Went over to mom’s yesterday to take her to the bank. While there, I noticed there was a book on the dining room table, ‘I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me’. The tagline or subtitle was ’Understanding the Borderline Personality.’ 

Now there are 7 people living at mom’s house: Mom, my Aunt, my sister C, my sister’s daughter- JL, and JL’s three kids (ages 6, 5, and 1) 

Neither my mom or aunt would be reading that book, and I’m not sure my niece JL reads anything beyond her text messages. But my sister, who has a PhD somewhere in child development and psychology field, would definitely read something like this. 

I had never heard of Borderline Personality Disorder so, like everyone else these days who needs to know anything, I googled it and then went straight to wikipedia.  

The page there starts off: Borderline personality disorder, also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder…. 

Well, I didn’t have to read too much more than that to figure it sounds like my sister. The good thing, for me, is that it tells me she is at least aware that she has a problem. I assumed she thought she was completely reasonable, and all the rest of us were nuts. And yeah, she’s been at odds with nearly EVERYone she’s around for any amount of time.  

While she gets extremely upset with mom or I if she thinks we are saying anything about her to each other or someone else, she freely disparages us to other family members. I’ve personally heard from another aunt, and several cousins, that she has bent their ears badmouthing us. I’ve had my oldest niece contact me on facebook and apologize for her about stuff that’s happened… and I didn’t even say anything to my niece! The only way my niece would have known was if my sister was talking, and my niece had enough sense to understand what was going on and reject it. 

I try not to worry about it, but I take some comfort in knowing that other people who hear from her exhibit enough discernment to know my sister is off.  

I mean, I’ve personally lived long enough to know there are different sides to stories, and when someone from, say church, tells me a one-sided tale of wrong-doing, that there’s undoubtedly another side too, and not to take the one side as the gospel-truth without hearing from the other. Since I can do that, I assume others can too, and thankfully enough, it seems like most in the family and friend set that my sister and I share, know enough to take my sister’s stories with a grain of salt. 

So despite her hatred of me sharing anything, she freely reaches out to others looking for confirmation. 

And while C is clearly intelligent, in the sense that she has the ability to mentally manipulate concepts, she is often misled in what information she accepts as fact. 

I’ll give a few examples: 

Back in early 2020, as my dad was progressively getting sicker, there was one day when my sisters and I were texting about a clean-up day we were going to do. C said she was tired and just wanted to sleep. So I texted a simple: “Go for it.” 

Next day I was alerted that she was very angry with me. So I went in to find out what was going on, and was told that “I wrote it sarcastically!” When I tried to assure her that I did no such thing, she told me I had no business telling her how she feels! Which was ironic, since she was apparently able to tell me how I felt when I texted, but that’s just the kind of inexplicable interpretation that can set her off. 

She took that information, misinterpreted it based on her own ill-feelings towards me, and then ran with it from there. 

Another example was a few years ago she decided she would study italian. She knows spanish fairly well already. She would ask me some things, and at some point, she said she couldn’t understand all the different definite articles. Since she knew spanish, and was familiar with different versions of definite articles, I asked her: What’s the problem? She erupted and told me I was making fun of her and how dare I, etc. I’ll grant that it’s possible to read that text as demeaning, but there’s no real reason to do so unless you have bad-faith in the person. 

My favorite interaction was back on my birthday in 2020. We were on vacation in Wyoming visiting my wife’s cousin, when I get a string of texts out of the blue: 

“I have no idea  where you’re going for your bday/anniversary trip, but stay the heck away from Minnesota and A!!!!!” 
“She’s doing well and rebuilding her life and has NO NEED to hear from YOU!!!!! ” 
“How could you?!?!?!” 
“She’s younger than (C’s kids) for heaven’s sakes!!!!!!!!” 

That was out of the blue. I was just minding my own business, no interaction with C, on vacation with my wife, and she spews that on my birthday. I didn’t bother responding.  

She is intelligent, but she doesn’t have much wisdom with the information she gets. She is too blinded by her personal hatreds. 

Now, on the other hand, when she’s not mad at you, she’s a likeable enough person. She can be kind and caring, she is genuinely interested in people, she has a good sense of humor and can be easy to laugh with… she’s not a totally bad person. I get the brunt of it because she seems me through S*** colored glasses, but I don’t want to give the impression she’s all bad. If you were to run across her in daily life, she’d be fine.  

Even if some of her friends and family don’t think well of me because they believe her side, that’s ok too. I’m not always a great person and to be honest, I’m sure I wouldn’t like me for some of the stuff. And that’s not the half of it… if they knew my thought life, I’d probably be sentenced to death right now. 

So I don’t fault anyone for friendship with her, or listening to her, etc. And I always feel like, if one of her friends/family does hold something against me based on her testimony, then all they’d have to do is talk to me and hopefully they’d see quickly that the story isn’t so one-sided. 

The main point of this post was to say that it looks like she is aware of a problem, and is looking for help. That’s a good thing, and it gives me some hope that maybe it won’t always be this way.