When I was 14, I worked in a Pizza Shop. I met this really cool chick. She was older, a delivery driver. Crazy long hair, loud and colourful voice, fiery nature and what she lacked in stature, she made up for with an overbearing personality.
She took me to a concert. Picked me up from my mums and gave me a joint in the carpark of the concert. She was cool.
When I was 15, I got kicked out of a house I was staying at again. I had been living on a mattress on a bare concrete floor. So I went to live with her for a few months. She had a beautiful 3 year old daughter who didn’t talk. She would be locked in her bedroom for most of the day and night with a hockey strap tied between the girls’ bedroom door handle and the bathroom door handle. The little girl is now autistic from what I’ve heard.
I would sit and paint with the little girl, and watch shows with her and sing to her and read to her. When I would come home from school she would wrap her arms around me and point at the books. She never got any attention from my friend
My friend had BPD. Borderline Personality Disorder. I didn’t know until I came home from spending a week in the psyche hospital after trying to harm myself on a bedroom door. I showed her my diagnoses. She showed me hers too. We had the same illness.
I would watch her be a beautiful carefree woman with all the love in the world for her boyfriend of three years and gorgeous daughter (in front of people that was). To a maniac psycho who would throw everything she could at the ones she loved, smash down walls and doors like some kind of super human with her petite tiny frame. She would become malicious and invite different men over each night after a fight with her boyfriend whom she would kick out for the night. Her boyfriend loved her so much. I would come home to see the house destroyed and him crying to himself at the table. He was much too good for this.
The nights she screamed, the neighbours smiled at me with sympathy. I would take the little girl and walk her all the way to the river to feed the ducks. We would pretend we were fairies one night, or swan princesses, or simply grown up people not fighting. When I couldn’t hear the yelling travelling along the wind anymore, I would walk her home in my arms and tuck her into bed.
In one week, my friend lost her boyfriend, her daughter, me, her best friend and her other lover who killed himself. I’ve never seen her again.
Watching her made me never want to be that person. Never put people I love through so much hell. I was never going to be as sick as she was. And I haven’t been sick like that since. I went to intense 3x a week group therapy sessions that trained my brain to think different. I stopped going after a year or so. I was better. I kept getting hand written letters from my psychs and the hospital. I want to do that course again now. Retraining the brain cloud patterns.
