Perception

I have a piece of artwork that reads "I am a pilgrim on the edge of my perception. We are travelers on the edge, always at the edge of our perception."

I bought this piece of artwork a couple of months before I met her. What a telling piece of art, foreshadowing what I was about to live through. She hated -- I mean hated -- that piece of artwork. I found that piece of artwork (and the Believe sign that I got her) in the garbage, out in the garage, anywhere that she didn't have to see it. She thought that was me screwing with her and other females, trying to take advantage of them through changing their perception. Or something like that.

I just thought it was a neat concept and a neat piece of art.

The BPD knows that their perception of the world is different from everyone else's. They know it intimately, and they *try* to make you think that they see things similarly. They slip too many times, though, telling you things like, "I knew that I was into you because if I found that he (the old boyfriend who she has a restraining order against) was living with someone else and I wasn't with you, I would have freaked out."

Really? If I had to have a restraining order against someone because I feared for my *life,* and if the things I say about this person (they were a narcissist, they regularly lied and screwed with me, etc.) were true, I would pray that they were with someone else.

I think normally though. My perception of the world is not so self-centered that I cannot understand the dynamics of a normal, healthy, functional relationship. I understand how things are supposed to work. I may not have had much normalcy, but I'm working on it :).

The BPD only can focus on themselves. After they have split and made their partner the evil one, they are still so controlling that they cannot wish their partner well, as a normal relationship does. They will attempt to destroy the partner, as that person is the reason for their misery. They try to project their misery, their emptiness onto the partner, then destroy them at all costs.

I have heard stories of BPDs, years after a relationship has terminated, accusing their partner of stalking them when they were hundreds of miles away. Many BPDs will file false police reports and ultimately get themselves into trouble.

They need the drama and will do whatever to make drama. She accused me of tampering with her computer network at one point, illegally checking her email, and other things that I can't even remember. One was send her a text message at 3:12 in an attempt to screw with her as her daughter gets off the bus at 3:20 (this was the best one ever - I'd call her at 3 every day because we'd talk at lunch - somehow, 3:00 became the regular time I called. That was, in some way, an attempt to screw with her -- true BPD paranoia). This is months after we had spoken for the last time, and was all done via email and text message.

I wonder what my motivation would be. Just to screw with her? To find out information that I would make me sad?

The BPDs perception is all about them. They do not think how these actions which they accuse the partner would impact the partner if they actually did them. In the end, such senseless accusations are yet another attempt to get attention, primarily from her family, but from anyone else who will provide it.

The thing that makes me the most sad is that while she was thinking all these bad things, I was living life on Cloud 9, thinking that I was truly in love and that life was great. Meanwhile, every day, she was splitting and making me into some evil person that was out to get her, screw with her, cheat on her, and the like. When she talked about her old boyfriend, she never said anything good about him. He was just there to lie to her, screw with her and take advantage of her. Now I'm the same person, and I tried so hard to make every day special, keep things on an even keel.

Unfortunately, the Nons live a life that's an illusion. The BPD is good at making the Non's life blissful until they give the Non their misery in slow doses. We think that this was the life we always wanted (I said that many times), but the BPD has an entirely different perception going on in their head. Looking back, she gave it to me from the beginning, but I was so confident that I would just excuse it.

As a Non, we settle in because we think life is just wonderful, but then things begin to change on a daily basis. At first, the good outweighs the bad, then slowly, the scales tip back. Now we're completely enmeshed and unable to break the chains easily.

Looking back, it was a learning experience. I know what I will -- and will not -- accept out of life. I know that relationships take time to develop and are built on trust -- without it, no (and I mean NO) relationship exists. I will not fall into the traps that I fell into again, I will have healthy boundaries with my partner, and I will not tolerate large levels of dysfunction that negatively impact my children or career. There are other important things in life, like Me.

When looking for a partner, make sure that you have similar perceptions. I know that Men are From Mars and Women are from Venus, but you need to view the world the same way and understand similar experiences. It takes time to develop this understanding of another person; I gave this understanding blindly and assumed that we saw things similarly. Wrong.

Our perception is everything.