Buddha and the Borderline

by Kiera Van Gelder

  So here’s an odd thing about me: I may have no emotional skin and come undone at the smallest interpersonal upset, but I’d make a great bullfighter or firefighter—anything that gets my adrenaline going and focuses me on a physical target. The motorcycle is all of that and more. When I’m on the bike, it feels like a door opens in my chest and the world rushes in, pure, fresh, and sparkling with clarity. It forces me to approach fear with total awareness and to pull reason mind into the moment of intense reactions. The motorcycle is another place to practice the skills, and before long, the other DBT group members are rolling their eyes as I yet again use the homework to describe a riding experience: how countersteering is a form of opposite action and how stop signs can be a place to practice interpersonal effectiveness.

  Taylor is a born teacher. He starts me in a parking lot on a Honda Hawk 650, a sport bike he describes as naked because it’s not covered in plastic. It’s big and heavy, but that doesn’t stop Taylor from pushing me around the parking lot like I’m a second-grader on a tricycle. As soon as I’ve mastered the shifting, he gets on his own bike (another Hawk) and leads me down the street, a real street, at the bottom of which I forget everything I’ve just learned, stall the bike, and go down with four hundred pounds of metal while cars back up behind me. I lie on the ground crying, not from pain, but humiliation. Taylor stands over me with his helmet off, smiling.

  “Okay,” he says, “no biggie. Let’s try again.”

  What?! I may be a trooper, but I have limits, and dumping the bike wearing a heavy, bright yellow moon suit in the middle of the summer heat is a good enough reason to go take a cold shower and watch some TV. I tell him I don’t want to.

  “But this is the only way to learn,” he says, lifting the bike up. “Everyone drops the bike the first time out. There’d be something wrong if you didn’t.”

  This hadn’t occurred to me. In my world, you do things right or not at all. Or you practice for long hours alone in front of the mirror and only emerge once you’ve achieved perfection.

  “The two most important things to remember,” Taylor adds, brushing the tears off my cheek, “are relax, and look ahead.” Relax… And look ahead…

  I climb back on the bike. How do you relax knowing that the slightest fuck-up could cost you your life? And if you look ahead, what about the stuff immediately around you?

  Each day after work Taylor takes me out for practice, and I slowly begin to understand what his advice means. “Relax and look ahead” is his version of wise mind. Relax is the state of mindfulness—awareness of the cars, the bike, the position of your body, the currents of fear and excitement—where you rest, present and with all senses alert. But in order to ride, you must combine this present-moment awareness with reason mind—the moment-to-moment judgments involved in seeing where you want to go and how to get there, making calculations, weighing options, and letting emotions inform your behavior but not control it entirely. The dialectic of emotion mind and reason mind, combined with mindfulness, transforms the Honda Hawk into a wise mind machine. When I get triggered with Taylor, I can’t navigate this internal calculus, but on the motorcycle I discover the place inside myself where I can manage the intensity of my feelings and be fully functional at the same time.

  I continue building my life one piece at a time: Ethan, DBT, work, Taylor, motorcycles, and now sex, another level of exposure. It’s another place to experience emotions, and also a place to avoid them. As soon as the month’s contract ends, Taylor and I are fucking on a daily basis. And I have to admit, I’m better on the bike than I am in bed. My system is flooded with antidepressants again, so my ability to experience pleasure is severely at odds with my sexual appetite. It’s like my clitoris is on novocaine. I discover that riding a bike for two hours gets my lower regions more sensitized, but even so, Taylor and I must work at my pleasure—work, work, work at it. Unlike Taylor, I’m not a good teacher. He asks me to tell him what to do, but I’m tongue-tied. Part of the problem is that, because of the medication, I don’t know what will work for me from day to day. Maybe this should be BPD criteria number ten: instability in sexual response, followed by inappropriate expressions of sexual response, like when we’re sitting on a public bench. Sometimes when I see his body or smell his scent, I want to consume him with all of my senses. Then, when we meet skin on skin, it’s like hitting a thick glass wall. “It’s the medication,” I tell him.

  “Can you change it?”

  “Um, not the best idea right now.”

  “But doesn’t your therapy help you so you don’t need the pills?”

  I say it might, but I’m not willing to risk it. I’ve also got depression and an anxiety disorder churning under the surface, along with BPD, and I’m not sure I’m stable enough to make that kind of change just yet.

  By the end of summer I’m riding the Hawk to work every day. When I pull up to the corner of Church Street and Massachusetts Avenue in the morning, I pause after I take off my helmet. Perched on the bike, I survey the square. Students are returning. The first breath of fall rustles the leaves. Last year I was running out of the bookstore like I was under sniper fire, convinced even the simplest tasks were beyond me. Now I’m sitting on a motorcycle twenty feet away from that same spot, about to go to work. A lot can happen in a year.

  I believe I’m progressing, but it’s distressing to realize that as my relationship with Taylor deepens, it unearths even more pain. It reminds me of when I quit using drugs and alcohol. Without the instant numbing power of a substance to manage my inner turmoil, my life actually got worse. And now, as I try to practice mindfulness with each emotion, without reacting or defending or deflecting, I’m immersing myself in new territory, or, I should say, old territory from a new perspective.

  Now, at stage two, which involves dealing with emotions and traumatic experiences from the past, the old-school BPD theories about disordered attachments and disorganized personality begin to make sense to me. I go back into the literature to see in what other ways BPD behavior and perceptions can be explained. I know I’m dysregulated, unstable, and impulsive. And I’m using the skills with all my might to manage these characteristics. But why do I still go blind with rage when I think Taylor is talking on the phone with Tanya, when actually it’s his mother? Why is it that even when Taylor and I have sweet, intimate moments, I can’t surrender and sometimes even go numb and float away? Why can’t I put the pieces of a self back together? Why has yet another person become the center of my world? And why do I turn into a fearful child now that touch, love, need, and belonging have fused with Taylor?

  Trauma, unresolved issues, core wounds—maybe it makes sense that these demons only resurface when I achieve a semblance of safety. Now that the ground is firm, my inner rifts are more accessible.

  I try to put all of my energy into not letting this relationship dismantle my progress. I have gone though all four DBT skills modules in group, from mindfulness to interpersonal effectiveness to distress tolerance to emotion regulation, and am now starting my second, and final, round of them. I’m at the head of the class, and the other women in the group increasingly look to me as a leader. But with Taylor I often feel like I’m regressing. He doesn’t turn the radio down like I ask him to, so I decide that means he doesn’t care about me and I spend the rest of the day strangled and stupefied by the emotions from just this one slight. I’ll feel cozy in Taylor’s house until he makes a comment about renovating the kitchen. He mentions wanting to redo the floors as he’s carrying a bowl of pasta into the dining room, and by the time he’s crossed the threshold, I’m completely offended and huffy.

  “What happened between the kitchen and the dining room?” he asks, completely baffled. I’m convinced that he’s planning on a future without me if he’s thinking of renovating and hasn’t yet invited me to move in. When I read a while back that borderlines “test” people, I had no idea what that meant. Now I understand: It’s like I’m constantly searching for confirmation of his love for me, an
d each of his gestures and words, no matter how trivial, can either prove or disprove it. I wish I could just ease up and feel secure. On the other hand, I wish he’d stop doing things that trigger my insecurities. It’s a vicious cycle of sorts, but that does make it extremely fertile ground for learning.

  And despite all the turmoil and periods of freaking out, I am content like never before. For weeks and months at a time, I live in a cocoon of comfort. I work in office fun-land. Renee and I go on outings to Ikea for furniture and to Costco to fill an entire pallet with office snacks. I started out not being able to make small talk, and now I’m the “Office Goddess” (I have a mug that officially declares this), dipping strawberries in dark chocolate to feed the masses, arranging luncheons and parties with Gail and Renee, presiding over my desk with the silver candy bowl and a “Free Advice” sign, like I’m Lucy from Peanuts. At home (by which I mean Taylor’s), I sleep, cook and watch TV. He teaches me how to design web pages and how to season a steak. All the while, I continue with therapy and DBT group, ride motorcycles, and grow close to Taylor’s mother, who has the same insatiable curiosity as her son and no baggage from the past to throw into the mix of our mutual affection.

  It’s a cliché, but time really does fly by when you’re having fun. The flip side being, of course, that when you’re in misery, each second feels like a year, boulder-heavy and crushing you. The rhythm of my life follows accordingly: When things are good, weeks flash by, and when they’re bad, each second seems like an eternity. I’m still set off by the same things. I feel threatened when even a hint of an ex-girlfriend pops up, including Tanya’s underwear, which I discover while cleaning out Taylor’s dresser to make room for my clothes. (Apparently, he throws nothing away—nothing!) I still feel like I’m being stabbed when Taylor forgets to make eye contact with me in social groups or when he doesn’t respond to an email or voice mail promptly, and it doesn’t help that my definition of prompt and his are drastically different. I continue to flip in my perceptions and emotions about him depending on my perception of how he treats me, and I resent him whenever I discover that I have very little life outside of the relationship, even as I keep perpetuating that dependence.

  Taylor comments that although I’m still often triggered, my times of upset are shorter: I lose my bearings for a day or two, not a month. And I no longer declare that our relationship is over every time I feel neglected.

  I agree. My relationship to pain is changing. While the feelings are as intense as ever, they don’t take me over completely, and I don’t react as quickly. Sometimes in the crisis of the moment I can actually say what I’m feeling, and even do it without accusing Taylor of trying to hurt me. I try to take the long view—to ride these states out, rather than giving in to the story lines that justify their presence. I haven’t hurt myself physically in a year and a half now, though the impulse is still there, like a shadow, and it still steps into my conscious mind when the pain peaks. I still have to ride out the urge, have to tell it, “You’re an outdated survival tool,” and figure out some other way to reregulate myself, from holding an ice cube to going shopping for shoes.

  Certain areas of my life, however, aren’t evolving so well—my sex life, for instance, where I start to wonder if I’m actually regressing. It’s hard to examine this, because I feel baffled and ashamed, but I’m beginning to wonder if I’m a semifrigid sex addict. Like my cravings for love and security, my carnal desires overwhelm me but only lead to more disconnection. I’m passionate and intensely physical and crave being touched and petted like a cat all the time. Yet when Taylor and I are intimate, I don’t respond easily and cannot climax unless an hour or more is dedicated to my body, and even then there’s no guarantee. And for all of Taylor’s tenacity over fixing broken things, he’s at a loss as to how to repair this.

  There is one guaranteed way I can get excited, and that’s if I am allowed to be in complete control. I initially tried to avoid this scenario because I wanted to learn how to be vulnerable and trusting in bed, but soon enough the ManRay girl’s boxes of clothes come out, and it’s not like I have to twist Taylor’s arm to get him to participate. If I take the dominant role and render him completely helpless, I get ridiculously turned on. My pleasure flows most naturally when I’m in complete control.

  And having Taylor supine and unmovable allows me to use all of my senses, all of my body, to consume him. It’s a ravenous delight that works well for both of us—until I start to grow weary of the dominatrix role. While it’s definitely more pleasurable, I don’t want to always be in charge and doing things just to him. I don’t articulate it, but I feel a growing resentment that this sex is still ultimately about Taylor’s pleasure. Even with all the power, I feel like a handmaiden who needs to please a man in order to have any value.

  So I tire of this and want to go back to straight nookie. The thing is, when we go back to being simple bodies under the covers, I don’t know what will happen. Some moments I’m in the midst of the action, a full participant, feeling great. Then a numbness cuts me off and I’m dissociated, clinging to Taylor and wishing with all my heart I could reenter the waters of passion he’s still so happily frolicking in. I want to ride that wave, damn it. I touch myself, call to mind various fantasy images, do a bit of self-coaching (Relax! You can do it!), ask him to do this or that. But in the end, I’m just along for the ride, feeling like I did in almost every drunken high school hookup. A boy has turned into a rutting, frenzied stranger. My Taylor, with the lights off, can become a stranger. The worst part is that after what should be a pinnacle of intimacy, I feel horribly alone. I am empty and need more. It’s like I want to siphon every last bit of affection he can offer so that I don’t drift to sleep with this ache inside me. I want to climb inside him and be comforted like a child. But Taylor, of course, has fallen asleep.

  I’m a hypocrite, because if I were being really honest, I’d tell Taylor that the sex isn’t really working. But that would threaten our relationship, and without the relationship, I don’t know what I’d have. All of Taylor’s friends have become my friends by default. I’ve taken up residence in his extra room while still maintaining my own place, though I never go there. My day is perfectly structured by him—between our routine of emails, phone calls, dinners, and nightly TV shows, I can’t fall through any cracks. If Taylor were gone, it would be like pulling the plug in a basin that holds all the shapeless, turbulent liquid of my life. I would drain away.

  And so I need to understand: How can I be healthy and functional in so many ways, and yet still be on the edge, without a self? I’m essentially trapped in a paradox of need and love. I keep telling Taylor that I need to create my own life. Meanwhile, Ethan and I work on the skills and examine how I’m avoiding being with myself and how I’m blaming Taylor.

  If I can stop projecting everything onto Taylor and see the deeper workings of my mind, I can possibly become more than a “functional borderline,” more than a woman now living on the edge. Outwardly, I seem to be doing so well. But it’s like I’m wearing a loosely secured mask. Everyone is so proud of me for having come so far, yet as soon as Taylor turns his eyes away, my world is threatened with destruction.

  17

  First Touch

  I find myself going back to the original rift. Not infancy, where I may or may not have had unlimited access to my mother’s breast. Not to early childhood, when my brother was born and undeniably usurped my parent’s attention. Back to when I was six years old, playing at the edge of the yard, spinning with wide arms. House then street, house then street, whirling by until they blurred. Only the sky remained still and unchanging, a blue portal with smeared walls. It’s an apt metaphor for the shifting focal points in my young life: a divorce and my father’s absence, a blur of languages and countries in six short years. When things finally stopped spinning, I’d landed back in the States, along with my mother and brother, with Dutch, Italian, and English twisting on my tongue.

  I was lonely. Every afternoon the s
treet clattered with children playing, but I remained an outsider. Then, a babysitter. How old could he have been? Like most six-year-olds, I saw all tall people as adults, but perhaps he was just a teenager, perhaps even just a boy. While our mother went out at night, he watched over us. He let us stay up and watch TV, even though we should have been in bed. He made us popcorn in the brand new machine that melted butter at the same time it popped the kernels. On one particular night, we camped in the living room with our pillows and bedding because the heat was low and the windows were drafty. Only the top of my brother’s head was visible as he lay swaddled on the couch across from the TV. On the other couch, I was stretched out with my fuzzy yellow blanket, the babysitter sitting next to my feet.

  The metallic light of the TV flickered against us, casting a blue tint. Inside the balloon of warmth within my blanket, a cool pocket of air grazed my ankle. The babysitter tickled my foot and I giggled. Shh, he motioned, his finger to his lips. His hand moved lengthwise under the covers, bringing a cold line of air with it, until he found the edge of my nightgown—a flannel nightie with posies dropped all over the surface and lace around the sleeves and neckline, a gift from my grandmother when we stayed with her after the flight home from Europe.

  I watched my babysitter’s profile. He didn’t look at me. He laughed with the canned laugh track from the television, but from my knee to my thigh, his hand traced my skin so that it quivered. His hand played itsy-bitsy spider, ascending finger over finger. I noticed that the ceiling had lumps in it, as though the floor above had let some of its weight crumble down. My babysitter turned his head and winked as the itsy-bitsy spider climbed higher, giving me shivers. Then it arrived. There.