Favorite Person

I don't think that I have BPD. Brittyn has BPD and so does Aaliyah. I see some similarities between us, but overall I think the symptoms of my affliction aren't quite a match with theirs. Overlap is not grounds for diagnosis. One thing that makes me think I have BPD is the "favorite person" or "FP" that becomes the object of someone with BPD's obsessions. I'm not sure what the line between having feelings for someone and have a Favorite Person is. I don't often like people very much. That's not to say that I don't like anyone. I like people. I like almost everyone. I wasn't allowed not to like people growing up, so I've trained my mind to be able to find common ground and surface level connection with most people. However, I rarely like people. There are rarely people who I struggle to move on from. That I feel a need for. When I do like someone though, it is devastating for me. It is uncontrollable and inconvenient. I imagine of them, I default to them, and I will do anything to rid myself of them. I told this all to my therapist for the millionth time and she said, as she always does, that I simply fell in love with these people. I struggle to cope with that though. How can people enjoy love the way they claim to if it feels like that? Like some sort of ambush. I want my therapist to say that I have BPD, or that I'm crazy and that those were just my FP's. That would be much easier than admitting that I'm just weird. I wonder what bell hooks would think of it.

I spoke to Richard Lewis for a long time on Wednesday morning while I sat outside of the Lackawanna on Grove St on the picnic bench. We talked of his girlfriend. A lovely woman that had broken up with him for a year or so and reached back out. How their relationship is progressing. It's going well despite a few obstacles. The most intricate obstacle seemingly being Richard's rich collection of friends or all genders and orientation. A few of which, including myself, he has shared a form or two of physical intimacy with. I, an ex boyfriend befriender and first date reconfigurer, empathized with him. His girlfriend has been a skeptic. Ranger shares the same perspective as Richard's girlfriend. He doesn't trust it and he doesn't see a reason to continue any sort of relationship with someone that you were once intimate or romantic with. I don't know if that's exactly how Richard's girlfriend feels for I do not know her. However, I gathered that she and Ranger share similar sentiments. They just don't yet know how to transmute love. Love rarely dies, it more often transmutes. It adapts to fit the needs of the pairs who share in it. This made me think of Kaleb and how I ran into him recently. All of the past frustrations and furies between us had long left our souls, so upon meeting on the sidewalk we had nothing but the purity of the connection we no longer desire to deepen, but will always share. The love that bonded us had changed. It was no longer rabid and ravenous. Now aged and stored in a stable environment, it was mellow and understanding. Especially understanding of the fact that our romantic relationship had run it's course. The lessons we were meant to learn from each other had been learned and applied. The universe now allows us exist as respectful neighbors and perhaps one day good friends. I invited him to spend time with me and Ranger, but he declined. Ranger was very angry with me about this. He couldn't understand why it was so important to me to be friendly with Kaleb. I couldn't quite find the words to explain it when we spoke, but I now know that it's important to me because I want to continue to grow. To be held accountable by people who have seen evert iteration of me. The worst and the best. Who better than Kaleb, Ahil, or William to provide me advice? To be a voice of reason in aid of the poor man that loves me romantically now.

Richard Lewis and I spoke of great love and it's significance to us as people who struggle to maintain desire to stay alive. I wasn't always so obsessed with Love. I was once obsessed with the macabre. I was obsessed with the macabre until I swallowed a bottle of pills and awoke to an electricity coarsing through my body in the back of an ambulance. Of course, they locked me up for a week that time. I tried to escape the first night. I bit the big oaf on guard. They tranquilized me. I am grateful that they did it. Sedated, I was forced to understand the root of my anguish; knowing that life ends and not understanding why it must me lived. From there, I studied, I did meditation, reiki, and sensory deprivation. I admitted myself to psych as many times as it took for me to have the space and environment to process life and what we are living it for. It took me 8 months of this to realize that people are living in pursuit of love. The most powerful energy exchange. Thus spawned my obsession. For a year and 10 months I researched love and all its iterations. I had the privilege to do that. A loving grandmother that loved me as much as I loved her. We needed each other to find out way through my grandfather's death. Through her I studied love. I came to understand exactly why God wants us to wait for marriage and to devote ourselves to loving our naseeb. What can come of a true love unburdened by worldly pains from participating in haram love. Through it was too late for me to know it, I understood why from her. I volunteered to barista at my favorite local cafe 4 nights a week. In doing so, I came to understand the complicated love between friends of the opposite sex. I made so many unlikely friends and watched so many navigate unrequited romantic urges for others, sometimes even towards myself. I came to understand that romantic feelings are often just chemical, animalistic urges that can easily be controlled if you know yourself very well and value the people around you. I even came to understand the way love transmutes as my friends that dated fell out of romantic infatuation while maintaining their friendly love. All while in an act of love, I served them for free to keep the space that housed our friendships alive. Richard was there at times, though he was in Tallahassee most of it.

I've rambled now, in this entry. I won't delete it because it is not without truth, but I find it perhaps useful to form a conclusion. The spirit of MLA formatting lives in me. What I've arrived at is that my therapist is perhaps correct. These people I feel I'm obsessing over are simply people I've loved and still love. I am not obsessed with them, but obsessed with love. I am obsessed with understanding the kind of love that I feel for them. I am obsessed with explaining it away because I know that spiritual concepts like invisible string, naseeb, twin flames, soul mates etc sound crazy. Perhaps though in the words of the disgraced Kanye West "the truth sounds crazy in a world full of lies". I do not support Kanye West, but I do agree that the truth sounds crazy in a world full of lies.