A Critical Analysis

Dear Self,

One of your biggest flaws is the fact that you're a coward. You always have been. You detest that weakness in others because you know it's a mirror for your own chicken-shittedness.

In addition to being a coward, you have this nasty habit of having no strength of your own convictions. You allow yourself to be talked into things that are terrible ideas. You go along with shit that you know is detrimental to yourself and, sometimes, others.

This is not a one-time event. This is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout your entire life. Yes, to a very large degree, it's because it's what you were groomed to do. You were raised by a narcissist and an enabler of the narcissist. You learned that the only way you could get through life without being crushed underneath someone else's foot was to just lie down on the floor for them, cover your eyes, and hope for the best.

Because of this, you've attracted the worst of the worst. Unscrupulous people sense that inherent weakness within you and exploit it. Nearly every single relationship you've had in both your child and adult lives--be it with friends, family, lovers, co-workers, everyone--has ended in you being taken advantage of and ultimately betrayed and left worse off than you were to start with. All your efforts to just roll over for people in order to avoid pain and confrontation have ended in just that--pain and confrontation.

You'd think at some point you'd get the goddamn hint. As The Last Psychiatrist says, if you flip a coin to help you make decisions, you'll get it right half the time. If you're currently batting less than .500, it's either time to completely change the way you do things or get a damned coin.

Yes, you got (figuratively) fucked as a child. But it's time to try to get past it. You cannot always live in fear of doing things differently and keep reliving the same toxic situations over and over, only with slightly different characters. If you always cave to the strongest influence on you at any given time, only to turn around and cave in the opposite direction a few miles down the road, you will never, ever, ever develop anything that can be called "character," and you will live at the mercy of someone else for the rest of your life--something you swore to yourself you wouldn't do after you got the hell out of your parents' house.

Do not keep playing out your pathetic psychodramas and bringing hell down on the heads of yourself and the one or two people in your life who ever actually gave a shit about you. You've been in one classic narcissist/borderline relationship after another your entire life.

Most of the time, YOU'RE the borderline, desperately clinging to the narcissist(s) because you want him/her/them to give you an identity. Remember that anyone who will give you an identity is going to saddle you with one that, in your right mind, you wouldn't fucking want in the first place.

On the other hand, you have, much to your chagrin, been the narcissist in the relationship, raining shit down on the couple of people in the world who've ever given a flying fuck about you. You have become your mother, in the ugliest way possible. You pander to people you shouldn't even bother giving the time of day, and you are mean, cruel, and heartless to people you should be the most loving and appreciative toward. Yes, in some ways, it is instinctual for you, having only been exposed to that kind of thing for most of your life with no healthy examples to fill the gap. But now you know better, and it's time to stop. You are no better than your mother if you continue down this road. In fact, you're worse because you realize what you're doing, and she most likely does not.

The thing about being either narcissistic or borderline is that they do not occur in a vacuum. You behave in these ways in relation to other people. With no one else around you, you cannot be either of these things. And that's what truly scares you the most--if you don't play out these ridiculous psychodramas, you have no roadmap whatsoever about how to go about life and living. You think you need these things in order to not be alone, but now you finally see that, ultimately, these stupid crutches that you cling to are EXACTLY what's keeping you crippled in the first place. And, yes, they will see to it that you are alone forever.

You know that now, so throw your poisonous crutches aside and walk on your own two feet. Or crawl if you have to. Hell, lay down and roll. Anything is better than continuing to rely on the demons that only want to consume you from the inside out. This is not just for you but for the people around you as well. Fallout from each and every one of your meltdowns hurts everyone. Not just you, not just the other people involved, but innocent bystanders as well. You know that these things are evil, and you've got a responsibility to at least keep them caged if you can't exorcise them altogether.

And that brings us to your other fatal flaw: You're wishy-washy as hell. This is mostly because of the cowardice and lack of character and backbone you exhibit. You say you should do x when you're in the presence of one person, but then you turn around and say you should do y, which is the exact opposite of x, when you're in the presence of another.

Do something. ANYTHING. It doesn't even matter anymore. Anything is better than being caught in this perpetual cycle of self-doubt, of ruminating, of questioning and never doing anything. You do this because, ultimately, you are afraid of changing, and keeping yourself constantly tied up in some sort of Catch-22 double-bind provides you with plausible deniability to continue spinning your wheels and doing absolutely nothing.

It is not enough to merely define the problem. You have to try to solve it, too.

After nearly two years of being medicated, a year of introspection, and six months of actively isolating yourself from the world to work on your problems, you finally have a fairly objective view of things that you have NEVER had before because your brain was so fucked up. It's easy to hide behind the "I don't know what to do" curtain, but the truth is, you do know. You've always known. You have an excellent sense of what's right and what's wrong; you just hardly ever have the integrity to act upon it.

You do not get to make up the narrative of your life as you go along. You don't get to say, "Well, I know what's right, so that doesn't make me a bad person. I just had my hands tied by such-and-such, and that's why I couldn't do the right thing...." You are the sum of your actions, nothing more and nothing less. If your actions are shitty, then you're a shitty person, regardless of what kind of mental gymnastics you try to perform to convince yourself you aren't.

You can be better than this. You are not forever confined by your past. Your battle with the bipolar demons have shown you that. You can rise above if you try hard enough. You do not have to lie, cheat, manipulate, and two-time your way through life just to keep from getting your head chopped off. There is a better way.

I know that you've made a lot of progress, but at this point, it's mostly been in isolation. And I know that you have remained in isolation because you are afraid that at some point, when the pressure is on, that you will revert to type. But everyone has that fear, and the only thing you can do is face each thing that life throws at you one at a time and do the very best you know how to do each time. Eventually, it will become a habit, and the fear that your dark self will take over will ease because your not-dark self is so much stronger.

What was going to be a short memo has turned into an epic, so I will try to end this quickly. You have taken a lot of steps in the right direction, but it's time to test the person you're becoming, to try it by fire, so that it will become strong and tempered from the flames.

Do what's right. If you're not sure what's right, get a damned coin. If you're lucky, there may be a benevolent God out there who has enough of a hand for parlor tricks to make sure the "right" side of the coin turns up when it needs to.

~Bunny

P.S. Those dreams that are haunting you are trying to tell you something in that strange, confused, and muddled way that dreams have. Listen to them.