Who knew?
It's funny how I justified my self inflicted wounds and it turned out to be exactly what I needed not so much at the time but years down the road.
It Was Always About Me
Currently my best friend is my phone. This is because over the last 5 years I’ve lost every friend and “friend” that I had. At first it felt cathartic, many of the people in my life that I considered friends were not and I needed to cut them out. Unfortunately for them I couldn’t JUST cut them out and leave it at that, for reasons I didn’t understand at the time. Some of them got caught in the crossfire of my rampage purge of many at once and it sucked to have them out of my life but it wasn’t a huge deal and only sucked for a little while. A few were friends that I didn’t want to lose that got caught in the crossfire, those hurt, but not as much as I thought. Pretty much all of my friends were not as good of friends as I thought they were. This was them, I thought, I mean I was convinced they were bad friends.
But I’m learning now that they were not my friend, nor were they bad friends, they were friends with who I was for them. I mold myself to others for some type of relationship and expect others to do the same. I never realized that this didn’t make me a good friend, but was instead a symptom of my unknown and untreated BPD. So I did need to let my friend’s go, because they were not friends with ME but an illusion that I created for them in order to be the “perfect” friend for them. This explains why I had so many fast, strong, and exciting friendships that fizzled out or seemingly disappeared over night. They finally found out that I was not exactly who they thought I was. Maybe I crossed some line they would never cross, or several. Maybe they saw me acting differently for others and started to realize or see that I might be acting for them as well.
All I know about myself for certain now is that I don’t know who I really am. I want connection, real connection, but that can not happen until I know who I am so that I can connect with others that are like who I am. Not who I am while still dominated by BPD, but who I am when the BPD is “gone” or at least dominated by me. I need to figure out how to be an "I" not a "We". I want to get to the point where I can enjoy alone time because I enjoy myself, not because I am just sucked in by something that has captured me in isolation, not because I’m afraid and burnt out by ghosts of my past.
they were not friends with ME but an illusion that I created for them