Scorched Earth
My book is called “How to Sacrifice Your Lover”. And I need to stress right out of the gate that this book is not an attack on people who suffer from Borderline Personality as the subtitle would suggest.
On the contrary, this is a book that was borne entirely of love. It is a chronicle of love, of endless love… of endless sacrificial love.
My best friend of 10 years was borderline, and I loved her like I never loved anyone, ever… so very much. Just being near her made me incredibly happy, even if she was angry or sad… I loved being near her, all the time… always.
I wrote this book FOR her… not about her… 10 years ago… initially, it was a massive, massive, 450-page love letter, 150,000 words, written about and during the first 90 days that I knew her. She read all of it as it was written, and very little changed during the later revisions that would taint or even foreshadow how the story and its message would naturally form. In fact, as the author, I can only think of a few sentences in the entire book that I later added for clarity, interest, and foreshadowing. Beyond that, this book was a chronicle of real events that naturally unfolded, and somehow naturally connected and resolved in the end. I did things to prove my love for her that no human does for another human… ever… I wrote her a damn book god sake, ultimately consuming 8000 hours of my life on the project! On some level, I hope that the mere existence of this thing helps her understand the magnitude of what she meant to me, but I know for a fact that she will not see it that way…
…she could not feel loved enough, no matter how much love I or anyone gave her, and her version of love was backward and came only from sociopaths who abused her.
Obviously, this is very sad, and I want to empathize with her… and this book is a chronicle of my struggles to prove to her that I loved her Unfortunately for me, and for the other people who loved her, you cannot prove to someone suffering from severe BPD that you love them… because they will just simply never believe you… and this only caused me to try harder and harder and harder and became a bottomless pit into which I emptied my soul, body, and even pockets…
Publishing this book, which, despite being full of love, is totally offensive to her. If I love her, why on earth would I want to offend her? Well… the truth is that I don’t want to offend her. But in publishing this… I’m doing the best thing for myself. I’ve decided to stop sacrificing myself for her, and the best thing that I can do to preserve myself is to build a massive barrier between us. If I don’t, she might potentially continue to suck me in, drain me, and leave me alone, staring at blank walls in a mental institution.
By publishing this book, you see, I’m making it impossible for me to go back. I’m guaranteeing that she and I will never sit across from each other again. Because despite my love… despite my empathy… my best friend was a bottomless pit that ultimately hurt me… destroyed me… left me with nothing but these walls upon which I stare… a bottomless pit in which everything I loved about living disappeared, and nothing ever reemerged.
I’m scorching all the earth between her and me. Effectively, I’m committing social suicide by publishing this… effectively canceling myself…
I don’t know if you want to read this… I don’t know if I want you to read this… But it is there, for someone to read, and I assume that it is going to trigger a lot of people… but if nobody reads it, then it might as well not exist… it needs to exist. Despite damaging myself and her, it needs to exist. It needs to be the barrier between us.