It’s totally crazy how long it took me to crawl out of the well. This is the 3rd or 4th time I’ve tried, and I’ll know tomorrow whether or not it’s real. I really should have been journaling this whole time, since it must be doing something useful for how hard it is.
2025 is almost over, and it feels like all of it happened over the course of several brutal weeks, or a day from hell, or something like that. The start of COVID was over 5 years ago, and that’s maybe even more astonishing. I graduated high school 11 years ago, and the intervening time has belonged to someone else, or so it feels.
Sometime in the past year, I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I’m not sure when the condition became relevant in my life, but it might have been always? I’m not sure when I could last rely on myself to be there. On the other hand, somehow I have a Ph.D. in math, and somehow I haven’t totally pushed away my family. I think the mask I’ve built is responsible for both of those things.
Before things got bad at the end of 2024, I hadn’t really doubted the structural integrity of what was there. Maybe in my young years, the persona was constructed with material so strong that it survived all this time under the intense pressure of all that I chose to let after it. Of course, in retrospect, there are moments that are so clearly borderline that a person with more awareness could have seen it.
The game has really changed. Up until now, I had been in the business of curating the quality of the mask. It was good enough when I was like 12, but something like sunk cost, or maybe just habit, kept me at the whetstone. Maybe it was fear about what lurked in the space beyond that which the mask had proved it could handle. In that case, the way forward would have been clear: condition the mask to be able to handle the challenges. Train it over and over to handle everything, including very difficult things like math research. Train it with autistic hyperviligance so complex social groups can be managed.
Instead, the right play is to figure out what’s been hiding beneath the protective layer all this time. I’ve declared it my responsibility as a healing borderline to find out where I am. At the same time, the mask is talking, and it will probably always be the one writing these journals. Honestly, right now I could probably live the rest of a natural life without finding that person, but I want to be able to pay back something to those who love me. I need to discover the parts of myself that are reliably there, so that I can portray those elements and be reliable.
Today was really hard. I chose to let go of the connection I had with some people I care about very deeply. At least I think I did; again, I’ll know tomorrow whether or not it worked this time. And, it’s not crystal clear what I even did. The scope of it is huge, and I can point to things in it that matter more than anything ever has, but I’m not sure how I’m going to change as a result of my choice to let it go. For example, I want to hang on to the parts that are most significant, but I don’t want to let them be festering wounds anymore. I know this choice will come with fading memories, and that terrifies me, since I don’t know if I will learn the lessons it is important for me to learn.
When I listen to the music they made to mourn me, my inner sight goes myopic out of terror. I’ve let myself hear each part deeply, but only once or twice. The impact I had on these people is magnitudes bigger than I thought, and that mistake is what helped me find the borderline personality disorder. Their life becoming much more painful as a result of my self-neglect and naivete can’t be real, but it’s what’s there, so I have to be better to prevent it happening again.
Anyway, I expect these journals to: