The Beginning: Snot, Salt, and Sadness

 This is not going to be a healing journey. This may not always be nice and polite and kind. This is how I claw myself back from the brink. This is surviving a breakup with Borderline Personality Disorder, ADHD, Depression, and Anxiety.

At least my chances of death-by-Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo have slimmed. 

 💔

Since receiving my Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis I’ve recognised that one of my biggest ongoing struggles has been dealing with the Fear of Abandonment. It crops up in all of the places, all of the time. I am constantly on high alert that the people and/or things I care about might leave me.

Why would they leave me? Because I’m a monster.

Thanks, brain, you unreliable narrator. (My sister was once listed on my MHCP has my arch-nemesis, but it’s wrong. My arch-nemesis is me.)

 💔

Time and experience has shown that my Fear of Abandonment is rarely correct. Its wiring is faulty (installed by the same company that supplied me with everything else mentioned above) and I’ve been working hard to tune its doomsday preaching out. I’ve been looking into things like Radical Compassion and upping my meditation practice to help me cope with the looming, pervasive presence of the FoA.

But yesterday its dire warnings came true.

“Are you breaking up with me?”

My now-ex-boyfriend sat on the edge of my bed, a shadowed figure in the evening light. I’d resorted to hiding in bed because my FoA was telling me that this time was The Time, and I was panicking. He sat silent for a moment. Took a deep breath. “Yeah… I think I am.”

Those words rang in my ears and my stomach bottomed out. This can't be happening. 

“Why?” My voice was a watery squeak. My lungs had stopped working. A horrific tingling began to spread through my body. By the end of the conversation that tingling would turn to numb dissociation.

I tried to listen to his words as, slowly, his reasoning came out. I tried to ignore the timbre of his voice instead of basking in it. I wanted to think of a pithy counterargument, but I knew he had already made his mind up. If he thought I should have been part of that conversation prior to the deliverance of his final decision, it didn’t show. I’m stubborn, but he’s more stubborn. He had made a choice and nothing—nothing—could change that.

💔

There must be something wrong with me, I thought. This must be my fault. It’s my fault he’s not moved on from the breakdown of his relationship with the love of his life. It’s my fault, because I’m not smarter/prettier/thinner/more mentally stable, and that my personality is an acquired taste.

When I voiced these fears he told me straight out that it’s not my fault, but that he’d come to the realisation that he can’t meet my emotional needs or love me, and a partner needs to be able to do that. In a small, broken voice I barely recognised as mine, I asked him if he even wanted to try to do that. 

He said, “No.”

That one word twisted the knife in further. Deeper. Sharper.

It felt like something broke inside of me.

 💔

Before this all went down, I knew he didn’t love me—but I did think he was going to take some time in the not-too-distant future to see a psychologist to work on himself. Looking back on it, maybe I just hoped that he would.

He had mentioned in the past that he thought he might be able to love me if he sorted through his shit. And now, here he was, telling me that it wasn’t going to happen. Not working on himself. Not him helping himself. And not ever loving me.

“Why won’t you help yourself?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

"You don't want to?"

"No."

 💔

Over twenty-fours later I'm finding that his choice is still a hard lump for me to stomach. I’m struggling to accept that this is not my fault and there’s not anything I could have done differently, and that short of begging and pleading or utilising other unhealthy behaviours, he’s not going to change his mind.

My racing mind has been flooding me with questions since he left: Did I not matter to him? Why isn’t my love worthy of reciprocation? Why am I not good enough? Why am I not even the main character in my own life? Why am I a plot point on the way to a breakdown or realisation for someone else?

I guess I learned that you can’t make someone love you just because you love them. 

 💔

My friends and my psych say I have to feel my feelings, and that they’re perfectly normal heartbroken feelings but oh my god do they hurt. Everything about me hurts: my shoulder (because I have bursitis); my nose (because I’ve sandpapered it raw with tissues); my face (because it’s literally swollen from crying); my jaw and teeth; my nostril piercing (again with the tissues); and my heart and soul, or whatever it is that is making me feel like I have had my ability to feel happiness yanked out and thrown away.

I may not be the love of his life, but so far he has been the love of mine. 

And I mean nothing to him. Perhaps I never did. 

💔

I even resorted to Googling what to do in a breakup, because this is my first big one. Unsurprisingly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing a broken heart. Even less surprising was that what I really wanted wasn’t available: a magic wand or word to make everything okay and take away the pain. (I asked my boss where the magic wands were, and she said we don’t have budget for them this year, which is a massive shame.) 

 💔

“I am empathetic towards you, but I’m not worried for you.” My psychologist called me first thing in the morning. I’d texted her after he left: Ed broke up with me. Do you have time tomorrow?

(I was supposed to be texting her in triumph that I’d made a phone call I was avoiding. I was supposed to be focusing on my mental health, not having a breakup-induced breakdown. I was supposed to be planning our second-year anniversary.)

“You’re not?” I blubbered.

“You’ve done the hardest thing already. You have saved your life.”

My snot-filled scepticism was piqued. “I have? How?”

“You got out of a relationship where you were not loved or prioritised. So many women—and it is usually women—stay in those kinds of relationships thinking it will get better. And it doesn’t. You have prioritised yourself, even if you didn’t choose this. You will be able to live again once the pain fades, because you have already done all the hard work on yourself. You are grieving and disappointed. You are feeling grief and disappointment in him, not grief and disappointment in you.”

“I need to write this down,” I muttered, repeating grief and disappointment in him, not me to myself while I scrabbled around my rumpled bedding for paper and a pen. A new wave of pain washed over me: he used to tease me about the books, socks, and random things he would find in my bed. He had to be careful laying down because he was never certain if a doorstop of a novel was lurking under a pillow, poised for attack.

“You deserve to be in a relationship with someone who loves you back, and isn’t pretending.”

💔

At the time I am writing this, I am a creature of snot, salt, and sadness. I’m so, so afraid. I’m scared and broken and shattered and I don’t know how to move on. I’m scared I’ll never find love again, and then I’m scared that I will.

But so what if I don’t know how to move on. If I don’t know how to heal. If I don’t know how these scars are going to look once the wounds have sealed.

I’m going to find out.