing trouble?”

Wow. Ouch. Devastation and so much grief. I almost tried to defend myself again. I managed to stop myself. Even as I bawled after I left my parent’s place it was as if something was partially lifting from my soul. I heard what she said and she said so much more I can’t even keep straight enough in my head to write down here right now. But, I didn’t feel the same. It didn’t feel like it always has for me before.

I am not accepting the shame. It’s not going all the way in this time. It hurts like hell but it’s not going all the way in. I just don’t have to internalize her stuff. Her blaming and her denials and her rejections I see now are way more about who she is or who she hasn’t been able to be.

She says I was always “causing trouble”. My God, I was trying to exist. I was just trying to protect myself. I was reacting to the abandoning abusive ways that they treated me. I was reacting against the invisible place they had shoved me in because I wanted to be separate from them. I wasn’t just going to be their emotional dumping ground – their garbage can forever. Odd, actually that I get that. I think I did some of that in my relationship, in my own borderline way. Some thinking that my partner did stuff that really was more about what I had done first. I guess it’s not that difficult to only see your own side when emotionally blinded by BPD.

My mother isn’t going to ever see the light. Not even a shadow of the light. She is in the dark. She is a mirror that doesn’t give anything – doesn’t give a reflection, and certainly does not give me any accurate reflection that I can trust to define as having anything to do with who I am.

Mirror Without Reflection – Invisibility’s Painful Perfection

The fact that this reflection is and has always been absent and that I have not ever experienced it with her is really invisibility’s painful perfection. The seat of narcissism. The soul of the need to be grandiose I am hearing about in group. I hate that stuff and yet slowly it is starting to make sense.

There is this grand illusion my mother has about her parenting ability. With the mirror image blocked by the darkness of her borderline dissociative emotional disconnect she can feel a sense of perfection that has absolutely no base in reality. That must be why my facts, my reality, my pain, my anything and everything must be devalued by her. Welcome to but one of the many grand illusions of Borderline Personality Disorder.

I get that now. Just as I have devalued others so that I could keep some of my own borderline dissociative emotional disconnect alive so that I wouldn’t have to feel the incredible pain of the death of my self. This pain that I know is actually the way to healing more but this pain that continues to feel like it’ll kill me. Between this pain and the flashbacks from the sexual abuse I don’t know how much more I can take. I have had my own grand illusions going on. I am now experiencing the group’s mirroring this to me. A working reflection of all the work and learning I still have to do. Every time I make progress, climb a steep emotional hill, it leads to yet another and another. The recovery is demanding so much. More than I could have ever thought possible.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

Am I writing on and on here so that I don’t have to just sit with that unbelievable pain of her abandoning rejection? I think I feel numb right now if that is a feeling? I feel kinda distant from the grief that I was drowning in a little while ago.

No mirror reflection from my mother for me or really from me for my mother. I think we somehow both managed to reject and abandon each other. I have a sense I just never trusted her. She so didn’t know what she was doing. She so didn’t know what it really takes to be a mother.

No mirroring. No connection. No bond. No relationship. No getting along. No end to the war. No end to the ways that she punished me and had my father punish me too. She is so out of touch with her feelings. I know what that is like.

How am I ever going to make sense out of all of this? Right now I am treating “S” so bad in group. “K” says I’m doing a “bad mother split” onto her. I can’t even stand to be in the same room as her and yet I have to be. I am being so rude and actually really mean to her but it’s like she’s so not her – she’s so my mother. I don’t know. It’s nuts. I feel bad in some moments for how I am treating her. I actually like her a lot and no doubt that’s bugging me too. There’s a softness about “S” that I have perceived as weakness though “K” has warned me I’ll find out that’s not the case.

The pressure is on to get this. They keep saying I do get it. I haven’t caught up yet or something.

I think that I will miss my mommy, the mommy she never was and the mommy I never had, for the rest of my life. Will it always hurt this bad? Will it always feel like it’s killing me? Will it always give me panic attacks and the runs?

It’s like I so want to connect with my mother and be loved by her and there just is no way. No way. No way. Such abject powerlessness here.

Oh yeah this is freaking perfect. Just great. I’m so screwed. Really screwed. Not good enough for my own mother to love me – NO – wait, stop that. This really isn’t about me. I have to remember that. It’s so hard.

So when I look in the mirror it’s like I don’t really see a “me”. I don’t have a reflection of “self” that I recognize or understand. If my mother and I stood in front of the mirror together, of course something we could never do, it’s like we’d both see blank space. Or we’d each be focused on the other and all that she isn’t in our own eyes. Creepy that similarity.

My main goal now, well, along with all my other goals, and God knows the goals I don’t even know enough to have yet, is to just NOT be like my mother. Big time, I can’t. I have to fix myself. I have to find myself. I have to learn to behave or something. I’ve come a long way but this stuff really sets me back.

In a heartbeat I can feel like that invisible kid being raged at, screamed at, punched, kicked, and so insulted and devalued – the little invisible kid sexually abused into a fantasy mirror’s reflection. Into an over-compensating illusion of any mirrored sense of self at all.

Why did my mother have to have BPD? Why did my mother refuse to ever get help? She still refuses, as does my father. That of course means that every friggin thing is my fault. No wonder she says I was always causing trouble. I understand from all this therapy how hearing the truth can sure be misconstrued as “trouble” if one isn’t taking any personal responsibility.

More tears now. I realize how much I’ve been a mirror reflection of her in ways that just sadden me. Disgust me really. I have really given back to her, in my own ways, so much – as much as I could of what she has given to me. I doubt it will ever come close to equal because I was the helpless little child that she abused from age 2, if not before that. My rage and my punishing her seems more fair – not right – I know now, but more fair because it’s all been about trying to get her to stop what she does and says that hurt me – whoever “me” really is.

I feel like no matter how much I tried to punish her back it would never be enough until this morning when I realized that being hated is what she wants and needs. Being hated is what she is used to. Now I know that I cannot remain complicit in this pattern anymore. It’s toxic. It is killing me – or killed me? It actually leaves me feeling sad for her. Oh this is too much. This is so confusing. When I feel sad for her, it’s real but it leads me back to feeling rage for all of her incompetence and abuse.

I can’t get the love I’ve always wanted. I am not going to. I know that. I can’t hate her really. Not way down deep. I am still so angry. God I’m friggin dizzy! I hate this! It can’t stay like it is. It can’t. I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to. It is defining me. I won’t let it anymore.

What does that mean? Now I am shaking. I am going to have to let go – somehow. Okay, this is driving anxiety and panic. Here I go again. Fighting the pain. I am fighting the pain. That’s why the anxiety and the panic.

I can do this. Feel the pain. Cry. Do it. I know, it feels like I’ve cried about this millions of times. Will it ever be over? Will I ever be done? Will it ever be enough? Will the tears ever stop coming. Now I am crying. Now I feel so powerless. Now I get it.

Grief. Sobbing. Such a hollow ache. Such heartache.

She likes me but she doesn’t love me. She hates me. She hates herself. I am her to her. She has been me to me. I must now find me. A me, without her. I hate that I love her.

© A.J. Mahari, July 17, 1994

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Excerpts From The Diary – My Borderline Years

Why did my borderline mother hit me? Why was that her only solution to what wasn’t even that stressful a situation? Why was it that I could do nothing right in her eyes as a child? Does this woman, or will this woman ever, have even a clue how much she has negatively impacted my life? I have a million questions about so much about my borderline mother. I have most of my answers, not from her, but from the reality that I too was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. Living inside the world of borderline hell has provided me a lot of insight into my mother. But, to what end, I wonder?

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

September 7, 1993

1:20 pm

It is Wednesday and I have just returned home from group therapy. The weather is so nice out but my emotional temperature is stormy. I can’t believe what I just went through. Sitting in group and being so triggered by that woman “Lady Jane” as we call her. What a drama queen. What a snob. What a bitch, actually. What a reminder of my mother she is. God, I can’t stand her. Every time she opens her mouth I just want to shove something in it so I don’t have to hear her. I wish someone would just make her go away. She thinks she knows everything. She’s been in group all of two days and I am already at my emotional wits end. I’ve been reprimanded five times in two days for getting into to “it” with her. As if it’s just my fault? As if “Lady Jane” isn’t in the game. She’s in the game alright. She’s the one spinning the games but as usual it seems I’m the one getting all the blame. Unfair, unfair, unfair. I can’t stand it!

Art therapy was just hell today. It sure feels like the last straw for me. I can’t – just can’t listen to or put up with “Lady Jane” anymore. What am I going to do. I’ve been in enough trouble lately. I’ve been high on the group’s radar in terms of feeling like my every word or choice to not speak is overly scrutinized. This entire experience is my friggin family all over again. Like I need that – NOT!

The therapists seem to think that everything that happens with and/or is said between me and “Lady Jane” is somehow my fault. It’s driving me crazy. How can it all be my fault? If C…. says it’s about my “upping the anti” one more *&*&*^%^ time I swear I’ll just lose what’s left of my mind.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

I hate art therapy. It sucks. I don’t like crafts. I can’t draw. I don’t paint – houses, and walls maybe, but not canvass in the artsy fartsy fancy. Oh “Lady Jane” is just so perfect – so she thinks. Between her and J bragging endlessly about their unending artistic skill there really wasn’t air let alone space left in the room for the rest of us peons whose artistic talent peaks with stick people and child-like suns with straight-line rays.

“Lady Jane” looks down on everyone. “Lady Jane” has contempt for everyone. “Lady Jane” is so judgmental. “Lady Jane” is self absorbed. “Lady Jane” manipulates the guys into fetching her paint brushes, paint and supplies. At the end of the group, as I sat there getting the blaming and shaming how-rude-can-you-be-A.J. riot act jammed down my throat by K, my prime therapist, “Lady Jane” was smiling behind K’s back and laughing at me. She got me good. She threw out the lure and I bit it, hook, line, and sinker. The therapists just don’t get what goes on under it all. There are people “out to get” others and they know it. “Lady Jane” is like that. She got me. Somehow I can’t let her get me again. I also really want to “get her” and get her first.

Reminds me of one of the cardinal rules of hockey - you can take a shot at someone, break the rules, or have someone trip, punch, slash you but if you retaliate or defend simultaneously, you’ll not only be caught you’ll be penalized in hockey – punished and shamed in life. Lectured to and at in life – especially in group therapy. I should have known better than to allow myself to be bested that way.

I am so pissed! Pissed at K, pissed at “Lady Jane”, pissed at those guys falling all over themselves like idiots to please her and wait hand and foot on her – to say nothing of the way they accused me of shit and defended her pretty little useless ass. I could just scream. Oh wait, I did. God that felt good. I just let my rage fly at “Lady Jane”.

I was kept back 30 minutes after therapy ended today – lectured about my behaviour. Oh yea, right, it’s always about my behaviour. Screw it! I know it’s not over. Tomorrow they’ll start all over again at me about me and “innocent-acting” little pretty air-headed “Lady Jane”. So much to look forward to.

Why is this so Familiar to Me?

Why do I feel like such a child around that annoying bag of hot air? I guess I feel outcast and left out and criticized and played with to boot like my mother used to do to me around my father and brother and others. She’d provoke me, be so cool, have everyone in the room believing her and there I’d sit like the puppy who pissed up the rug seemingly in plain sight when really no one saw anything.

I don’t know why but I feel like I’m four years old again. Shit. I know enough to know that this isn’t just some “feeling” attached to nothing. It means something but what?

The tears come in answer to my question. The grief wells up inside me as I continue to stew about “Lady Jane” and all she is not only doing to me but getting away with doing.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

This feels so much like being four years old. The very first day of my school career, “trial day at Kindergarten” when I was four. Being dragged to school by a five-year-old from down the street who was a regular little school vetran of exactly one year more of school than my zero experience at school.

I had stood outside in the school yard with this kid, watching all these other kids run around, play, yell, scream and stuff. I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. It all seemed just too much for me. I wasn’t safe. I wanted to go home – not that home was exactly safe either though.

Suddenly there is this shrill loud noise. It ends the chaos of play and everyone lines up in an orderly fashion just as my insides become totally chaotic. I am scared to death. What is that loud noise? I can’t catch up to what’s going on. I panic. I feel all shaky and hot. Fuzzy. Weird.

I just turn and start running as fast my little legs could carry me. I ran all the way home. I ran to the one person I knew I could never count on for anything and yet I ran there as if I was going to be rescued, cared about, soothed or something? Had I lost my mind?

I pounded on our front door. My mother seemed to take forever to open the door. She didn’t really want to answer the door. There I was, four years old, scared shit-less, alone, and rejected by her yet again.

I needed. I needed so much. I was so lost, so out of touch, so out of step.

I needed.

Finally she threw open the door, “What the hell are you doing here” she screamed at me her face turning beat red. God she was mad. I was scared, shaking, crying, and she was mad. I didn’t think she was going to let me in to the only world I truly knew – a different kind of fear-producing world. A world, some people call it “home” where I was even more invisible than I had just been on that playground.

I needed so much.

I got nothing.

My mother pulled me in the house by my arm. It hurt. I thought she’d pull my arm off. As I remember this, the tears, the anger, and the growing hatred I have for “Lady Jane” all increase.

My mother screamed at me long and loud that day. I just cried harder and harder. Four years old and able to cry. I wouldn’t be able to cry much past the age of 8. Was there any comfort in that crying, I don’t know.

My mother finished her raging tirade by dropping me in the hallway outside her bedroom. She went into the bedroom to call my father. Whenever she was mad as hell at me, and that was often, she would call my father. Tell him all about it. Never mind me. Never mind what I needed. I sat in the hall crying while she told my father what a little shit I was.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

This of course meant I was about to hear “you’re going to get it when your father gets home.” My mother’s mantra of malice and mean. She’d call my father at work which would get him as pissed as she was and of course because she called about me it meant that my borderline father would blame me and be as enraged at me as my borderline mother was. And when borderline Dad came home, he would do the rest of my mother’s bidding. He would pick a fight with me, no doubt, to ease his stress, though I never understood that as a kid. He’d rage, and hit me. He’d punish me. In his mind and as he used to say to me, “I’ll teach you …” He never was very coherent or making sense when he’d start a sentence that way and/or I just blocked him and all of his threats out. I grew used to them even though often he’d act them out and I would be abused. I felt helpless and insignificant. Truthfully, back then, I had no frame of reference to know that life was any different in anyone else’s house. I sure do remember that day that illusion was shattered and how much that hurt. I thought I’d died that day.

If only I had a hole to crawl into.

Wow, I am feeling all of this now, again. Why?

When my mother hung up the phone she yelled at me to “shut the hell up”. She screamed, “Stop that bloody crying or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

What? What? That was so confusing. I was crying for a reason. I didn’t need another one. I really didn’t.

I couldn’t stop crying. I was bawling – the noisy kind of kid crying.

She told me a couple more times to “shut the hell up”. I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was so distressed. I was so in need of something – anything other than what I was getting.

My mother came rushing out of her bedroom at me. I was still sitting where she’d dropped me, thrown me really up against the hall wall. As she came out of the bedroom she banged her elbow on the bedroom door frame – I knew somehow that too would be my fault.

Sure enough, she was even angrier. She lunged at me. She screamed, “You little brat”. I heard this loud thump and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. All the air was out of me and I had a sharp pain in my back.

My mother had round-house punched me right between my shoulder blades with all she had to give, literally.

What should have made me cry harder – pain that should have made me cry harder, abandonment and rejection that I now get should have made me cry harder. Instead, my mother finally won what she had demanded. I was silent except for gasping for air and coughing.

What had I done? I needed her. What was wrong with her?

I no sooner got my breath back when my mother again grabbed me my the arm. “Come on” she bellowed as she dragged me to the front door of our house. “You are going back to school”.

Totally traumatized was I and now back to the place that left me in a panic. Oh, this was so just laying a foundation for the way I would experience the world – the way that I am trying to change the way I experience the world right now in therapy for God’s sake. The very therapy that got me thinking, feeling, and writing all of this down today. What a circle.

My mother dragged me back to school yelling at ladies in the office, “Where is this little brat supposed to be?” How embarrassing. Everyone was looking. God, it felt so unreal. I wasn’t really there was I? This wasn’t really happening was it?

Yup!

She was directed to the class I was supposed to be in and she walked there quite quickly dragging me the whole way by a very sore arm.

She knocked on the classroom door and when the teacher opened the door she threw me into the room saying something rude and mean to the teacher. All the kids stared. The teacher looked shocked. I was numb. I wasn’t really me. I was and wasn’t there.

This is how I feel around that friggin “Lady Jane”.

I don’t know how I am going to cope with therapy tomorrow. Now I not only have all the feelings from what happened today in therapy but these feelings about my borderline mother hitting me and abandoning me at a time of need when I was four years old. I feel it all. I have no idea what to do with any of it. My dog needs to go out to do her business. Suddenly I feel like I can’t go out. I don’t feel safe. I am having one of those moments where now is yesterday. I am scared. I am not feeling safe. I don’t feel like myself.

Adult Child of BPD Mother – Search For Closure Audio Program

It is dawning on me that there is a lot about my borderline mother that I haven’t even yet begun to feel. I feel sad writing this down. I feel devastated actually. I feel like it wasn’t real even though I know it was. Why am I back in this place right now? What’s the purpose of this?

My mother didn’t give me what I needed. Back then I didn’t know what I wanted or needed. I don’t think I really expected her to be any different than she was. But, why did she hit me? Why was my pain and fear something to be so punished and shamed for?

I have pain and fear about tomorrow in therapy too. Will they punish me too? I have shame for what happened today.

I guess my borderline mother hit me because I needed her. I think I broke the cardinal borderline rule or something. I wanted so badly to do what I was supposed to do but there were so many reasons why I had to run. There was so much fear.

The hatred and indifferent rejection, invalidation, and abandonment I experienced from my mother that day when I was four was but one incident in hundreds that was making me lose me.

So all these years later I am in therapy and K keeps saying all this stuff about I don’t know who I am and that I am not so tough and intimidating as I act that there is this vulnerability and fear. I am beginning to think she is right because I feel four again and all of those feelings that I had on that most unsuccessful day – that first day of school. A day that, looking back, sure did foreshadow so much more heartache and difficulty to come and my struggles to go to school or to even stay a full day if and when I’d go.

That’s what the thought of going back to therapy tomorrow feels like now. How do I know I’ll go. I don’t really want to. I just want to stay home.

Got to take the dog out. God I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place. Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. What to do?

Am I comparing the way my mother chose to treat me when I needed and felt scared to how I think the therapists will treat me? How can that feel the same. I mean, I know they won’t hit me.

My borderline mother hit me because, to her, I wasn’t really there. It was all about her. My needing her just left her feeling more and more needy herself. She felt out of control, I think, when I needed. She sure did teach me how to be out of control. All these years later I am still fighting to try to control my own emotions instead of controlling and being mean and punishing to others.

Does this ever end? Will I ever get through this? What is the purpose of this? Why did my borderline mother hate me so much? Why was it all about her? How can I face “Lady Jane” and find a way to cope when I now know that “Lady Jane” triggers me back to some very deep and troubling painful feelings that still scare me, from my childhood.

We’ll see. I have no idea. But I guess I just have to go back to therapy tomorrow and soldier on not only for that little four year old in me but because she soldiered on for me all those years ago. What a strong little kid I was I guess. What an amazing inner child I really do have.

I have to pay more attention to that stuff they are talking about around inner child stuff in group. Maybe there’s something I can learn in all of this that will make a difference in my life.

I think I just need to sit and cry. I’ll walk the dog, then I’ll come back, put music on, lay down and cry myself to sleep.

© A.J. Mahari 1993 – All rights reserved.

Borderline Diary -  “I know why the caged bird sings” (Maya Angelou)

I know why the caged bird sings because I am a caged bird. I am a caged bird that has been singing a song, a song that expresses my longing to be free for years. I long to be free from the cage that is my nutty family. I long to be free from being relegated to the invisible albeit “black sheep” role that they have me stuck in, in their minds. When I left “home” at 17 I thought I would find freedom from their caging me in. Hasn’t happened. Even since I have moved out to go to college I am still in this cage. Everyone is them and their criticism of me is in everyone else. I don’t know who I am but whoever I am I must suck and therefore in my hating them I think I hate myself too.

Phoned Home Like a Fool Looking For Support – As if …

November 14, 1975

7:34pm

I am not adjusting well at all to the dorm life at college. There’s just so much going wrong all the time. I have no idea why. Either I am pissed at everyone or everyone is pissed at me. It feels so much like being at home. Too many people. Too much confusion. I am always afraid and I don’t know why. When I am afraid I get very angry.

I tried out for the varsity hockey team and I made it and now I am being held back from playing pending a third neurological evaluation because of a few seizures I had. This is so unfair. Of all the areas of my life hockey is the one place where despite everything and everyone and how poorly I get along with people there is joy – just pure joy for the love of the sport itself. I am so good at hockey.

It’s killing me to not be able to play. It’s driving me nuts to be seen as so weird and to have people like being afraid of me. I seem to be even more of a freak than usual these days.

I called “home” today – as if I ever really had a “home” – against all odds even though I damn well knew better than to bother doing that. I don’t know why I did that. How desperate was I? My parents never listen. They don’t care. They don’t have time. They never get where I am coming from. They always blame me – see me as the cause of everything that goes bad. I am not allowed to feel anything.

I sat upstairs in the Newspaper Office, where I am the Women’s Sports Editor and feature writer. I was alone in the office. The office overlooks the ice rink. There were my teammates out practising for our next game and I just keep ending up in tears. It’s like I don’t feel real if I am not out there practising and playing too. I feel alive on that rink. I feel alive in the challenge of hockey. I don’t even usually cry about much at all. I can’t concentrate on my work for the paper right now at all. I can’t get my homework done either. Journalism assignments are piling up – maybe I have writer’s block? Maybe I journal too much?

Anyway, I called “home” which is technically 500 miles away though I feel more at home in Toronto with or without “family”. Not that Sault Ste Marie was ever my home but my father got transferred there in my grade 12 year just in time to screw up my graduation with the kids I went to high school with from grade 9 until 2 months into my grade 12 year. I only lived up there with the parents for just under a year – hated it. I absolutely hated it. I couldn’t wait to get out of that city and my so-called “family”.

When I called, my father answered and listened for a few minutes and then my mother got on the extension phone and they both sat there firing blaming and critical questions at me. It hurt. I was trying to express how hurt I am that I can’t play hockey right now and how unfair it is and all they could say is, “Well you must have done something wrong.” What about the concept that they did lots wrong to me in my life?

When I told my father that I had been diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy he angrily said, “Oh, you don’t have epilepsy, you’d know it if you did. I’ve never seen you have one of those grand mal seizures. I went to school with a kid that had those. You don’t have epilepsy” Funny thing, but when the neurologist told me I had it, silly me, I thought I actually did know that. I did know that until my father tried to insist I couldn’t possibly know that. What’s his problem, I am not perfect enough for him? First I was born the wrong sex and now I apparently don’t know what I know – this must be a big part of why I don’t trust people.

Why does this surprise me anymore? Whatever I say they find a way to totally dismiss it. It’s as if I don’t even exist. Am I merely an extension of them – the part of them they have dismissed and always hated or what?

Well there you go I thought, case closed, once again I’m wrong, or lying, or nuts or whatever they think I am. I couldn’t possibly know what I am talking about according to them. This is just like the time I was in the car accident and called my mother cause I thought she’d want to know and care or something and she told me, “You probably weren’t in a car accident at all, you are probably just making it up.” Why the hell would I do that – it’s not like there would be any sympathy there real or fake.

What? I can never figure out what is wrong with them that they think there is always something wrong with what I am saying. I am telling them the truth about my life and they have to constantly tell me I am lying. It’s nuts. It’s like the only reality that exists is theirs and man I wouldn’t want to live in that crazy place. I have always refused and I will continue to refuse to live in their version of life. In fact it is because I refuse their twisted reality that they have punished me and rejected me, criticized me, invalidated me and gone so far as to use physical violence to try to control me. I am not going to be controlled by them anymore. Now if I could just get this part of me that seems to care what they say and to want to prove to them how wrong they are to give up maybe, just maybe, things will be better somehow?

After bawling on the phone and sharing how I felt about what was going on with the hockey situation and other stuff, for a minute, just ever so briefly, I actually thought a miracle took place and that I was heard and that they really cared – just for minute, because they hadn’t ended the call or hung up on me or started a fight. God, my hope rose. I thought they were about to prove all of my negative feelings toward them wrong somehow – if even only maybe this one time. Ah, you know better than to believe the shadows on the wall inside that dance and deceive and twist and weave and leave your head spinning, by now don’t you?

Then it came, the sarcastic, “Well we hope you feel better now, because now, we feel like shit.” In other words I am mostly them but when I express feelings, if they listen, they become me? They feel like me? They feel what I feel? Even if that were so, it would only be a momentary thing until they have a few drinks. Not like me, I don’t drink, I can’t escape the crap they say to me. It just rings, like it has for years, in my head. That was my father’s way of ending the call. I felt like I was in shock. Like I had been hit by a mac truck, a truck that has hit me many millions of times before.

I hung up the phone. Where the pain should be all there is, is angst and some sense of indignation. Rejected again. Invalidated again. Dismissed again. Abandoned. They don’t see me. They don’t get me. They don’t hear me. They don’t care about me. I am alone. Why did I bother? What kind of an ass hole am I? What the hell is my problem? I so should have known better! Will I ever just get it and stop trying to get them to be there for me? Will I?

Just when I thought the cage door had been opened for a change, it slammed shut on me yet again. The cage bird sings to try to keep its sanity. The caged bird sings to try to feel what is really real. The caged bird sings and sings and sings to hear itself – to validate itself – that must be it. I am not really sure. I just know that I have to talk a lot to feel real. I don’t feel very real, let alone important, when I am not heard and when I am dismissed.

After all if I can hear myself talk I must be real right? If I can talk in the sense that the caged bird sang then I really exist. If I can hear myself I can matter just a little can’t I? Well not really but hey almost.

I feel just awful. I can’t stand not being able to play with the team. I can’t stand this. It’s not fair. I just don’t care about anything else but being allowed back on that ice again. Already been to two doctors. One said I shouldn’t play in case of a head injury. The other one said I could play as long as I wear a helmet.

Not good enough for this &(*&(* college. Oh no. The athletic director has told me in confidence that he, himself, has epilepsy, but hey discriminate away against me anyway. Utter asinine hypocrisy. After all who the hell am I? I am just a helpless, invisible, caged bird who no matter how pissed I get or how much I demand or yell is really so afraid of my own shadow it’s pathetic. I wonder, does anyone else know that this is what is under my friggin rage?

I am likely going to have to file a complaint with the Human Rights Commission. I won’t take this laying down. If I’ve learned anything, it’s then when you are stuck in the cage of other’s oppressing, invalidating and unfair opinions and biased hypocritical actions, you must find a way to sing loudly and to express your outrage. I won’t be controlled like this. I just won’t. I’ll fight them all. I will get heard!

© A.J. Mahari 1975 – All rights reserved.

Borderline Diary – My Borderline Years – My Borderline Father’s Raging Abuse

Most years I was so protected at Christmas. Most years I was too busy having an anxiety attack at the mere thought of going “home” for Christmas so I would stay away from my “family”. I had learned my lessons well. Our family was well off enough and toys and/or gifts were always aplenty. But what came with those gifts and presents was quite the opposite of the spirit of the season – quite the opposite of love. It was enmeshed abandoning betrayal served up as “love” – “love” borderline style.

The Joy – Not – Of Christmas – Physically Assaulted by My Borderline Father

December 26, 1982

11:15 pm

Oh God, as I write this I have such a pounding headache it’s unreal. Most years, at Christmas, I dreaded going “home”. I dreaded the whole drunken thing. Relatives sloshing back all the booze my father can shove down their throats. And me, me having to constantly scream NO at him each and every time he tries to shove the booze at me. He thinks I think I am better than him and that that is why I will not drink. I have not ever drank and I don’t ever intend to. It disgusts me.

My approach to this Christmas was so different for some stupid naive reason on my part. I somehow managed to forget the reality of my borderline family – maybe because I haven’t lived with them since I was 17, I don’t know. This year though I got into the Carols, stuff I usually just ignore because it’s just too painful to bother with. For two weeks before I made the trip to London, Ontario, where my “family” had moved last – for my father’s job – I was really enjoying Anne Murray’s “I’ll be Home for Christmas” Like some unsuspecting deer about to be caught in the headlights of on-coming hostile traffic I went “home” for Christmas with some really unwise and unrealistic hope.

By only the second day I was there, I was bored out of my mind. As always the pairings left me out of the activities they decided upon – activities that bore the living hell out of me – either way I feel rejected. My aunt, my mother’s sister was visiting this Christmas too. Oh joy – not! God I hate this woman. Mind you the friction she causes between my parents is sometimes entertaining. Anyway, after a day of trying to get someone, anyone, my aunt, the parents, my brother and/or his wife, to play Trivial Pursuit or do or say anything that might remotely interest me – no luck. So they continued to do the boring crappy stuff they all decided they’d super enjoy. At one point they actually had a two hour conversation about head lettuce. Head lettuce just isn’t that interesting. My brother was working as the produce manager in a grocery store. Well, what a friggin’ hero eh? Did they enjoy it just because I hated it? Finally today I got bitchy. Not unusual for me at “home”. I was trying to ask my father something. He was ignoring me. I did get pushy and demanding. I did ride the edge of the danger that exists in provoking this bastard, yes I did – as I had so often done throughout my teenage years as well.

I ended up following him around as he was setting up and testing some intercoms around his house. I was clearly bugging him – he bugged the shit out of me just in that he existed and what who he was. We did not get along – period. I wasn’t the girly girl he wanted. I didn’t fit his misogynous mold of what he thought a woman should be. I did not stay in “my place” at all. He was the biggest disappointment of a father who wasn’t absent that a daughter could ever be abandoned and betrayed by in the name of his borderline idea of “love”. Anyway, I guess I let my “borderline” way of just letting loose with my oh so honest and tactless tongue get way too out of control. Fair enough. But my father’s response – well, way over the top and very illegal. Somewhat predictable, however. I must be more self-defeating than I realized?

As I gave up trying to get him to even respond to me and turned out of his bedroom to the hallway to go to the guest room I was staying in – that I would retreat to often just to try to get a grip on my own emotions – he lunged at me and shoved me face first into the wall at the end of the hall. I didn’t really know what was happening at that point.

Next he grabbed me with such a familiar and telling look of hatred on his face and threw me into the guest room I was staying in. I toppled backwards over the end of the couch. I no sooner hit the couch than he punched me in the face. He then grabbed me by the collar and pulled me up. He just kept punching me in and about my head. It was all happening so fast. I finally broke free of his hold of my shirt and jumped back. There was a second there I really thought about getting this bastard once and for all and really fighting back.

I was 25 and very athletic and so f–king angry I felt the rage and the power that goes with rage vibrate throughout my battered body. Then I thought if I started to fight I’d have to kill him really so better not go there. I hated him, he was beating me, yet I was conflicted. Typical really, nothing was ever uncomplicated for me.

I then dove on the couch and grabbed a pillow and covered my already swelling head with it. I covered up as best I could. He continued to pummel away at me fists a flying. I was screaming by this time. Hollering hysterically for my brother to come and make him stop. It seemed like hours went by though it must have been a good five minutes. No one came back to this room where he was beating the shit out of me.

Finally my brother did show up in the doorway. I’m not entirely sure he cared what was happening to me but he was the only one in the house big enough to hold my father back. He didn’t have to do or say anything. Upon my brother’s arrival my father just stopped punching me and stood there. Then my mother and my aunt came back from the living room to the room we were in.

I was shaking, in shock, I think, though this wasn’t the first time my father had been so physically violent with me. I was hysterical. I was 25 years old. I wasn’t a kid anymore. Part of me wanted to call the police. Part of me wanted to kill him. I was as enraged as I was terrified. What the hell is wrong with me that I wasn’t taking better care of myself? Why didn’t anyone else care to even try to protect me?

Bloodied and bruised I grabbed my father. I tried to hug him. I pleaded with him. I said, “Dad, Dad, why did you do that? Why do you hit me? Why do you treat me this way? I love you. I love you.” With that he lifted my hands off of him, showed no emotion, and walked out of the room. He couldn’t let my love in anymore than I knew what to do with his lack of love, his hatred and abuse of me.

My sister-in-law stayed out in the living room and refused to believe that my father hit me. She maintained for the next day we were in that house together that I was lying. I may have been a difficult kid and angry and mouthy young adult but I was NEVER a liar.

All my mother said to me as I stood there shaking was this very empty sounding twilight surreal thing, she said, “Come on dear, come on back into the living room and finish your gingerale.” (I was never “dear” to her in words or otherwise for God’s sake) That’s it, like nothing had just happened. To her nothing had happened. Every time my father abused me in the many ways he did over the course of my life up til and including this time at the age of 25, she always acted as if nothing had happened. Hitting me must have equated in her mind to hitting the absence of a human being. Or was this normal for her because she had been through it at the hands of her father I often wondered? I was just that insignificant next to the man that was her enmeshed everything.

I was in shock that that was all my mother had to say. Silly me again. What the hell did I expect? Sympathy, her protection or her outrage at him? Ha – like that would ever happen – hadn’t in 25 crazy abusive years. I refused to go back into the living room. My mother left the room.

My aunt sat down on the couch with me and in the most strange moments we had ever shared she told me in a round about way that she understood what I was going through. She said she had the same experience with her father. She tried to comfort me. Too bad I have no idea what to do with “comfort”. Too bad it was such an anomaly that it didn’t feel significant or very real.

After she left the room, I was crying, in physical, emotional, and spiritual pain. I just wanted to jump out the window. I have felt this way many times before. It is a theme for me and I don’t know why. I don’t know what it means. It spooks me out. I have this thing about smashing glass. I have smashed glass and sliced myself with it before. I would have jumped right out the window without hesitation but what stopped me was being on the first floor and just thinking how f–king futile would that be?

No one asked me if I was okay or if I needed to go to the hospital – no one. My head and face just continued to ache and swell up. My cuts bled. Whatever really I thought, just whatever. Who the hell cares. Who? I couldn’t even care enough about me to get some ice, go to the hospital, call the police, and/or stop my own cuts from bleeding. I just really wasn’t all there. I wasn’t connected to it all.

Hours passed. My mother called me for dinner and was shocked I didn’t want to just sit down with them and eat. I didn’t. I stayed in that room. After they finished dinner, notwithstanding that it was Christmas Eve, I demanded that I had to get the hell out of there. What happened next was just typical crazy-making borderline life unfolding for the hell that it truly is.

My father, calm now, acting as if he’d never touched me, said, “Well, if you want to go home, I’ll drive you to the train station.” What, get in the car with that son of a bitch – no thanks. But wait, what’s the alternative? Stay? My mother in her borderline learned helplessness can’t drive anymore because she had one little fender-bender like 15 years ago. No, she’d rather rely on good ole Bill to be at her beck and call to drive her here there, anywhere and everywhere so she is no option. No one else is volunteering.

I got my bags together, guitar and all – the guitar no one had any interest in my playing anyway, silly stupid me for dragging it all the way there on the train. He drove me to the train station where to my horror we discovered that all the trains that night had been cancelled due to the freezing rain we’d been getting. All the tracks were iced up and frozen right over.

I had to go back to my father’s house. Oh God, this can’t be happening I thought. He was talkative on the way back – nice and friendly kind of talkative – I didn’t give a shit at all and just ignored him. I was as angry as I had ever been and so anxious feeling so trapped there.

I was scheduled to go the church with my aunt on Christmas morning. I wasn’t sure I could go though I had such a headache and one eye was swollen shut. I was in the living room with the parents when my mother asked if I was going to go to church with my aunt. When I said, “I don’t know, I don’t feel very well and I have a very bad headache.” My father jumped up out of his chair like the maniac he truly is. I was too angry and tired to be afraid. I just looked at him. He shouted, “You are NOT going to make me feel guilty!” To which I just looked at him in disbelief and said, “I don’t have to make you feel guilty nor was I trying to make you feel guilty – YOU ARE BLOODY GUILTY!” He said nothing else to that. He got up and left the room.

I ended up going to church with my aunt. It was the kind of life-changing all-inspiring sermon that I knew had planted some new seeds in me – meaningful seeds. Seeds that would rise up one day out of this crazy borderline garden of wacky weeds and mean something in my life – my faith despite the events of this Christmas was palpable. Wow, I thought, God really does have my back. Something in all this nutty craziness made sense when I heard that sermon that Christmas Morning. Soon after church I got driven by my father to the train station and without saying a word to him – he handed me a bunch of money – I just took it and saying nothing I just got out of the car went and got my ticket and waited for the train. No one in my borderline family cared to see me off but then since they hadn’t met the train I arrived on why break with tradition right?

It was about a two hour ride home to Toronto. I was hauling lots of gifts and my guitar. I sat stoically still staring blankly out of the window catching my own reflection, the reflection of a battered woman in the window from time to time. I felt my heart sink but I was so disconnected from it. I ignored it and all feelings. I was numb. People stared at me. I must have been quite the site. A couple of train employee people asked if I was okay, I don’t think I even answered them.

I got off the train at Union Station. I had to then catch the subway with all I was hauling and my cuts, bruises, swollen and rainbow coloured face and my headache for about a 20 minute ride to the Shepard Subway station where I then had to wait 30 minutes for a bus, was 15 minutes in the bus to my street, walked another 10 minutes to the house where I rented a room. I went upstairs to my room and upon closing the door to my room I simply fell apart. All by myself. Unable to cope. Afraid of all I felt. Anxiety and panic attacks ensued for the next several hours. I endured. I iced my head and face as I lay there journalling – getting this all down for whatever reason.

So much for Christmas and the fire and the family and the love eh?

Presents and money and disregard, negation, abuse, heartache, invisibility, they were the familiar family treasures of yet another nightmare Christmas.

I wasn’t sure but I thought that something inside me had not only snapped but died and was about to change. This would be evident in the choices I would make after this day. I was 25 years old and he had hit me for the damn last time.

The Diary – My Borderline Years – The First Cut Is The Deepest

Cutting myself feels. Cutting myself makes the feel real. The first cut is the deepest. The first cut is the emotional experience that screws me right up. The first cut comes always from someone else. It isn’t my fault. I don’t do it. I don’t ask for it. People just deliver it to me constantly – treating me like shit.

Slighted By a Room-mate – Feeling Misunderstood

September 7, 1975

4:55pm

All I did was try to take a shower. How can I be in her shower at her time when there are no rules – no rules I understand or really care about for sure? Life in the dorm so like life in my crazy family at home. Freaky eerie how similar they really are. What does that mean? She pissed me off. She treated me like shit. She wondered why I screamed at her. Who the hell does she think she is? She got what she deserved and then so did I.

The first cut is the deepest.
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The first cut is the way that everyone hurts me. The first cut is the way that there isn’t anything fair in or about my stinking life. The first cut is the way that all that I can’t stand to feel washes over me. I drown in it all. I need to NOT feel it. It feels like it will kill me.

The first cut is overwhelming feelings that I have no control over and that have nothing to do with me – they aren’t my fault. The next cut is my response. The second cut is when my right hand, abandoning the rest of my body, manipulates the razor it holds and rips into my flesh.

The angst is killing me. How I feel is killing me. I can’t stand this. I simply can’t, stand this anymore. People just don’t get it. People just don’t understand me. They look at me like I am the one that’s crazy. What the f**k do they know anyway?

I feel so much that I just can’t feel anything anymore. I feel so much that I feel this horrible gut-wrenching pain-filled numbness. The razor’s edge cuts both ways. It cuts me physically – it cuts me even more somewhere deep inside – a place so deep I know somewhere inside that I am cut-off from it.

The razor’s slice as it cuts my flesh is the transition of my pain from invisible to visible – from feeling unreal to an obvious reality that matters. That first cut, always the sweetest. Always hurts in such a welcoming, safe, and predictable way.

I watch the blood flow. It is my blood. I feel removed from it. I feel hot and fuzzy. I feel closely-distant. A part of me feels such relief because as the blood flows a part of me is crying. The part of me that is crying is the part of me that is always dying.

© A.J. Mahari 1975 – All rights reserved.

I am writing my memoir about my life as a child of borderline parents, a person diagnosed with BPD and my recovery from BPD. You can check on its progress, up-dates, and up-coming excerpts by going to ajmahari.ca

Please note: This was written when I had BPD and was in the active throes of BPD. I do not want to suggest at all that this was the most effective way to cope or that this is the way that I would recommend coping. It is, however, a way that many with BPD do cope in the absence of knowing any other way to cope.

In my recovery from BPD I stopped cutting and all self-harm and have maintained that for over 12 years now. So, if you have BPD, please know that you can learn other ways to cope with the pain that you feel or the pain that is so overwhelming you don’t feel it at all.

© A.J. Mahari, July 14, 2008

Excerpts From The Diary – My Borderline Years

Everyone is always mad me. What the hell is wrong with them? It seems like everything that happens is somehow tied to me, related to me – my fault. I don’t get it. It drives me crazy. How in the world can they seriously be blaming me for everything that’s always going wrong?

Everyone Is Always Mad At Me

Alcohol in the Desert

May 10, 1972

6:48 pm

Tonight the parents had a party. Pity the poor party-goers that aren’t alcoholics. My father is pushing alcohol on everyone like if they don’t drink what he wants them to when he wants them to they aren’t really his friends or something. I’ve seen this odd sense of what my father considers to be the most significant betrayal. It’s so embarrassing to see how people react to this – like they like him but they can’t stand him at the same time.

Big fight at dinner tonight. Dad pulled my hair and knocked me backwards off my chair real suddenly. Usually I least get a sense he’s about to blow. Why did he do that tonight? I am not really sure. All that happened was that my mother served desert. The desert came, though, after the parents had some dinner with their wine. So even the normal crazy of my everyday life and most dinners with the parents gets worse the more they drink. Sitting there like a dart board, already full of holes, my duty and my obligation to this loyalty that my father seems to think he is entitled to without condition and without exception, trying to predict which number he will aim his raging hateful and often violent darts at on any given day or night I am clueless and feel so helpless. I feel as if there is something going on here that I don’t understand or like there’s some information the parents have that I don’t.

Desert was those weird parfait things that my mother has recently began concocting. Some dysfunctional mix of smashed up oreo cookies – minus my favourite half, the half with the cream – jello and God-forsaken creme de mint – alcohol. Between trying to get me to drink wine with them night after night and now the alcohol in the deserts, how desperate are they to get me hooked on alcohol?

I refused to eat the desert as soon as I asked what the hot and weird taste to it was and found out it was alcohol. Again, my father erupted like dynamite thrown into a fire. He was screaming and yelling at me demanding to know what was wrong with me and how it is that "you think you are so much bloody better than us." What? I think somehow that’s a reference to the fact that they drink way too much and I continue to refuse to drink at all. Who pushes alcohol at a 15 year old? How is it that my father sees me as thinking I am better than them because I don’t drink? We play this game of shame ping-pong I think. He has, somewhere inside, shame for how often and how much he drinks. I feel shame for being different. My refusal to drink isn’t just to piss him off or to not be like him. It feels like it matters deeply to me – some part of me that "is" somewhere inside. I’m not sure why.

And again I had to hear how I’d ruined their night. How my not wanting that damn desert was going to put them in bad moods for their party. Like they’ll even remember the desert battle several drinks from now? Like I’ll be on their mind when they are busy getting the attention of others – not. I’ll be the one sitting up half the night thinking about this, feeling about it. I am the one stuck with this crap each and every time. I have no place to put this stuff. It just keeps piling up.

I can’t go along to get along. These people are crazy. Here I am again in my room, hiding, hoping to just be left alone. Hoping they get caught up enough in whatever they get out of these stupid parties to forget about their anger at me. Hoping that the usual anger at me for not being like them or being what or who they want me to be will pass tonight without him bursting into my room and screaming at me some more or hitting me again.

God I am tense. It’s so hard to predict. Will one of them come up here and keep it going or will it wait until tomorrow or the next day? It always does come back up. I can feel my heart pounding. Makes me so angry. It makes me so angry that they are always angry at me. Angry at me for the stupidest things and the weirdest reasons. I don’t know what to do with all that I feel. I feel like screaming but that would only bring my father’s wrath and violence down on my head. I feel like getting them back for how they make me feel. It feels like I hate them.

Doesn’t matter what I do I end up alone and feeling like I am the odd one out and that I don’t belong. The bad seed. The rotten kid. They don’t care about me. They just don’t care about me. They want me to be like them. God, that’s a fate worth than death in my opinion.

In the absence of anyone to talk to I just keep writing this stuff down, day after day, after day, after day. If this diary could talk it would let out the loudest and longest scream – it would be the kind of scream that would be heard around the world and yet for as loud as it would be it would also fall on deaf ears. It’s like people would hear something but not find it significant enough to really notice or pay much attention to.

I feel like I could go sit in the middle of a busy street screaming and no one would notice. No one would care. Cars would just run me over the way that the parents do. The irony of it all is that I must be that invisible. I feel that non-existent.

Part of me wants them to get it. Part of me wants them to care. They NEVER hear me. Part of me has so given up it’s ridiculous. Part of me just wants them to hurt more than I do.

When they party what do I have to look forward to? When it’s over they will violate my space and my mind by barging into my room to let me know that I did something that negatively impacted their night. What they say I did is nuts because I never go downstairs when they have their parties. They do this every time guests leave their party and the party ends. With both the house and each of them stinking like alcohol and cigarette smoke they seek me out like heat-seeking missiles to explode outward on me all that they can’t stand about themselves. I hate them. I hate them for hating me. I hate me for hating them. I am supposed to love them so I am told. Hate.

I hate them for hating the them in me that is all they see.

© A.J. Mahari 1972 – All rights reserved.

I am writing my memoir about my life as a child of borderline parents, a person diagnosed with BPD and my recovery from BPD. You can check on its progress, up-dates, and up-coming excerpts by going to ajmahari.ca