#it’s borderline unbearable because it’s just soaked in misery

[myname-isnia]

I’ve written myself into an angst hole so fucking deep that I’m immensely glad I won’t be the one who’ll have to get the characters out of it

[garden-of-succulents]

Wait, so you don't have BPD but you want to write parse with bpd as your representation? How does that work? I'm really sorry, I like your Parse stories and read them and I don't mean to say that you shouldn't write them, but I don't understand where you're coming from on this. Is it really that difficult to identify with any of the characters of color on the same level?

I’ll answer your questions backwards so the long personal story can go under a readmore:

“Is it really that difficult to identify with any of the characters of color on the same level?“

That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few weeks. Like, mental health is my wheelhouse, that’s a huge thing I write about; what about writing mentally ill characters of colour?  I can do it pretty easily with my OCs (cf. Luis and Maida) but feeling my way into mental health themes with canon characters of colour is more difficult while Kent and Jack are kind of like... low-hanging fruit, for me.

It’s why I’ve started bugging @abominableobriens with thoughts about BPD Nursey, gone back to trying to work my way into Ransom’s anxiety (I can’t find the post where I talk about where I was with this a couple months ago).  It’s not a smooth process, though--I’m flopping around being like “but how do I respect Ransom’s personality and preferences but get him some TREATMENT and REST” and “Okay but I haaate conflict-laden relationships and Nursey and Dex’s canon relationship is so full of sniping, how do I write Nursey without Dex?” and that’s the kind of flailing and experimentation I have to do internally or talking to a few people. Mostly the for-public-consumption stuff that’s come out of that process so far has been fluffy romantic headcanons.

So we’ll see how that goes. It’s partly that positive depictions of BPD/the kind of complex trauma I’m interested in are really rare. Before OMGCP, I spent most of my time writing straight-up OCs in fandom contexts because I couldn’t find what I wanted in the source material. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Oookay, and now for the long bit: Why I care really personally about representations of BPD even though I don’t have it myself.

So basically, I’ve been depressed/mentally ill since elementary school, but growing up I kind of internalized the idea that letting my family know I was suffering would be so awful and unbearable for them that I could NOT do it. So I hated myself and I was miserable and was convinced that I couldn’t tell any adults about it. The big lifeline for me were young adult problem novels--books about teens in treatment programs for eating disorders or self-injury or, heck, kidney disease or parapalegia--I never saw myself in the symptoms, precisely, which was confusing, but I did see myself in the emotional experience of overwhelming pain, and I was captivated by the idea that feeling so awful all the time wasn’t normal, it was a disease; and a disease that could be treated. There were people who could help me be Not-That--but I couldn’t ask my parents to see a therapist, since that would be too awful for them, so I tried to soak up what knowledge I could through those books (or the nonfiction books that were available to me).  The books... were very  bland, whitewashed, rendered down to be acceptable; the girls were very soft, very fragile, would never hurt a fly (except themselves). I kind of internalized that as what a Good Mentally Ill Person should look like, and didn’t realize there was any other sort of mental illness.

In junior high school I started being able to articulate this depression to other kids and started making friends, online and in real life, who were also mentally ill like me. We could talk together about feeling worthless and unlovable, and participate in a conspiracy of silence Not To Let The Adults Know.

I’m struggling to explain this and keep my narrative somehow concise, not an essay about my entire childhood--long story short, I’m not Borderline; I was a lot more emotionally stable, even if my stability was in absolute fucking misery. I could take an emotion like a punch to the gut and sit with it, when a lot of my friends would have to get it out somehow--it drove them to do crazy and self-destructive things. (As an adult I know this difference is a lot about genetics and our lives before the age of three.)  And also, long story short, I learned that one way to make people like me was to pay attention to them and take care of them. I nurtured out of self-defense and because it was the only way I knew how to socialize. So I was the person all my friends told about their problems.

And I thought they were like me, that we had the same problems, the same illness? I tried to take what I learned from books and apply it, which was all about being patient and giving and empathetic and loyal and A Good Friend. I thought friendship could cure anything.  No matter what anybody did to me, I was totally disconnected from my anger and self-protective instincts; I thought I had to be a sponge, soaking up all their bad emotions and loving them no matter what.

So I was totally unprepared for them to split on me. I didn’t know anything about the idealization/devaluation cycle.

Splitting is... so, Borderline Personality Disorder is basically an inability to self-regulate, to integrate, to tolerate ambiguity. Either the person with it is an amazing perfect god, or a destructive piece of shit. Either their friend is a wonderful loving angel, or an evil demon who hates them and wants them to suffer. And this is an opinion that can flip on a dime, depending on how the person feels in that moment. So like--

I was maybe 16 or 17, and made a friend through a speech and debate club I was part of. From out of nowhere she liked me, thought I was pretty and smart and special. I stayed up until 3am one weekend and talked with her; we shared our hopes, our dreams, our favourite books. She sang a Scottish ballad that she said reminded her of me (”black is the colour of my true love’s hair”). The next time we met she gave me a little teddy bear with a hand-written note about what a good friend I was.

Then in the club, it was my job to make sure everyone got to meetings on time and was properly dressed and everything, and someone pointed out to me that my friend was wearing a skirt that was way shorter than dress guidelines allowed for. I had to go tell her that she was supposed to change and said, squirmingly uncomfortable, “People have talked to me...”  She stalked off.

That night was a ceremony where people who aged out of the group got to talk a little bit about what the group meant to them, and say goodbye to people, and play or sing a song. Her turn came, and she announced that our entire group was full of fake, awful, petty monsters, two-faced liars, almost as hurtful, hateful, and abusive as her foster parents. The song she played was “Just Like You” by Three Days Grace. I sobbed the entire time and tried to apologize to her, but it didn’t work. 

About a month later, she emailed someone in the group to say she’d been angry and hadn’t meant it, and she was sorry for ruining the ceremony.

That kind of thing happened to me with... maybe five or six different people, to greater or lesser degrees, from the time I was 12 to the time I was 20, which is when I finally got a handle on what was going on and how to predict it and keep it from happening. Friendships where everything was fine, wonderful, great thanks, how are you, fine, wonderf--KABOOM YOU’RE A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT LIS YOU ABUSER (oh wait sorry i didn’t mean it where are you going).

It took a lot of work to learn that I had to get my sense of self from something other than helping other people, to look after my own needs as well as other peoples’, to learn (GASP) to accept and even ask for help. A lot of things changed when my mom told us, when I was 15, that she was depressed and going into therapy, because that meant we were allowed to do these things in our family. I immediately blurted out, “Can I see a therapist too?”  So I got more centred in myself, and also finally figured out what was going on with my friends, and got better at maintaining friendships with people with BPD that did not explode, at making friendships that were not based around me being a pseudo-therapist, and at getting my helping-people jonesing out with actual paid work.

So you might notice that a lot of my fics about Kent and BPD aren’t actually from Kent’s perspective or about him--they’re about people trying to live with him. Hurricane or Campsites are stories about people who know what to expect, who have some understanding of what he’s like and how to keep themselves safe. They can find ways to love him for his good parts without letting his bad parts hurt them, can love him without letting themselves be sucked in by the extreme warmth of his regard, can maintain their own boundaries and make their own decisions.

(To be honest, I was initially really amazed to find that people with BPD appreciate my fics or me talking about the subject? Because I am an outsider, because I am writing from this perspective--a medical perspective, no less! The voice of the Establishment! But a lot of people have been really receptive to my POV--which might just be, again, the paucity of positive representations at all.)

I didn’t really think about it this way until I got this ask and started trying to explain it, but... I’m trying to write the kind of story I could have used when I was a kid.

(So then you ask, Lis, you’re still writing about other people, about meeting other peoples’ needs--when are you going to write about children like you were, about experiences like yours? When are you going to tell your own story? and then I change the topic and sidle awkwardly out of the room. I’m not ready for that yet.)