I (22M) have BPD and C-PTSD. It’s pretty pathetic and I’ve never admitted it to anyone before, but pretty much every night I listen to videos like this to help me sleep: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TACr-M6Wda8

I was thinking about it last night though and I realised, I don’t think I can ever have someone who loves me like that. I don’t think love like that really exists. Granted I’ve only ever been in love once but I analyse that situation all the time. She cared about me and supported me, but she didn’t feel the same way I did, didn’t love me back. And it makes sense, if I think back to that friendship, of course she didn’t love me back. She was the only person who ever really saw the full extent of my mental issues and I think having mental problems makes it almost impossible to be attractive to someone else as a partner. 

I can’t provide a feeling of safety or security because I can’t even guarantee I’m gonna have the energy to get outta bed some days and as soon as someone saw all my self-harm scars under my clothes there’s no way they could ever think of me as stable enough to give them that. 

Mental illnesses also make you appear vulnerable from time to time and as much as you can try to hide it, if someone gets close enough they’ll see it eventually. So once they see it it’s almost impossible to appear attractively strong and masculine in their eyes again because they’ve seen you weak before.

I can’t really have kids because I don’t want to pass my mental issues on to them and even if I didn’t, I know how damaging having mentally ill parents is. 

I can’t offer any kind of long-term stability because my moods change so rapidly that some days I’ll be fine then two hours later I’ll be walking to the gym and be so goddamn angry that I can’t stop picturing doing incredibly violent things to strangers on the street, getting so caught up in it that I almost get hit by a car crossing the street because I’m deep in a fantasy.

I can’t even promise to be able to just be there for them 100% of the time because sometimes I just can’t be around people. I can’t summon the energy to speak and I don’t see the point anyway. And when other people try to speak to me it irritates me to the point where I feel infuriated like someone’s scratching my brain with their words and it takes everything I have not to just scream at them to shut the fuck up.

I think about all this then I listen to one of those videos where I’m hearing a girl say all those kind, supportive things and I realise it’s impossible to get there. The moment anyone sees this side of me they either leave because they don’t know how to deal with someone like me or they stay but all attraction and possibility for intimacy is gone.