MY GLITCH IN THE MATRIX

Estranged or deranged, I’m not sure which applies right now. In the mental-health lottery, you drew the short stick, even though you only drew one, while I somehow ended up with three. Still, your untreated BPD is an impenetrable wall, and I no longer have the strength to keep trying to break through it.

All our lives, I’ve never known which version of you I’d meet on any given day:

the you who genuinely wanted my help, or the you who believed I knew nothing at all.

The you who wanted to be exactly like me, or the you who despised everything I was.

The you who wanted to take over my life, or the you who wanted to burn my life to the ground.

The you who followed me across the globe, or the you who hid from me in the same house.

Or the you who wants nothing to do with me at all.

That last one is where we are now, again, and, honestly, I am at peace with it.

You came bounding back into my life full of intention: change, growth, reconnection. You wanted to hear about what I’d been doing, to share your own stories. You wanted my help, and I tried to give it. You even dipped your toes into the things I’d recently begun, wanting to share them with me. It felt hopeful. You felt hopeful.

But it never lasts. It never does.

Some obscure issue, one only you could find, cropped up in a hobby you’d just decided to share with me. Suddenly something was wrong with it. And, as always, it became my fault.

And now, once again, you want nothing to do with me.

At this point, I hope that remains the status quo. I have nothing left to give you. You’ll likely run into the arms of yet another unsavoury man, tumble into another chaotic relationship you won’t understand, continue down a questionable “career,” and engage in the same self-destructive patterns that burn your life down again and again.

But I hope not.

I hope you take the first step: toward treatment, toward therapy, toward figuring yourself out without waiting for a man to save you. Because they won’t.

Only you can.