Unfriended.

TW: anti-LGBTQ+ language, abuse, sexual assault

As much as I look back and say to myself, “Wow, people fucking hated me,” that isn’t actually a fact.

One of the hallmarks of BPD is rocky relationships, often involving idealization and splitting. Idealization is obvious: a little obsessed, they can do no wrong, BFF, spilling all my friends’ secrets even though they’re secrets—but I want them to like me!

VS. splitting: you used the wrong tone of voice, so now I hate you. I’m jealous about XYZ, so now I hate you. You were put off by one of my idealization behaviors, so now you hate me.

That’s just my experience, like, the top skim of fat off of it. And it’s exhausting trying to navigate interpersonal relationships when you’re neurodivergent, traumatized, and operating with a brain that sometimes interprets rejection as a fucking five-alarm fire.

I’ve had quite a few friendships crumble and die over the years, but let me pick my top ten.

I can’t use their real names LOL, so I’ll just give them make-believe monikers.

Hemlock. Oleander. Marigold. Snakeroot. Agave. Belladonna. Poinsettia. Lily. Foxglove. Wolfsbane.

And this isn’t even an extensive list.

When I originally wrote this article five years ago, I had no idea how much more there would be to add. Since then, I’ve lost both of my childhood best friends, one of my favorite coworkers, and gotten a divorce.

We’ll cover that in another article.

Hemlock

Hemlock was my first new friend after elementary school.

I used to have crippling social anxiety. The kind where you couldn’t go sharpen your pencil because you would rather die than make any kind of noise.

Hemlock was jealous. We quit being best friends because she was allowed to have other friends, but I wasn’t.

I found out years later that she had an unrequited love for me, and that was the nail in the coffin for our friendship.

But she also helped me come out of my shell and develop confidence, and I’m thankful for that gift she gave me.

That’s one thing I’m trying to remember as I look back at all of these relationships: someone can hurt you and still have given you something valuable.

Oleander

Oleander is a tricky one because it’s surrounded in shame.

I have a couple of other friendships that went this way as well.

When you grow up gay or bisexual, friendships have a tendency to get weird. Even when you don’t make them weird.

This is one of those where her boyfriend hated me and referred to me as a dyke.

This is also one of those where, later on, in desperation, I wanted to pursue her, and it wound up ruining our friendship.

You get pigeonholed into being predatory.

What I mean by that is: “Oh, if you like girls, you must like all girls, and that means you must like me.”

I feel like that way of thinking plants a seed.

Someone you’ve never been attracted to hoodwinks you into, “Oh, if I was gay/bi, I’d totally date you!”

Which later turns into, “I’m feeling curious.”

And then when you call them on their bluff, you’ve all but practically SHATTERED the jar of moths, and things will NEVER be the same again.

You have to act straighter when you’re bisexual, just so nothing is ever assumed, and that too is a tripwire ready to be set off by, well, closeness.

A lot of platonic friendships express the five love languages, obviously in a different sense than a romantic relationship, but love is love.

I’m a firm believer in being able to hug your friends and tell them you love them without having other intentions.

I think that’s something I had to learn the hard way: intimacy isn’t automatically romantic or sexual. Sometimes you really can just fucking love someone.

Marigold

Fuck you, Marigold.

Marigold became a close friend of mine. My two best friends, who had been my best friends for thirteen years, started out as her best friends.

It was a constant competition of trying to be #1.

When Marigold and I became close, it didn’t last because, like I said, I’m unapologetic.

She had just broken up with her abusive boyfriend, and then he attacked me, calling me a dyke and telling me to kill myself.

All because I told her not to go back to him???

This was in tenth grade, when my family was already falling apart, and just like that, overnight, she convinced all our mutual friends to “break up” with me.

Without explanation, I was no longer a part of the group.

I was devastated.

This is one of those things that you never get closure for, and another one of those things that only exist in your perspective.

I have no idea if there was an actual witch hunt against me or if it was just high school girl bullshit that happened to be coincidental.

All I know is that it came at the WORST time for me, and I took the hole puncher and damn near shredded my “forever alone” passport.

I was a kid.

I didn’t know how to process that kind of rejection. I just knew that suddenly everyone I loved was gone.

Snakeroot

Snakeroot is the other half of this coin, with a very similar story.

His girlfriend didn’t like me.

He was very depressed and suicidal, and I had made some fucking brownies to try and keep him alive.

Overnight, he publicly posted on my Facebook wall how much he hated me and what an annoying, awful person I was.

And I was the last to see it.

All of our mutual friends had seen it, and it obviously became weird because FUCK talking directly to me about it.

I feel like he apologized later on about it. More than once.

But my trauma brain locked it up with everything else because it didn’t matter.

He’s still a very unhappy person as an adult, and I have a hard time having grace because I wasn’t given grace in the hours that I needed it most.

That probably isn’t entirely fair.

But it’s honest.

And this article is about being honest.

Agave

Agave was like the first love of my life.

She awakened the big ol’ BI in me.

This love was a dangerous dance. We were never on the same page at the same time, and it felt like one of those relationships you’re just supposed to learn from.

She got pregnant at fifteen, and that cemented our fate.

We couldn’t dance anymore.

I hope she’s happy with where her life took her. I’m more than happy with mine.

It’s just weird to grow up and not be able to remember what that kind of love felt like.

I feel like your first gay love is different from your first straight love.

It’s like that saying about having two wolves inside of you.

Except one of them is gay.

Belladonna & Poinsettia

Jesus.

Let’s group her together with Poinsettia.

These were my first two friends.

I had other friends. Better friends.

But these were the broken people I naturally had to gravitate toward because I was also a broken person.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Belladonna because we experienced such similar trauma, though I always felt that she was coddled for hers.

I felt like our similarities in birthdays, writing, fashion sense, and more were always a point of competition—at least on my end.

Her lack of self-esteem, to me, was a ruse for attention and validation, and she always got it.

I resented her for having a support system.

Though I’m sure she always felt the same toward me.

Or maybe she’s a better person than I am.

Poinsettia was poor and dirty and lived in a trailer with, like, fifty rabbits. None of us were allowed to stay at her place, not only because of the filth but because we later found out that her father was a CHILD PORNOGRAPHER.

Which brings me to Lily.

Lily was a person who betrayed my trust on sensitive topics.

Because remember: my biggest secret was being sexually abused.

That was the common denominator between all of us.

I was mean as hell to these girls because I hated that the main thing we had in common was a dirty secret.

I wish they could’ve gotten unfucked.

But I was lucky in the fact that my life wasn’t as dysfunctional as theirs.

That’s survivors’ guilt.

And it doesn’t make your trauma any less valid.

I hope they’re all able to find peace as adults.

I also hope they never read this article.

Foxglove

Speaking of friends I don’t like—or never liked—Foxglove was manipulative since I was in grade school.

She was at least four years older than me but always hung around me, which is a big juicy red flag now that I’m an adult.

She was also a mutual friend with Agave, but insanely jealous of the relationship she and I had.

The plot thickens as I pursued a friendship with her as an adult, strung out on Accutane, so I was already living my worst choices.

Because Accutane is NOT for the mentally ill.

Holler at my clear skin, though!

Anyways, in 2017, I was sexually assaulted while out with her at a bar.

And she did nothing.

She was my ride, and she wouldn’t let us leave.

And that just stirred my trauma pot.

So hours later, at four in the morning, I started driving home in shame.

All I could fucking hear was:

“You were an easy target.”

This is something I need to retread in therapy because I can barely stomach sitting here typing about it.

This is a person I’m very thankful I don’t have to pretend to like anymore since I blocked her on just about everything.

Get fucked, weirdo.

Wolfsbane

Lastly, an ex.

Wolfsbane.

My idealization crush.

This guy gave me a good mind-fucking.

It was one of those “don’t meet your heroes” moments.

Or, in this case:

Don’t date your crush.

He used the hell out of me.

He didn’t pursue me until after he graduated.

If I agree with my mom about only one thing in this life, it’s that this guy was predatory to be nineteen coming after a sixteen-year-old.

It would have been different if we started dating in school, but we didn’t.

I made so many mistakes trying to pursue this guy, and I’m still super embarrassed about how foolish I acted.

He broke up with me after dating me for two weeks.

On my BIRTHDAY.

And then kept my number for, like, four years after that.

I want nothing good for this guy.

This was the biggest heartbreak I think I’ve ever felt in my life.

And it’s so messed up because so much of it was idealization.

I didn’t just fall in love with him.

I fell in love with what I thought he was.

And when that fantasy collapsed, I had to grieve a relationship that barely existed.

Now that I’m done EXPOSING myself—particularly admitting to being wrong in a lot of situations—and exposing these people, you now see what I mean when I say relationships are pretty messy as a member of the BPD squad.

See: cringe.

There were other people I used to hold a vendetta against.

But that’s what growth is.

You can’t carry every skeleton with you forever.

Eventually, I had to stop asking who the villain was in every story and start asking what the fuck I was doing in it.

Because the truth is, sometimes people genuinely hurt me.

Sometimes I genuinely hurt people.

Sometimes both things happened at the same time.

And sometimes I will never know exactly what happened because I only have my side of the story.

That’s one of the hardest parts of growing up: realizing that your experience can be completely real without necessarily being the complete story.

And this is what led to my diagnosis.

Admitting one of the WORST things ever about myself because that’s just what you have to do in therapy.

I hurt the people I love on purpose.