Excerpts From The Diary – My Borderline Years
Everyone is always mad me. What the hell is wrong with them? It seems like everything that happens is somehow tied to me, related to me – my fault. I don’t get it. It drives me crazy. How in the world can they seriously be blaming me for everything that’s always going wrong?
Everyone Is Always Mad At Me
Alcohol in the Desert
May 10, 1972
6:48 pm
Tonight the parents had a party. Pity the poor party-goers that aren’t alcoholics. My father is pushing alcohol on everyone like if they don’t drink what he wants them to when he wants them to they aren’t really his friends or something. I’ve seen this odd sense of what my father considers to be the most significant betrayal. It’s so embarrassing to see how people react to this – like they like him but they can’t stand him at the same time.
Big fight at dinner tonight. Dad pulled my hair and knocked me backwards off my chair real suddenly. Usually I least get a sense he’s about to blow. Why did he do that tonight? I am not really sure. All that happened was that my mother served desert. The desert came, though, after the parents had some dinner with their wine. So even the normal crazy of my everyday life and most dinners with the parents gets worse the more they drink. Sitting there like a dart board, already full of holes, my duty and my obligation to this loyalty that my father seems to think he is entitled to without condition and without exception, trying to predict which number he will aim his raging hateful and often violent darts at on any given day or night I am clueless and feel so helpless. I feel as if there is something going on here that I don’t understand or like there’s some information the parents have that I don’t.
Desert was those weird parfait things that my mother has recently began concocting. Some dysfunctional mix of smashed up oreo cookies – minus my favourite half, the half with the cream – jello and God-forsaken creme de mint – alcohol. Between trying to get me to drink wine with them night after night and now the alcohol in the deserts, how desperate are they to get me hooked on alcohol?
I refused to eat the desert as soon as I asked what the hot and weird taste to it was and found out it was alcohol. Again, my father erupted like dynamite thrown into a fire. He was screaming and yelling at me demanding to know what was wrong with me and how it is that "you think you are so much bloody better than us." What? I think somehow that’s a reference to the fact that they drink way too much and I continue to refuse to drink at all. Who pushes alcohol at a 15 year old? How is it that my father sees me as thinking I am better than them because I don’t drink? We play this game of shame ping-pong I think. He has, somewhere inside, shame for how often and how much he drinks. I feel shame for being different. My refusal to drink isn’t just to piss him off or to not be like him. It feels like it matters deeply to me – some part of me that "is" somewhere inside. I’m not sure why.
And again I had to hear how I’d ruined their night. How my not wanting that damn desert was going to put them in bad moods for their party. Like they’ll even remember the desert battle several drinks from now? Like I’ll be on their mind when they are busy getting the attention of others – not. I’ll be the one sitting up half the night thinking about this, feeling about it. I am the one stuck with this crap each and every time. I have no place to put this stuff. It just keeps piling up.
I can’t go along to get along. These people are crazy. Here I am again in my room, hiding, hoping to just be left alone. Hoping they get caught up enough in whatever they get out of these stupid parties to forget about their anger at me. Hoping that the usual anger at me for not being like them or being what or who they want me to be will pass tonight without him bursting into my room and screaming at me some more or hitting me again.
God I am tense. It’s so hard to predict. Will one of them come up here and keep it going or will it wait until tomorrow or the next day? It always does come back up. I can feel my heart pounding. Makes me so angry. It makes me so angry that they are always angry at me. Angry at me for the stupidest things and the weirdest reasons. I don’t know what to do with all that I feel. I feel like screaming but that would only bring my father’s wrath and violence down on my head. I feel like getting them back for how they make me feel. It feels like I hate them.
Doesn’t matter what I do I end up alone and feeling like I am the odd one out and that I don’t belong. The bad seed. The rotten kid. They don’t care about me. They just don’t care about me. They want me to be like them. God, that’s a fate worth than death in my opinion.
In the absence of anyone to talk to I just keep writing this stuff down, day after day, after day, after day. If this diary could talk it would let out the loudest and longest scream – it would be the kind of scream that would be heard around the world and yet for as loud as it would be it would also fall on deaf ears. It’s like people would hear something but not find it significant enough to really notice or pay much attention to.
I feel like I could go sit in the middle of a busy street screaming and no one would notice. No one would care. Cars would just run me over the way that the parents do. The irony of it all is that I must be that invisible. I feel that non-existent.
Part of me wants them to get it. Part of me wants them to care. They NEVER hear me. Part of me has so given up it’s ridiculous. Part of me just wants them to hurt more than I do.
When they party what do I have to look forward to? When it’s over they will violate my space and my mind by barging into my room to let me know that I did something that negatively impacted their night. What they say I did is nuts because I never go downstairs when they have their parties. They do this every time guests leave their party and the party ends. With both the house and each of them stinking like alcohol and cigarette smoke they seek me out like heat-seeking missiles to explode outward on me all that they can’t stand about themselves. I hate them. I hate them for hating me. I hate me for hating them. I am supposed to love them so I am told. Hate.
I hate them for hating the them in me that is all they see.
© A.J. Mahari 1972 – All rights reserved.
I am writing my memoir about my life as a child of borderline parents, a person diagnosed with BPD and my recovery from BPD. You can check on its progress, up-dates, and up-coming excerpts by going to ajmahari.ca
