A little travel snap from my Instagram, @thatnomadjess
Spoiler alert
I've just finished reading André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name and the thing fucking broke me. Last time I felt this way about a book my friend had just died and I'd reached the part in David Nicholls' One Day where Dexter and Emma are finally together but then she gets hit by a truck. The two events didn't sit comfortably together, and I've never read the book again.
Other than a few noted absences in the final section of the book, there are no big deaths in Call Me by Your Name, instead, it's their relationship that effectively dies. That summer exists for all of us, me included, and we never really get the love we feel during that year's particular heatwave back. I remember who I fell in love with during my 'summer', remember the moment we met, the first words he said to me and the first time we kissed. I also remember the last time we spoke after 6 torturous years of my being in love with someone who would never love me back. After struggling to let go for over half a decade, I'm pleased to say I don't miss him anymore.
The reason I still crying over the book in question is that, as a borderline, there is nothing I simultaneously crave and fear more than being loved. The loneliness of BPD is agonising. We're known for our temperament and attachment issues to the point that the idea of someone falling for us is impossible, laughable even. The idea that someone could be able to love not only me but the thing that lives in my brain that permeates every thought I ever had seems to be nothing more than a fantasy, a fairytale that will never come to exist.
Not only is it laughable, it's also terrifying. Rightly or wrongly, although seemingly rightly given all the evidence I have on the matter, everyone I ever get close to romantically eventually leaves. I've been broken up with more times than I care to admit and it's suffocating to constantly find myself being rejected again and again and again. Whether it's someone who doesn't love me any more, someone who never did love me but told me they did or someone who was still in love with their ex, I've never been able to find someone to stick around, and I don't believe I ever will.
Just before I moved to Canada the first time, I tried to talk to my ex about how I felt about someone and he responded with "You fall for people too quickly, you can't force love." Now, not only was his evidence of this unprecedented, as he'd mistook my reluctance to sleep with him straight away, unless our connection was going to be more than a come-and-go situation, for my wanting to be with him long term after only three dates, but it also hurt like hell. To me, to a borderline, what that told me was that I won't be able to find someone to love me, that the fault of my being alone lays solely at my own feet and that there's nothing I can do about it. Whatever his words truly meant, what they said was that the only way I would ever be able to find someone to love me was if I forced them, and that is something you just can't do.
I've always been reluctant to admit that I like people, even in high school I found it impossible to write in my diary that I had a crush on my friend, terrified that even by putting my words down on paper I would somehow feel the pain of rejection. There's a guy at work I have a bit of a thing for and today my colleagues were telling me to go for it. I think they saw my reluctance and comments on my chronic insecurities as a joke, but they're not. Being rejected as a borderline result in an indescribable pain I can feel in every pore, something I really have no physical feeling to compare it to. The sensation is agonising and indescribable, but all I've ever been able to envisage in my romantic future is rejection.
As a result of this, I don't talk about my feelings. People know about the crushes I may have on people, subtlety has never been my strong point, but I can never, ever tell people how I really feel when it comes to dating. Truth is, I want so so desperately to not be alone, and ending things with the guy I was seeing seems to have hit me harder than I thought it would. Not because I want to be with him, the guy is a fucking douche bag, but because I'm back in the same position I was before. Of being alone, and desperately wanting to be loved.
There are a thousand more things I can say on the matter, this shit show is only the start of how it feels to trying to date when you have BPD, but I want to start reading something more cheerful before I get to sleep. At the very least so I don't waste any more loo roll trying to get the almighty amount of snot out of my head that has formed in my hour spent crying at this fucking book.
André Aciman, you destroyed me.
xXx
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