5/6/24

"What're your red flags? Are you like...toxic?" he asks me, even on the phone I can feel a hint of a sly smirk spreading across his thin lips. I can tell there's a correct answer, and I want to give him that. However, I am also astutely aware of the thin grey line I have to balance on. While I can't admit that I would thoroughly consider murder as a viable response to him looking at someone else, I can tell in his tone that the mature answer isn't what he's looking for either. 

"I mean I can get possessive" I respond after a breath, "but I try to keep my toxic tendencies under wraps". I was satisfied with that response, and for the time being, he was too. A slight hint at the thinly veiled "crazy" so many men think they want, but still keeping in enough that I don't scare him away. "Yeah that's good, but I like when boys are a little mean". He says it like he's challenging me. As if he doesn't believe I'm capable, and he wants to see how much he can push me to bring it out quicker. 

"I'm mean," I say, almost defensively. As much as I enjoy being nice, and being perceived as such, I know there is significantly more to me than "nice", and I find myself feeling almost insulted that that entire other part of me is not being acknowledged. Instead of explaining that, I continue "I just want you to like me. I want to be nice to you".

He doesn't respond for another 10 minutes, about 9 minutes after his little text bubble indicating typing had disappeared, about 30 seconds after I sent the text. Why did I say that? I should've just said something mean, put on a little bit of an act, given him what he wanted. But I don't work that way. I meant what I said, I didn't want to be mean to him. If I like someone I want to show them the side of me I like the most, the side of me I want them to like before they have to endure everything else. The "mean" in me doesn't come out in the way that people who like "mean boys" want it to, especially through text. I tease, sure. My friends and family know better than anyone that a majority of the closeness I express to them is expressed by really testing my limits with how much they can put up with me before the immature jokes and jabs become annoying nuisances. But that part of me is something hard to attain, both for people getting to know and for me knowing my limits with each person. 

For the remainder of our time together I ignore his comments about desiring a little bullying every now and again. While I am capable, and on the phone such bickering back and forth is much easier for me to get in touch with, I decided, for my own health, I should continue on with the side of me that makes him call me "sweet". With the way it was going, I would much rather him look back at our conversations and wonder what it was about me he didn't like, rather than having material to pick from to blame some of the fallout on me. Inevitably things got out of my control faster than I thought they would, and the thought processes I had been utilizing to attempt to keep myself grounded in a romantic situation that was already driving me crazy were soon long lost when calling me "sweet" was no longer something of interest to him. 

By the time 3, 4, 5, and 6 hours could go by before I heard from him again in between texts, I had, for lack of better terminology, completely lost my mind. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about him, what was he up to, why did everything changed, had I said something, did he do something, was this redeemable? Why wouldn't he just explain his loss of interest instead of making me feel like this? Was it something I had done before that I could've avoided? Maybe I'm not new enough anymore, I should change my look. Take out my piercings. Dye my hair. Hit the gym hard. Get my life together. Act like he never even existed and I can ghost him out of my memories just as easily as he did. Act like I'm thriving. Act like I have not a single care or worry in the world. I'm perfect. I'm better. I was the one who was bored and using him, he asked for my number, asked to call me, he said I was special, but I never said the same. I just need to save face now. God, that was all so embarrassing. 

Men long for the profane. For the same reason that porn is the snuff film-adjacent exploitation and glorification of violence against women and their bodies that it has been for decades, on a person-to-person level men go a step further and exploit and glorify the mental well-being of the people their interested in. For the past few years, a concerning growth in verbally expressed desire in people with genuine mental health problems has consumed the mindsets of far too many men, primarily the ones who consider themselves feminists. This discourse has become some of the most prominent with terrible, awful, insufferable men explaining their type in women and men, and has completely undone the previously laid path of normalizing the struggles and hardships that those with serious issues experience on a daily basis. 

I remember being 17 when this genre of relationship first entered my center of attention, thinking to myself how wonderful it is for people like me that men like that exist. Finally, people see the issues arising in my head no longer as a roadblock, but as an element of relatability, something for them to see in me and understand right off the bat where I'm coming from. An important note to make is that when I thought this, I had been on a single date in my entire life, and had very little real-life interaction with men, especially men interest in me, at all. However, the reality of this rhetoric is much sadder than I could've realized then, and even sadder than I thought it could be when I first started putting pieces together. 

The "BPD Baddie" first became a thing around 2020, when mental health was close to all we talked about for a good few months. Everyone was so depressed, and furthermore, so isolated, all we had to do was think and feel and share those thoughts and feelings with as many people as we could for some semblance of social interaction. Though this inhibited people such as myself from healing in a lot of ways, and finally attaining some sense of understanding toward why I processed things in the ways that I did, there is always room for plenty of negative results from this kind of discourse occurring almost exclusively on social media. For every person who realized they weren't alone in their feelings, there were five people who saw what people were expressing about themselves and decided they also wanted to feel that way. DID become something every one in five 14-year-olds struggled with, OCD was more common than a cold, and BPD was what you had when you acted a little jealous from time to time. Mental health became competitive, an object of pride, and in worse scenarios, an excuse to act however you wanted to. The symptoms of one struggle became confused with another, and for a time, it seemed like people forgot what having a perfectly healthy brain felt like, diagnosing themselves with some of the most serious issues because they liked having their desk organized in a specific way and cried a little harder than usual last week. Nothing became something, and something became something less oppressive when every Tom, Dick, and Dan had it now, seemingly with zero symptoms or signs appearing prior to the TikTok on what Bipolar is that they just finished watching. 

With the lines blurred, and "crazy" becoming something you call yourself when your friend takes a photo of you with a bag of frozen peas on your head at the grocery store rather than an insult someone calls you when you cry so hard you throw up on your bedroom floor because your skin feels too loose, serious issues became much less serious and gave plentiful room to those too daft to understand the reality of a situation. Men began expressing their growing interest in those less mentally stable than others but at a very surface level. Whereas a man who truly loves someone with BPD would love them and learn to cooperate and work with the mood swings and irrationality of some behaviors, these men relied more on a verbal expression of mental instability. It was the mask of someone who would go crazy without them, the reassurance that all the man had to do to keep his partner happy in their relationship was show up, it was a feeling of empowerment. 

In more instances than one, a woman's well-thought-out, rational opposition to a man's behavior has been summarized in locker-room talk as "yeah my ex was fucking crazy". In a scenario in which a woman's self-diagnosed, and even medically diagnosed - well get to that I swear - "crazyness" is the sum of their relationship, the man can essentially do no wrong. Whereas in a normal relationship, void of the exploitation of mental illness, a man can cry "crazy ex" to be met with some questions on the plausibility of such a claim, if his ex told him and others she or he was "literally like bipolar" it removes the question marks and gives way to the crazy one being the only one capable of being at fault. Consider it a male-manipulator safety net. However, in their search for their next victim, a man might stumble upon someone with an actual illness that impairs their judgment in ways even worse than being "a little possessive". For as many times as a man will attempt to persuade the masses to believe his passion for men and women with a few screws loose, the reality of interacting with one in the manner that these men do is something they will never be prepared for. 

BPD is something bigger than a compulsive glance through his following or the inability to not check for new texts. For more than some, BPD is something that changes your perspective of yourself and the world around you on a daily basis if not hourly. The way I talk about it, it separates my brain. There is a part of me that thinks rationally, understands what is right and wrong to say, appropriate and inappropriate ways of thinking, and acting, and knows when my brain is trying to do the opposite. The other part of me is irrational, often angry, hurt, sad, frustrated by others' inability to function in a way someone in possession of decorum and class would function, and persuades most thoughts on the other side of my brain; that's how the irrational thoughts slip through. And with that, every thought, action, and feeling I possess is enforced, ridiculed, questioned, promoted, and acted on accordingly. It's caring about something I don't care about, it's acting on things I don't want to. I won't track your phone -all the time- or go to your house when you don't answer. It's so much more than that.

That is the harm this rhetoric creates. Men hurt it by making it something sexual, something to take pride in and own, but it's always their pride, never the one with actual issues. Other people hurt it by creating spaces in which those with actual problems feel the need to specify as such. Yes, I'm crazy, but not in a cute way. Not in the way that will make you feel like a provider, someone necessary and needed, but in a way that will enforce the need for you to tell me I'm too much, that I didn't do anything wrong but you're just not for me, that you just can't take the pressure of someone being that serious about you, despite me acting tame compared to the behavior you said was all you wanted in a relationship. Conversations I've had to have before that didn't even really assist me in the end as much as I'd hoped they would. 

The desire for a "BPD Baddie" benefits nobody. As much as I would love to love and be loved by someone who claims that mindset, that mindset in reality shouldn't and doesn't exist. Mental health, and BPD specifically, isn't a glamorous issue to have on any account. Claiming it based on poor summarizations of it only contributes more harm to those with it, and creates space for people to begin making it something it never was. BPD is something that takes care, and time, and patience. It takes communication and a good amount of understanding from all parties. I will be the first person to say I wish more than anything that someone who says they want that actually meant it, that my eccentrics and enthusiasm was a desirable quality. It isn't. It hurts. And existing in spaces that seem to do anything but understand that is why I feel the way I do about romance and love in general. It's a border that is uncrossable. A cycle that I don't fully understand how to break free from. And a pattern that can only be broken by taking the time to know yourself, your friends, your family, and the world around you, and the way in which how you express yourself affects things on a larger scale than just the individual.