Bad Lives Still Make Bad Stories

EDIT: 11/12/2023

So the subject of this blog post went through a lot more personal drama that revealed uglier things about themselves, and made my opinion on them a lot worse than what this article portrays. Most importantly, many of the revelations in this blog post might be exaggerated or fictionalized. I’ll still keep this up for old time’s sake, but take what I say with a grain of salt.

ORIGINAL POST 9/10/2023:

Yeah that’s right fuck you Will Toledo

It’s 8pm on a Sunday. I closed my curtains and left my desk lamp as the only light on. I need to get up early for school tomorrow. I haven’t done shit this weekend. I don’t want to see anybody for the next 10 months. What a perfect time to write about some horribly broken people I know/knew.

There was this one girl I knew on the internet. We were in the same discord community, and it took me a long time to even know she was a girl. She hid it on purpose because being a girl on discord is pretty much painting a target on your back for kitten appointments.

She and another…friend? Acquaintance? You never really know on the internet, so I’ll just say “guy I know”, started dating just as I joined the community they were both in. It’s embarrassing to admit, but that couple was one of my first exposures to how romantic relationships worked. I could hear all about what that entailed because the girl had a habit of oversharing, going into emotional breakdowns, deleting the emotional breakdowns, and getting suspended on every social media for slurs. The last one didn’t really contribute to the point I was building up to, which is that she had borderline personality disorder, but I wanted to say it anyway.

Her family life, from what she told, was horrible. Both of her parents were sex workers and drug addicts who barely wanted to have her. Her mom is either schizophrenic or also has BPD, or both, and verbally (physically too maybe I don’t remember anymore) abused her and her little twin sisters. Her dad transitioned when she was a kid, never did shit to help her, and instilled a deep hate for trans people (also transitioning surgery) in her. Before she met her boyfriend on the internet, she was traumatized, depressed, self-harming and basically waiting to die. I would say I was pretty into escapism as a kid, but for her, anime was escapism in the purest form, a temporary refuge from her despairing reality. That’s why she always seemed so much more…intensely into the anime and games she liked, which mostly consisted of 4-koma manga, idol anime and rhythm games — not exactly the cultural zeitgeist. She had a hard time finding anybody interested in the same things as her, including her boyfriend. She always complained about normies, tourists, fake anime fans and so on and so forth.

Despite all of that, she tried to be a good friend. She would hear people out and give out whatever advice she could, and her warped sense of humor made the few times the internet friend group gathered in calls a lot more fun. It’s just that this side of her was rarely there. Much of the time she spent in that discord server (which she left, rejoined, left again at least 7 or 8 times) was spent talking about her horrible situation and how much she couldn’t get out of it, arguing with people, and spamming the chat with idol anime art and depressive messages whenever her boyfriend was busy. On top of that…she had certain things she felt very strongly about. She had overbearing opinions on romance (a girl is a whore when she even expresses platonic affection to a guy who’s not her partner), art (I don’t remember much tbh but she was very eager to argue about that), drugs (let’s just say she wasn’t a fan), and every push back she defended with her own personal experience, which would cause the opposing party to stop inquiring further or express deep sympathy. Despite everyone around her giving her the most patience they could, she always seemed angry at select individuals. We had an artist in our community who was very good, she hated her because “she was a sellout”, but everyone could get she was jealous; she was mad at this other incredibly kind and friendly girl, because the stuff she drew was “ugly” and she “got too close” to a male friend who she enjoyed talking to. It’s safe to say by a certain point, her mental illness and trauma didn’t justify the way she acted anymore, or maybe her BPD should never be the scapegoat in the first place, but that’s a story I have no role nor much interest in disclosing. Maybe she was really just an asshole, I don’t know, because I managed to step around those landmines that caused so many relationships around her to crumble, and kept a normal distance with her, though the credit must not fall onto me — I just happened to be a member of the opposite sex who wasn’t close enough to her boyfriend or talented enough at skills she was trying to hone for her to really have anything to pick on. We kept in contact longer than most, if not all people from that community. No knowing by this point, but I really wonder how much of that was because I genuinely enjoyed her company, and how much of that was a sick enjoyment from watching a trainwreck unfold. In one of our last conversations, she brought up how she thought her only interesting point was the trauma, and she’d rather people pay attention to her disaster of a life than not pay attention to her at all. That might have colored my perception.

She was bullied intensely for her parents’ profession, her weak and childish physique and timid personality. At some point before meeting her boyfriend, she was raped. By a Filipino man, she had specified.

I think she mentioned it once or twice in her own (often very short-lived because she would delete them weekly) discord servers, but the reason I remember this horrible event is from her boyfriend talking about it. At one point we had a small scale server with 6 people in it, and it was nice — it finally resembled something like a real friend group, well, as much as it could. Her boyfriend was a much more private person than her, but that day, he was in a very bad mood. He told me about how much the girl’s recounts of her rape haunted and depressed him, how much pain she was willing to unload to others, and how she could never understand why anyone, even her partner, would feel the pain, as “they didn’t get raped, I did”. It was one of many times their relationship was in jeopardy. In fact, the instability of that relationship caused the girl more pain than her traumas ever did.

I don’t really know the details and I don’t want to, but on top of everything, her previous relationship ended in abandonment and cheating, which, if you know anything about BPD, is an unusually terrible thing. That made her incredibly paranoid of everyone leaving her, which in turn, subconsciously made her act horribly to others, which just confirmed her paranoia even more. Mental illness is fun.

For many reasons outlined above, she was very attached to her boyfriend. Understandably, that level of unhealthy attachment came with many caveats. Whenever her boyfriend acted a little disinterested, or maybe cracked a joke that landed the wrong way, she would remember it for ages and let it torment her for even longer. She would circle around the same destructive thoughts like “He doesn’t love me anymore he’s gonna leave me”, “This always happens I don’t deserved to be loved”, typed out in discord chats for everybody to see. I guess I forgot to mention the server was the boyfriend’s, so he did not take lightly to his private matters being brought to a bunch of friends. Initially, the both of them probably thought the problem would be solved if they saw each other in real life instead of dating long distance across continents, and for a moment, it did seem like that. Until inevitably, when the stay went from 2 weeks to 3 months, and her boyfriend had his own things to do — Youtube videos, more problems piled up. I didn’t want to even hint at the identity of anyone involved here, but this information is crucial.

She hated herself, a lot. I mean, I can relate, but when she talked about how talentless and useless she was, the good-willed folks around her couldn’t really refute it. She didn’t excel academically, the only skill she tried to get good at, that being drawing, she remained consistently at 5th grader level, due to both her mental episodes and a memory deficiency caused by trauma (might be fake but it doesn’t really matter). And since her parents never helped, she never got resources to sort her illnesses out. In order to cope with her mental breakdowns, she resorted to spending most of her money on figures, manga and posters, so she was always one step from being broke. Jumping around both of her parents’ homes all her life, where strangers often came in to do the thing with the sex workers, has made her scared and cooped up inside her room whenever she didn’t work. So, we come back to this again — most of this was purely the product of incredibly unfortunate circumstance. By the age of 19, she hasn’t amassed many marketable skills, through almost no fault of her own.

Compared to her boyfriend, who’s not the most affluent or successful person, but has gained traction on the internet for his well-crafted Youtube videos, through which I discovered him, too, she always felt inferior. He didn’t have any mad level discipline, but if his baseline was already much higher that her best, most stable day, it didn’t matter much. During those 3 months she stayed over, in a foreign environment she disliked (I’ll just reveal it was California — so a lot of weed. She did not like weed), she returned to cooping up in her boyfriend’s room, doing nothing because she couldn’t do anything, turning over the thought that she was a burden to everyone around her every day, and trying to not bother her boyfriend, who she thought would leave her at any second. At least, that’s what she told me. Later, the boyfriend described to me how stressful the 3 months had been for him. She was constantly forcing him to do things together, threatening to break up because he got busy with Youtube, and eventually, despite his channel finally getting into the algorithm after 2 years of hard work, he caved in and stopped uploading for 2 months to spend time with her, his channel never recovering since. “Sometimes I cried in my sleep wondering if she had genuinely ruined my life a bit”, he told me.

That is the thing with borderline personality types. Many of the things they do might come off as manipulative or cold hearted, but in actuality, the heightened emotional turmoil is their reality. When she thinks her partner will abandon her for Youtube because he spent the day editing, she actually thinks this way. I have no doubt all of the things she told me was what she felt, and in a way, that’s even more saddening.

After hearing her perspective, I decided to reach out more. I didn’t see eye to eye with her on a lot, but I resonated with the feeling of being useless. I felt that every day, before I found something I loved, and it was miserable — I didn’t want anybody to go through that. I told her to try to plan out her days a bit more using Google Calendar, I told her to find other stuff to do besides drawing, I told her to keep a diary for reflection, so on and so forth. Eventually, however, the travel visa had expired, and her financial situation back home got a lot worse, promptly sweeping my shallow advice under the rug, and as I would soon come to realize harder than ever, nothing I said ever mattered.

The boyfriend, after 3 long, emotionally draining months, wanted some time alone, which sounded every alarm in her system, and made her call her boyfriend an abuser, a horrible person and a sociopath for several months straight. Combined with her family situation which was somehow getting worse, this was some of the lowest points of her life. She lashed out at people, more than she usually did. She never missed a chance to rain on somebody’s parade, horribly insult people, and defending all of that with her mental illness. She got kicked from the server by her boyfriend several times, which just gave her more ammunition against him. I wasn’t privy to much of their ugly situation until much later, and I don’t think it’s my place to assume details that hasn’t been directly told to me, so I’ll just talk about my experience from here on.

Our last conversation together was in summer this year. By this point, I was still under the impression the boyfriend actually was ignoring and abusing her, just from what she told me. She kept going on about how she feels like she can’t stop him from moving on, and how miserable that made her. After a certain point, I got fed up.

“It’s almost like you can’t live without him,” I said. I told her my honest thoughts I’ve had for a long time. I told her as somebody who hasn’t gone through anything like her life, I thought it was honorable that she was able to make it this far. I said she was a good friend and was fun to hang around. I said I liked the time I spent with her. I said I thought her life had value outside of him, and that even if this relationship doesn’t work out, she should keep on living.

“If not for him, I would have killed myself 2 years ago.”

It’s stupid to get upset over this. I knew it. I mentioned it once in the post already. I knew all about her situation, and she had told this exact thing many times. Her life had no value to her outside of being the partner to this man. But it stung especially hard because everything I said to her came from the heart. I was under the assumption that we’d become good friends after like a year of talking to each other, and that my genuine words would reach her. Too bad for me, her world had been closed long before I, or even the boyfriend came along. She already assumed nobody would ever see any reason to like her or love her, and they’re only playing along because they feel guilt. She only ever talked about her trauma with her boyfriend, too (self-admittedly). When she gave this response, I felt defeated. Ashamed, maybe, of my arrogance. I could never change or help a person — not one so enveloped in their own darkness, that it spread and spread, until everybody left her alone, as she spiralled downwards every day — I haven’t even been able to help myself. I finally understood that I had never truly understood her, and with my life experience, probably never will. There was nothing left I could say to her. I prayed she doesn’t actually kill herself soon, and blocked her on all social media.

I haven’t talked to her since. Some gaps in the story were evidently filled out by the boyfriend later, until just recently, when the relationship finally ended — looks like she knew it was going to happen and found a replacement right after. “I don’t think she cared about me,” he said, “I was just her favorite toy and when I wasn’t doing what she wanted, she got mad at me for it.” The boyfriend, or I guess just my friend now, is taking a break from Youtube to figure out what he wants to do in his life, with her out of the picture. I wish him the best of luck.

In the end, she remained ambiguous to me. She was a person who did utterly detestable things to the people who loved her and she loved, but also a person I could never bring myself to hate. A pitiable person, yet utterly deserving of their isolation. A person I could empathize, but could never figure out. This was a messy story about a messy person, who despite writing a shit ton of words about, I still feel like I haven’t covered even half of. Will Toledo suggested that good lives made bad stories, but as somebody who did witness a car crash of a life, the opposite is not necessarily true. Yes, humans of all kinds are fascinating creatures — you can study one for ages, observe all the jagged edges or the large, gaping wounds, but the story of them always comes out mangled and uneven, without smoothing it over with fiction. It doesn’t have a moral, it doesn’t have a purpose, and it doesn’t really have an end that doesn’t feel arbitrary. I have no empty promises, no galvanizing solutions, but I’ll always keep writing, so that when I come back, she’ll still be here.