I hate that this (ex-)(boy)friend keeps using me as this vessel of his own vulnerable traits and qualities rather than actually looking at who I am as a human being. I am automatically made smaller in his perception of me, more feminine, more emotional, simultaneously more mentally ill (more anxious/insecure and with more abandonment problems(? That I do not have?)) and less (assuming I am this huge extrovert who doesn't struggle socially at all?) at the same time? We really are so similar as people that I understand that it can be difficult to not feel competitive within that area of overlap (which is huge, admittedly), but he can't even admit to himself that it's envy and self-protection that causes him to mutilate my image in his head to resemble his own insecurities. He's just like, "I personally find it very humiliating, degrading, and emasculating when I am perceived as naive, lonely, clingy, fragile, and irrational, but I see you (socialized female) be better at masking than me (thus representing these traits better when in literal FAWN RESPONSE, as in, when actively being traumatized), and thus I assume you won't also find it humiliating, degrading, and emasculating" - while I've been very open about being a trans man to him the entire time I knew him, even when still closeted on the outside. It's so angering. He himself has this huge fear of abandonment, but he continuously keeps projecting this on me instead because he's insecure about it. He himself is this shy, kind of feminine, nervous young man, and I know he feels deeply ashamed for this, so he wants to create this false binary where at least I am still more of a woman than he is. It's this stripping of my agency, not letting me also be intelligent or rational, and he can pretend this is rational to himself because he has admittedly witnessed a lot of my lowest (where I am fawning severely, and in denial about a lot of my own identity, or actively in a psychotic episode), and he at his best is still more "rational" than that. And it's like, of course you are, you're comparing somebody's worst mental breakdowns to your own most self-assured days. Me having these illnesses does not mean I am not still an individual with good and bad days, too. I also have a range of behavior and moods. And me as I was at eighteen when just exiting an abusive relationship that left me with the very fresh conditioning of how to act/mask (where my ex-partner had very intentionally been convincing me I was nothing more than the mask I put on to minimize abuse - I have a dissociative disorder so I can get quite stuck in false perceptions of myself with more ease than the average person) is not the same as me four years later.
But no, either he feels good about me and sees me as this feminized extrovert, or he sees me as this intimidating dangerous and intentionally cruel person to reason with his own sadness after I reject him for the way he treated me throughout our encounters (which was extremely poorly). It's so painful because, well, obviously it is, but also because I know how intelligent this guy is and how empathetic he can be when he chooses not to be selfish. But yeah, no, he's now starting to attempt communication again after FINALLY (after TWO FUCKING YEARS) realizing he mistreated me, but now it turns out he's warped his idea of me in his mind so badly I'm starting to think I'll never have my best friend back again. (I, maybe too kindly, am giving him a bit of grace because of the cocktail of mental disorders he himself deals with, because yeah, this is just his BPD benefiting from common misogyny - I know what he's doing because it's exactly what I find myself doing with people who are abusive to me, that pattern of idealizing and devaluing, but I'm not his abuser, so his unwillingness to see me where I actually am is just romanticized indifference, which is also exactly what masculine partners are allowed to get away with doing to their "feminine" partners (I'm not even the feminine partner so holy fucking shit but you get my point)) (at some point his idea of me (while in our Bad Situationship (different from it initially going great)) was so incredibly warped (not even as described here, he just thought I was intentionally manipulating him and laughing at his insecurities and everything) that I initially gave him the benefit of the doubt and guessed he might also be in psychosis but just with paranoid delusions, because he was also seemingly isolating etc and there were just these weird jumps in his thought pattern - and while I still think this may have been the case, it's also becoming evident to me so much more now that he just has BPD, not just from this, but overall) (I just wish he had the same grace for me without trying to make me into some kind of horrible fucked up villain the moment he doesn't entirely understand why I'm angry about something that doesn't involve him?) (Also no I can't fix him he'll have to do that himself I'm just subjected to my own automatic analysis and am reacting emotionally)
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Hellfire
