So! There's a really odd thing that I've seen my brain doing a couple of times. I'd like to know if it's a BPD thing or if it correlates with some other brainweird thing or what. Mostly I am posting this because I like the validation of random strangers responding to personal things about me, though. A little background on the weird thing, a separate, afaik normal for BPD thing, and my past feelings on MJ before I show how they all combine disastrously. The weird thing (before MJ) 1. The first time I remember this happening was in the first half of seventh grade (seventh grade was when I got kicked out of the public school system, so the year is split into two halves in my mind). I was pretty bad at picking up on trends because of my lack of friends, but even I saw how many people were talking about the Twilight books. I bought them, read them, and (embarrassingly) liked them. Which is weird, because I didn't swoon over Edward or Jacob, and am in fact asexual. I think I liked the prose. Anyways, something in me decided to pretend to be a vampire from Twilight and see if people would catch on. Like, vampire saliva is venomous, so when we talked about saliva in Biology, I raised my hand and said "And saliva is acidic in everybody. Some more than others." That second part was meant to imply I had vampire venom. I would refer to myself as "gleaming" and not go into the sun without clothes covering most of my skin when people were watching. I referred to my tendency to always wear long sleeve shirts as much as possible, which was meant to plant the idea that I was covering up vampire sparkle. I would talk about how fast and strong I was and how I enjoyed the taste of blood. Never did I outright say I was a vampire from Twilight. The idea was that everybody would figure it out on their own and be wowed by it. And yeah, I realize this is all super embarrassing. But I am kind of interested in what caused me to do it. 2. In the second half of seventh grade, I gave up on the vampire thing and started dropping hints for something different. The other kids at my private school were supposed to guess that they all lived in a virtual reality, and I was sent from outside to physically hunt down glitches. I was a bit more explicit with my hints this time since nobody got that I was a vampire before. Even more embarrassingly, I would punch and kick at the air to imply that I was totally fighting glitches that only I could see because I came from outside the virtual reality. I would also draw a bunch of Escher-style impossibly objects and talk about things I'd learned from the "list of paradoxes" articles on Wikipedia, because paradoxes caused glitches in my mind. Though I knew I wasn't really a Twilight vampire when I pretended that one, I kind of thought there was a possibility I was in a virtual reality during this one (possibly because I read up on all the arguments for this being the case on my paradoxes and philosophy searches), though I knew I wasn't actually from outside, sent in to fight glitches. The (I think) normal BPD thing Sometimes, a certain concept gets stuck in my mind as the most evil thing ever. Currently it's people who don't like arthropods, which I realize rationally is silly. The earliest one I remember was the color pink. After that came the concept of anarchy. Whenever somebody brings up one of these things, I generally either yell at them, yell in general, run out of the room, or some combination of those things. I don't do it anymore, but sometimes I would ask questions or make statements that naturally led to discussions of anarchy. Who knows why. Maybe I wanted to make sure nobody would ever mentioned it, even if the context demanded it? Maybe on some level I wanted to be provoked? What I thought about Michael Jackson before the brainweirds In sixth grade, I ended up spending a lot of my time with another kid who acted out a lot, though not nearly as much as I did. He told me he really lived in Denver and his parents sent him to a school far away from Denver so he wouldn't have a bunch of inner city kids as his classmates influencing him for the worse. Since he acted out so much, I now think there may have been more to it than that. We shifted from being friends to being enemies a lot. I think I eventually settled on hating him because he made sex jokes and Sex Was Evil, even though I had joked with him in the beginning. Anyways, before him, I had no real idea who MJ was. I confused him for Michael Jordan a lot. When everybody in our class gave presentations on our favorite person, his was Michael Jackson. Since I puzzled over whether I was friends or enemies with this kid a lot, I paid extra attention to some of the stuff he did, and this was no exception. I went into middle school with a vaguely positive idea of the singer from the kid's presentation. During lunch break, I would moonwalk on the basketball court because everybody talked about moonwalking as a really cool thing. Also, a character in the book I was writing at the time had some resemblance to him. Michael Jackson died somewhere near the middle of seventh grade. Everybody was extra sad. Moreso than with any celebrity I had ever heard of. I watched a bit of the funeral stuff, but mom kicked me out when I insulted Jermaine's singing. My parents were not happy when I joked that his death was good, since it probably made that awful [kid's name, who I had decided on "enemies with"] sad. When I went to the private school, I made some actual friends who I hung out with outside of school, which was rare but not unheard of for me. We watched a lot of funny YouTube videos. I noticed that whenever MJ was brought up as part of a joke, everybody laughed extra hard. I noticed that a list of dances in a book I was reading ended with "even moonwalking" and in many other ways, the moonwalk was seen as an extra cool dance. Months after his death, the news was still reporting on him. I remember hearing that when he died, people did CPR on him for eight hours. Clearly, this was a guy who provoked people to react extra to everything he did. This, and all the attention he got, may have influenced things. Where it gets to "what the fuck" territory When I entered high school, the next thing to get furious about was Michael Jackson. He was an evil pedophile and anybody who mentioned him should have been yelled at, as far as I was concerned. As time went on, this grew to encompass anybody who mentioned any of his song titles (including using "beat it" in a way that didn't refer to the song), Jacksonville FL, and anybody who mentioned moonwalking. I would instantly growl, and if the talk continued, I would scream or leave the room. I even told my stepdad that I hoped his brother Michael would be the first one to die, which I know is really horrible. At the same time, I was totally pretending to be Michael Jackson. Or, at least, pretending to be what I would be if I did the same things, if that makes sense. Like, I knew he intentionally made his voice higher, so I intentionally made my voice higher instead of just imitating his voice (this example actually came during a later stage, but it illustrates well what I was doing). I started writing (really bad) songs and talking about them the same way he talked about his songs. Since I heard he proposed to Lisa Marie Presley with "What would you say if I asked you to marry me," I made sure to say "what would you say if I said" in conversation all the time. I wore a [item that could bring this website up if somebody searched for me using it] every day and hoped to make it like MJ's white glove. I talked about how I never wanted to grow up and how much I liked Peter Pan. I read on a website that MJ liked P. T. Barnum, so I read his autobiography and made sure everybody knew I was obsessed with him. I said I wanted to get an arcade and a menagerie when I got older, as an analogue to MJ's zoo and amusement park. I also talked about wanting a giant, weird mansion, but I don't think it was based on pretending to be MJ because I didn't know much about his actual house. I think the mansion thing went more along with how I told everybody I would finish my book and become a super famous author soon. A bunch of my OCs started acting just like him. Mom was encouraged by our therapist to get me out of my MJ hate by flooding, which to her meant holding me down and repeating his name over and over again, in a more mocking tone every time. I got really angry when she did that, because I was really angry whenever his name was mentioned, because I though he was an evil pedophile. I thought there might have been something to the flooding therapy (or else I was just looking for an excuse to know more about MJ; I honestly don't know which is the true motivation), so I loaded a bunch of videos of his songs and interviews during school (I had no internet at home) and watched them at night after my parents had gone to bed. Sometimes I would shut the computer in anger very early, but as time went on, I was more and more able to watch the videos, thought I still hated him. The videos both gave me more to hate and more to pretend. At one point, I simply stopped hating him for a while, the same way I had stopped hating anarchy. I went back to it pretty quickly, though. Around junior year of high school, I stopped again. I still pretended to be him for a while longer, though. This was when I did the high voice thing, which my mom absolutely hated. I had a lot of odd thoughts that made me really happy like "What if my hands were Michael Jackson's hands" or "How would Michael Jackson feel if he was sitting in the car like this?" After I stopped pretending to be him, I obsessively watched every one of his interviews and every documentary about him, read his, his mom's, and Janet's autobiographies, and defended him to anybody who said he was guilty of pedophilia. Anybody know what happened here with my brain? Is this a BPD thing or something else? Does anybody have similar experiences?
Huh, I occasionally made up elaborate backstories and sort of hinted at them to people, I have no idea why. But it was around 7th grade or so. So I dunno, maybe that's a thing, but if it is, I'm pretty sure it's not specific to BPD, because so far as I know I don't have BPD. I think that's... honestly, I mean, I don't think it should be all that embarassing, because that's an age where people are going through a lot of trying-to-find-self stuff, and being weird is not really an unusual tactic for it. The Michael Jackson thing, well, the obvious big thing would be that there's a huge amount of BPD-symptomatic stuff with the splitting. The flooding therapy thing sounds... I dunno, like, I could imagine it being a useful thing but I would think it would be a horribly bad idea to give your mom an excuse to be abusive towards you more, as if she needed one. But taken as a whole, I think this feels a bit like maybe your brain's figured out that splitting isn't working, and is trying to figure out how to simultaneously hold good and bad opinions about someone... by doing massively extreme love and hate simultaneously. Maybe? I don't know, but it's fascinating. I note that to this day I have no idea at all whether Michael Jackson was in fact a pedophile, or just sorta weird, or what. I don't have a way to get the information and I don't need to know because the question of whether it's safe to leave kids alone with him stopped being relevant when he died.
this might come off as ignorant because i don't really know that much about either BPD or HPD but someone i know who's diagnosed with HPD has done similar stuff to this? just the 'make up elaborate stuff for attention' things, if it was for attention that is. i think they fall under the same category in the personality disorder groups though, so it might be that. as for similar things i myself do, i usually did the elaborate backstories thing for other people. i still do sometimes because how can you be absolutely sure everyone else isn't in a secret club without you? that's right, you can't. but i'm more at peace with it then when i was younger.
