[Quotes are from ‘Love the way you lie Part II’ by Rihanna, featuring Eminem]

“On the first page of our story
The future seemed so bright
Then this thing turned out so evil
I don’t know why I’m still surprised
Even angels have their wicked schemes
And you take that to new extremes
But you’ll always be my hero
Even though you’ve lost your mind.”

For three months I listened to no other music but this song. I listened to it on repeat – hundreds, thousands of times. It was my break-up song – the break up of a long-standing friendship that was an almost-fatal casualty of BPD. But not just my BPD – hers too.

Until two years ago she knew nothing of my mental health difficulties. Until two years ago, we were fine. And then I told her, and we were no longer fine. For six months we were caught in a constant cycle of push-pull on both sides, which fed off itself like nothing else, as we constantly triggered each other. To add fuel to the fire, I developed an obsessive attachment for her, and that fanned the flames of our already destructive relationship. I experienced frequent ‘splitting’ towards her – she was perfect, she was evil. She told me she could cope with that – she lied.

“In this tug of war you’ll always win
Even when I’m right.”

In the end, it wasn’t the ‘push’ that pushed her away, it was the ‘pull’. I killed her with kindness. I sent her so many friendly, caring, overly affectionate messages, so many messages asking her to visit and talking about all the things we would do when she did – that she felt pressured, persecuted and manipulated. The longer she stayed silent, the more persistent I became. I can’t deny that somewhere deep inside I knew where this was going; that part of me was steering the ship towards the iceberg that would quicken its sinking. On some level, I’d known for months that this was coming. On many occasions, I had been desperate to cut her out of my life completely; desperate to escape the feelings of powerlessness and dependency that she triggered in me.

“And it’s sick that all these battles
Are what keeps me satisfied.”

This song is about domestic violence. I never laid a finger on her, except to hold her, crying, in my arms. But I felt every inch the abuser; the emotional abuser. I was guilt-ridden and tormented by the thought that the part of me that was addicted to intensity had been feeding off the emotional storm of our relationship. That part of me had been sustained by the energy of the roller-coaster ride, though it turned our lives upside down and made us sick with pain.

“So maybe I’m a masochist
I try to run but I don’t wanna ever leave
‘Til the walls are goin’ up
In smoke with all our memories.”

Thankfully, the waters of our friendship ran too deep even for obsession and BPD to suck them dry. Or maybe we were just lucky that having faced only six months of hell, and both being supported (by this point) by caring therapists, we were able to slowly start to rebuild our friendship and talk about where things had gone wrong. I am no longer attached to her in the same way, and our friendship will never be quite the same again. Maybe that’s a good thing –  but I also think that we will always, to some extent, trigger each other.

The last time I saw her, around four months before we ‘broke up’, we spent a whole day closeted in her flat, engaged in intense and sometimes distressing conversations. On the one hand, seeing her was wonderful. But it was also one of the worst weekends of my life. I was full to the brim of emotions that were there but that I couldn’t connect with, couldn’t feel and couldn’t express. I desperately needed to cry but no tears came. I had an overwhelming desire to self-harm, my frustration levels were through the roof and I felt as though my insides were one massive itch that I could not scratch. By the end of the weekend I wanted to die and it was all I could do to stop myself pulling over on the car journey back home and ringing another friend to tell her that I felt like driving  into the central reservation.

She is coming to visit me this weekend. It will be the first time I have seen her since things went so horribly wrong. The first time in eighteen months.

Wish me luck.