“You’ve been through a lot of pain. And it’s hard to trust anyone, hard to believe that anyone could care because you’ve always hated yourself. On one level, you’ve wanted people to believe your tough facade. But on a deeper level, you’ve wished that someone would be able to get past it, to get inside you and listen to your heart. But you’ve been afraid that no one in the world would understand – or worse, that you would drive them away.

 

“Life is really hard for you because you wish you could have been born male. You see males as tough and strong. And you put on a great façade of a male.  You walk the walk and talk the talk. But deepest within you, you know that you aren’t male. You are female, which you see as weak, manipulative, and worthless. No matter how hard you try to mask it, you cannot change the reality of your gender. So you stay in this trap of putting forth a charade, feeling hypocritical, while inside you secretly seethe in anger and bask in shame because you are unequivocally female. Deeply vulnerable and hurting within as you act tough outside. You do need people; you need them so much so that it scares you to death. You drive them away so they don’t get too close; yet you regret it every time you do.

 

“You claim you don’t want anyone to understand you. But you do. You want it very much. It’s just that you don’t believe that it is possible for anyone to understand, and you cannot bear to be let down again.”

 

Damn. Some people really have a way with words. That little blurb there describes the core of so many of my problems I’m pretty awestruck. I think I am past the initial hump of self awareness about these problems but still have a long way to go at solving them; at learning how to get past them and move forward.

 

For example, “On one level, you’ve wanted people to believe your tough facade. But on a deeper level, you’ve wished that someone would be able to get past it, to get inside you and listen to your heart.”

 

He’s right that on one level I want people to believe in the façade that I have my shit figured out and am a healthy person now. I already know that much, as well as already knowing that I’m not as put together as I present myself to be on the outside. Plus, I also already know that on a deeper level, as the doctor in the book suggests, that hell yes I DO wish that someone could get past my polished exterior, get inside me, listen to my heart, AND NOT RUN AWAY when they do.

 

“But you’ve been afraid that no one in the world would understand – or worse, that you would drive them away.”

 

Totally, 100%, without any doubts that is exactly how I feel. So much so that simply reading that one sentence brings me to tears. I just want the freedom to be me and be accepted for who I am: messy, hurt, emotionally chaotic, confused me. I already know this, but simply knowing it has not taken away the primal fear festering inside me of never being loved and accepted for who I really am. I spend hours and hours thinking and writing about this stuff, trying to learn how to love and accept MYSELF, but all of that sometimes feels like just a mask because when shit hits the fan I seem to fly right back into a raging torrent of feeling abandoned and alone.

 

Moving on to the next paragraph of that quote gets a little messy for me because I AM a male, although somehow that doctor’s words still hit home with me. While I am definitely male and have a lot of masculine qualities my feminine qualities are also enormously strong, yet I’ve had to hide those qualities all my life because I’ve been so judged and outcast because of them. Sure, I can put on the mask of being a strong man that is in control of his feelings and not easily hurt. The problem is, that mask feels totally wrong and really DOES cause tremendous internal conflict for me. “Deeply vulnerable and hurting within as you act tough outside” describes me pretty damn well. I DO get hurt very easily. I really AM very vulnerable. I’m just not allowed to show these things without being judged as weak and inferior, especially for the first 25 years of my life. So, I learned to hide these things from everyone, including from myself.

 

“It’s just that you don’t believe that it is possible for anyone to understand, and you cannot bear to be let down again.”

 

This one is hard for me to even think about right now, let alone write openly about. Over this past week I’ve realized that a wound which that I thought was starting to heal is actually still gushing blood. It ties in with “But you’ve been afraid that no one in the world would understand – or worse, that you would drive them away.” I think I’ve talked about this before in my blog so I’ll just briefly mention it here – I totally opened up to my fiancée of two years shortly after I was diagnosed Borderline, removed all remaining masks that I had been hiding behind, allowed her to have a one-on-one session with my therapist, and she left me that same day because of it. Revealing my true self to her scared her so badly she ran away as fast as she could and I’ve never seen her again. So yeah, the words “you cannot bear to be let down again” most certainly hit home for me, in a very big way.

 

Okay, time to go back to reading some more. This book is such awesome therapy for me…