#it's about BPD and obsession and grief and i'm really only posting it publicly bc like...

[prismatoxic]

this is going to be a very long and very personal post, but i've been thinking about it for a while. it's about my old FP i mention sometimes.

it's almost 4k words long, so. be prepared for that.

i got this question on retrospring a few days after paris blew up on me.

it is a very innocuous message. probably from a friend, maybe from a stranger; i won't know unless they tell me. it's the last question i ever answered on retrospring, though i have gotten harassment since that i did not answer, forcing me to shut off anonymous messages.

the exact timestamp is Sunday, May 29th. the last time paris messaged me was Tuesday, May 24th. i had to go into our old server to find that date. i don't have a good memory, but i also hate to look at anything from their old account. so, the message on retrospring: a seemingly insignificant event, but dated so close to the breakdown that is serves as a much more accessible reminder of how long it's been.

"about 1 year ago" is the immediately visible timestamp on the message.

2 years ago, paris was my best friend.

though, thinking about it, maybe that isn't true. it isn't what i called them. mikee is my best friend. i have never wanted to dethrone them from that spot. that term is special to me. (see, now, why my earlier post mocked myself wanting to be everyone's best friend? i won't even use the title for more than 2 people.)

no, i called paris my "queerplatonic partner" or my "platonic soulmate". qpp, usually. in hindsight it is so blatantly clear that i was obsessed, that i was attached in such an unhealthy way; i did not recognize myself as having BPD at the time. so, in the end, paris was not my qpp, nor any manner of soulmate. they were my "FP", or Favorite Person: a BPD term i would say is akin to "hyperfixation", but on someone you personally know.

i don't want to openly pass judgement on paris here, because that's not why i'm writing this. they're long gone and goading people to be as upset as i am serves no purpose. however, i will say this: they encouraged my behavior. my obsession. i believed, in a sense, that the pedestal i had put them on was in some way parallel to the one they had me on.

there was no pedestal under me, though.

paris and i met sometime in September of 2020. potentially on the 15th, as that is when i created our roleplay server. it was in a proship fandom server for a website i used to moderate. (i don't know if that site is ever going to manage to get finished, now, but i still have hope.) having just gotten very into souyo, i was hunting for roleplay partners, and said as much in some channel or another. paris, at the time, was playing P4G for the very first time. we got to talking. i made our roleplay server, and for two years, we would only ever talk therein.

today, there are 77 threads in that server for different roleplay plots. some are very long; others, very short. i was (and am) unable to focus on any one thing for any real length of time, but paris was accommodating. they were happy to do new plots as i came up with them, and they pitched their own from time to time. most of them are souyo; a handful are for our bancho triplet au; there are some akeshus, and one or two banpegos. we came up with a lot of ideas. a lot of aus. sometimes we'd redo an idea; sometimes we'd branch off from something we'd done before.

we roleplayed every day. i knew their schedule and they knew mine. our responses were quick and snappy, and if we couldn't keep up, we'd talk about it. we talked A LOT. very rarely on the phone or VC, usually in text. they do not live in the US, but we exchanged numbers anyway. we talked so much and so often that it drowned a lot of my other relationships out; i can be very single-minded in my obsessions. i almost lost several people.

i almost lost the love of my life.

in the summer of 2021, paris was taking a trip to the united states to get vaccinated for Covid, and they made plans to stop and see multiple people. in between other plans, they made just enough time to see me for 3 days. they were seeing their older friends for much longer, but i didn't question it, i didn't worry. i was so sure that i was so special to paris. i trusted them so much that the fact that they refused to allow me to interact with their core friend group just bounced right off of me.

in retrospect? ouch.

the visit was fine. paris finally convinced me that i was allowed to be disabled, that i was allowed to rely on support like the electric carts at stores and stuff. they had clashed with devot in the past, but the two of them got along fine for the visit. i was so thrilled; my two most important people, getting along? what could be better? the three of us had lunch and went to ikea. then i hung out at paris's hotel the other two days.

even when they were visiting their other friends, we were talking near-constantly. at some point, my obsession reached a very unfortunate peak, and i decided that if i was that obsessed, clearly i was in love with them. they were (and are, presumably) polyamorous, and i thought maybe i was too.

this isn't a part i want to talk about very much, because it's humiliating and painful. i tried to negotiate an open relationship with devot, and as a result, i almost lost him entirely. it was a very hard time for us, and it made me realize that i loved him way more than i could ever love someone else, even paris. if pursuing paris meant i would lose devot, then i simply wouldn't pursue paris. it wasn't until later that i would truly recognize that it was never romantic love; it was obsession, a need to be a bigger aspect of their life than i was.

paris knew my intentions and knew my ultimate decision. however that made them feel, i can't say. i don't know.

you see, towards the tail end of their trip, they suffered a familial tragedy and their return home was delayed. (or maybe they did make it home, but not for very long? my memory is fuzzy and i absolutely do not want to comb through our server to find it.) their family was in the US and that's where they needed to be for a while. i don't want to go into more detail than that; it was a very personal time for them. we did not talk a lot during it. they said, "i can't carry you right now".

maybe that was a clue as to how they viewed our relationship. i don't know. i assured them i wasn't asking for that, that i could carry them, but all the same they needed their space and i gave it to them. i had permission to send messages with the understanding that there would be no response, so i did.

in lamenting my mental state during all this, jesse (you may recall him being a best friend) suggested to me that maybe i possibly, perhaps, had BPD. he explained it to me and may have also directed me to some sources. it was eye-opening. it forced me to confront my actions and alter my behavior in ways i never realized i needed to do. in terms of paris, however, it came too little, too late.

this part of the story i have told before; i mean, i've told it all before, but i think i was more descriptive at this point. as paris recovered from the tragedy and began returning to normal life, they did so increasingly without me.

conversations in our server were short and uneventful. they were not up to roleplay, which i understood; i searched for other ways for us to connect.

they abandoned their persona 4 twitter and made a new one. they claimed persona 4 had become a trigger. i don't know why, and they never explained. it seemed that the biggest connection we had was now in the past, but i was so deeply, wholeheartedly invested in our relationship that i didn't let it get me down... too much.

the thing about the decline of our relationship is that it was not all at once. it was an accumulation of things, increasingly large signs that they were done with me. the persona 4 abandonment was one of those signs. another, how they were publicly interacting with their older friends, but no longer with me. yet another; they got into no man's sky, but when i finally got my hands on a copy to play with them, they stopped playing. or maybe they just stopped posting about it.

they did not post in our server unless i prompted them first. they did speak in our server with our mutual friend priam, but... just to talk to priam. ask them for advice on the french language, mostly, for a novel they had started to write. anything i said was quickly glossed over (not by priam, though; priam and i are still friends and i love him dearly).

this went on for 7 months.

i know that figure because just before i purged my vent twitter, i went back to the very first post i'd made about the situation. i posted a lot about it... almost every day. i also cried almost every day. i was trying to take it in stride, at least publicly, but in private i was falling apart. paris, who used to like every post on my vent twitter to let me know they were reading them, had stopped doing so. they also never asked me about any of the posts, which they used to do. at some point i figured they had most likely muted my account.

it doesn't feel like it was 7 months. it feels like it was much shorter. how could i have been in so much emotional pain for 7 whole months? i know i was hiding it from everyone as best i could, i didn't even tell my therapist; how could i have done so for so long? but my vent twitter proved the timeline. 7 months.

devot's not blind, of course. he knew something was up. i very rarely told him anything about paris, a point of contention between us. i knew he didn't like them. i didn't want to make it worse. however, i am nothing if not a paper-thin pane of glass when it comes to the phrase, "are you okay?", and eventually i had to tell him why i was so depressed.

he didn't know how to help. the only thing he could do was provide me with the matches; i had to burn the bridge myself.

he told me, early on in my relationship with paris, that they had told him something. (i didn't know they'd spoken outside of my personal server at all.) they told him that my obsession with them wouldn't last, that eventually i would find another interest and move on.

it was a gut-punch. our relationship meant everything to me, but they only saw me as an obsessed little fanboy, at least at the time. and it felt ironic, because they had moved on from me, not the other way around.

paris was (and presumably is) very serious about the privacy of 1 on 1 conversations. they never ever divulged things that happened between them and someone else that seemed in any way "personal." they expected this of others, as well; they told devot what they said in confidence. of course, his loyalties lie with me and absolutely not with them, so he told me anyway.

now, let's step back, for a moment. i want to try and paint a picture of what it was like being in my shoes.

i trusted paris. everything they had ever said to me was taken at face-value and believed. they had proven to me (or so i thought) that they always spoke their mind, were honest, and cared about me very deeply. i trusted them to tell me if something was wrong. in those 7 months, i asked them directly if anything was bad between us. they assured me we were fine. all the while, i knew they were hanging out with their older (real?) friends and generally ignoring me. i knew they had come to loathe the media that brought us together. i knew that they didn't want to play games with me, even their supposed favorite game.

i knew that they were shutting me out.

but paris never communicated this. they were visibly moving on without me, but i trusted them so much that i willfully turned a blind eye to it, waiting for the day they'd be "ready" to talk to me again. then devot told me about what they'd said, and finally, i started to split.

splitting is another BPD term, though it has its uses in general psychology as well. it is primarily a defense mechanism, mostly against The Big BPD Fear, abandonment. splitting is to see a situation and black and white and take a side. there was no longer nuance to the situation; there was paris is my friend, or paris is my enemy.

i was reluctant to let it happen. i resisted it. splitting and my natural empathy are extremely at odds with one another; i tried to convince my brain that paris was still my friend, that there were reasons for all of this. these were conscious thoughts, but the split was not a conscious choice.

i resented paris. either they apologized to me, and fixed things, or they didn't and that was that, it was over. very new to the concept that these were unproductive thoughts, i didn't know how to combat them.

i made a tweet on my vent twitter.

as i said earlier, i had come to assume that paris had simply muted my vent twitter; they had gone through so much, clearly they couldn't carry me, as they said... so i made a vague tweet that wasn't really vague, assuming they probably wouldn't see it anyway.

to paraphrase, as the tweet no longer exists: "you said once that i would get bored of you and move on, but you're the one who moved on from me"

they had not muted my twitter, they were just ignoring it. i know this because they finally messaged me first, and it was about that tweet.

the first volley of messages, sent in our roleplay server, was very clipped but mostly civil. they were disappointed in me for resorting to such a low tactic as to post a passive aggressive tweet instead of coming to them about my concerns.

(i had been having no luck getting them to talk to me; our last exchange in that server was nearly a month prior and lasted about 6 messages. perhaps you can imagine why i didn't think taking my concerns to them would work.)

i was not present when they sent these messages, and didn't get to say anything before they left the server. i did return to my computer not long after, however, and realized, with equal parts regret and relief, that it was over.

then they dm'd me, something they had not done since we very first started talking.

the dms were vicious. they had only gotten angrier after sending the first wave of messages and wanted me to know. devot had betrayed them by telling me what they said, and i betrayed them by repeating it on my vent.

i watched each message roll in, one after the other, numb. i considered replying. i never did.

they called me selfish. hungry for attention. everything was always about me. they said all that happened was they stopped initiating contact, and i had the nerve to claim it was abandonment? in the server, they said they expected me to tell them if i had an issue with them. in the dms, they professed to feelings they had never told me they had towards me.

they said they didn't know what they were even trying to accomplish, that i wouldn't even care. the messages stopped.

their twitter was abandoned; in time, their discord was as well. they never blocked me, simply... vanished. their friend list was wiped clean, their icon blacked out. i think it only didn't happen immediately because they needed to retract their presence from everything they modded and collaborated on. why not delete the discord? i don't know. i'll never know.

it's still there, black icon, no friends, no profile. our exchanges are intact. every other account i ever knew them to have is abandoned as well. if i had to guess, they don't go by "paris" anymore. they told me they had changed before, that "paris" was the longest-running identity they had. they loved being "paris". i'm sorry i ruined it, genuinely.

so, May 24th, 2022. a Tuesday; devot would have been off work. i don't remember if i cried. i think i was just sort of bitterly relieved. i think i said "good riddance" on my vent, after blocking their accounts.

that's the thing about defense mechanisms, i guess. they can work. yet, as time passed, the full weight of it all came bearing down on me. not just the end, but every part before it: the grief of it all, of losing paris, piece by piece until there was nothing left. them claiming that the "only thing" they had done was stop engaging with me first was laughable, but maybe to them, that really was the truth. i said it before: it was an accumulation of things. straws on the camel's back, you know how it goes.

it was never just about the roleplaying, or even the conversations. i tried so hard, for so long, to find something else we could do. i trusted them when they said we were fine. i trusted them when they told me they loved me. i trusted them in every way i could trust a person.

paris said once that they didn't believe in empathy. they said it was essentially "mind reading", that there was no way to know how another person was feeling, so how could you know you felt the same? hyper-empathetic, i stayed quiet. they were smarter than me, and more worldly than me; they probably knew better.

"about 1 year ago," says retrospring. i remember when it said only days. when it said a month. when it said 7 months. (that might be when i made my last post on the subject.)

shortly before that day, i finally told my therapist what was happening. it was my very last appointment with him; i'd been seeing him for 4 years. he was moving onto a private practice and could no longer take my insurance.

i said it had all began about a year after paris and i met, and he posited a theory: perhaps it was the honeymoon phase. those tend to last about a year, he said. maybe they had simply gotten bored. he did not say it unkindly (he was very good at his job, and i trusted him very much), but it did strike a chord in me. i thought maybe it was too simple an explanation, though, and after all, we were qpps. how could they just get bored?

i don't think we were qpps at that point. (arguably, we never were, but as a label we shared, i think they had agreed on it at least for a while.)

the explosion a scant few days later did not feel like boredom, it felt like vitriol. like resentment. it felt like they had wanted to say those things for a long time. but it had been 7 months since the possible end of this "honeymoon phase," so maybe. i guess i'll never know.

i have become very bad at keeping up with roleplay. even if it's the same short style, or even if they let me switch between ideas constantly. even if it's souyo. even if they're my friend. even if i'm having a great time. at some point, the mental block rises up, and even though i'm not thinking about paris, i know that's where it came from. devot is the only one largely immune to this effect; we still roleplay constantly, though i do at times fall into slumps even so.

i keep trying; i love to roleplay. it's my favorite hobby. but every time i try, it stops dead by my own hand. even if i'm actively trying to prevent it.

...but otherwise, i think i'm doing better.

my approach to relationships is different. i know what i'm capable of, if i get carried away. i'm careful, and i try to keep track of my emotions about a person. i also trust people a lot less, and fear abandonment a lot more, but i'm aware of it and trying to do something about it.

devot and i are doing much better; he doesn't have to compete with anyone anymore. i have a lot more time and emotional energy for him. i love him very much, and i'm so grateful he stuck with me. i'd be nowhere without him.

the roleplay server i made for myself and paris sits at the very bottom of my server list, tucked into a folder with the server we shared with priam. i don't want to lose the memories, but i never even look at them, so it probably doesn't matter either way. maybe someday i'll use some of those old ideas. i already did, with one; one of our roleplays was the basis for my oc nate, who i made well after paris was gone.

i do not ever want to see or speak to paris again. luckily, the feeling is most certainly mutual.

tomorrow, in about 12 hours, i will be speaking to my new therapist. he is the second i have had since the one i had for 4 years, and the first since then that i actually think i mesh well with. i think i'll tell him all of this. hell, i might even read the post to him. we'll see.

is there a point to all of this? kind of. mostly it's for me, a retrospective of what happened. it's also just informative for the people closest to me who i have likely not told everything in this much detail. if you read it and get something out of it, that's great.

it's been "about 1 year," according to retrospring. i think i like that metric better than the exact timestamps of paris's final messages to me that discord gives. the era of "tox and paris" burned bright and burned hard, and died out very quickly. it's probably for the best. i am healing, and i don't know if i'd have ever gotten better if they kept me around. there is a long way to go, but... i have hope, honestly. i think i'll be okay.