Life doesn’t stop for your problems. Life doesn’t even slow down. You’re on the highway of life, barreling down the road at 100 miles an hour and when a bipolar episode hits …. it’s like wham! Crashing into the guardrail at full speed, without a seat belt on.

But instead of shattering glass and the sound of crunching metal, the sounds you hear are your friendships falling apart, your career disintegrating and your life falling down around you. If you’re really really lucky, the one thing you don’t lose is your understanding girlfriend. Because she’s the one and only thing you were able to get the seatbelt around right before you crashed.

I keep getting emails from other lesbians who are in relationships with women who have depression or BPD, or they have it themselves. They keep asking me how I deal with it? How does Remi deal with it? What’s my advice?

I’m no expert. I’m just like them. Stumbling through life with BPD trying to make the best of it on the days I can, and trying not to do anything irreversible on the days I can’t.

I’ve been congratulated for coming out publicly about my BPD. Which is nice and all, but it was either that or just let  the world keep thinking I’m a flake. Which I am, but there’s a reason for it. A lot of people with BPD also have a few other issues to deal with: some may be diagnosed as Borderline, or OCD, or ADD …. you get the idea. Myself? Well for whatever reason I tend to be a bit agoraphobic. I get into these funks where I can’t leave my house for weeks at a time. Which as you can imagine has a negative effect on my social life.

One of the hardest aspects of this whole thing, is maintaining friendships. Because seriously, who would want to be friends with a girl who can’t even go out and get the mail sometimes? It’s not that I don’t want to go out. It’s that when I get to the door, an overwhelming sense of panic and paranoia come up and I feel like I’m going to die. Most of the time, simply making plans about going out will have the same affect. I know, loads of fun. And just for added kicks and giggles, this anxiety extends to talking on the phone. I hate it. I don’t even like talking to Remi on the phone. I’ll text till my fingers fall off, but I absolutely abhor talking on the phone.

Thank God I’m not always like this. But when I’m not, I try to make up for all the lost time. I go out A LOT. Party A LOT. Work out A LOT. Shop A LOT. Socialize A LOT. Have sex A LOT. Life in a manic or hypo-manic stage can be awesome. (Not counting the aftermath.) But it never lasts, and it definitely doesn’t last long enough.

When that high fades, I do to. I fade out of sight and withdraw from the outside world. Completely.

It’s not hard to imagine that friendships have been tested over that. But that’s also why the friends that I do have, I would do anything for and have.

Because of a recent comment from someone that said, “I do know how hard this friend of yours has tried and how much effort she has put into your friendship. Which, though I don’t know you THAT well, I do know that is quite the task and takes a lot of effort with someone like yourself.”

Someone like yourself. I hate to admit it, but that sentence reverberated with me to the bone and kept replaying itself in my head for the next few days. Somehow, all my insecurities and self-loathing over BPD was confirmed in that one sentence. What I heard, was that all those times I’ve thought that I wasn’t worth the air I breathe, or that I was nothing more then a burden to my girlfriend or my family, or that I was a bad person because I couldn’t control this thing and it controlled me … that all those things were the truth.

But then, one of my best friends in the world left a comment and reminded me that I have some true blue friends, and that those relationships have been tested by time and hardships and survived. I had to really think about it for a minute: I have friendships that have lasted 20 years! Besides showing my age, that also shows that I can’t be that crappy of a person to be able to maintain a friendship that long. I’m the godmother of my friend, Nate’s baby because we’ve been through so much together in the 13 years we’ve been friends, he knows that he can trust me with his daughter’s life.

Yea sure. Maybe I don’t go out every single weekend and drink at some bar, shooting the breeze with a group of friends. Maybe I don’t just “hang out” a lot with my buddies. But that does not make me a bad person, or a bad friend.

I know this blog is a bit scattered, but it’s reflective of my inner workings right now. I keep vacillating between self-condemnation and private pep-talks between me, myself and I.

So I have this to say about friendships: I think that the people/person I am no longer friends with from that previous blog have a lot of requirements for their friends. They need or want them to fit into a certain box and when they don’t then they think there’s no room for them in their life. Which is fine, because everyone is entitled to live their life on their terms.

I however don’t expect anything from my friends, except to be able to trust them. I know we all have complicated lives and I don’t try to make my friend’s lives conform to some pre-fab ideas I have of how they should behave in order to be in my world. Because it’s not MY world. We’re all on this planet together and we’re all trying. In return, the friends I’ve had all my life know that I might not make it to all the parties, but they can trust me with all their secrets and know that I’d let them live with me if they needed to (and have) and that I’ve gone way WAY out of my way to get them out of some pretty sticky situations that would have landed me in jail had I been caught.

So I guess while I may not be the most social friend a girl could have. I am the one they call in the middle of the night when they need help that requires …. er … shall we say ….   thinking outside the box?

I’ve come to realize that there are different kinds of friends. What kind are you? Or what kind do you prefer?

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