Dinkaltranen

Next time someone tells you their ex was crazy, here's what you should actually hear: "I'm crazy!"

Borderlines and narcissists are complementary and mutually destructive. The borderline has no identity, or rather a fragmented, unstable sense of self. They use others perception of them as a substitute. The borderline person will become whoever you need, because if you love the character they’re playing, then there’s a possibility you’ll love the actor. Then everything falls to pieces and the only thing they can do is explode, or withdraw. In the business we’d typically describe that as a response to narcissistic injury. Either way, your crime to them was not loving them, but also ‘them’ in this case was nothing.

Narcissists also have no sense of self. Instead of being special, they decide they are special, and their entire existence is oriented around having others validate this.

Oh no.

The chronic underachiever, the burnt out “gifted child”, who has spent their entire life trying to get everyone to believe that they are special, has now met someone who will not only tell them it’s true, but believe it, because the borderline has turned the narcissist into their entire identity.

Why yes, you do look good in that mirror. Oh, that’s me. Or you?

But it’s fake. It’s two actors, who have to believe that the other isn’t acting, because the alternative is too painful. The borderline is acting out devoted love for the narcissist, and the narcissist gets their specialness recognised. Two mirrors facing one another, both broken, but they can’t tell because the image is all fucked up and they literally can’t see themselves clearly, there’s nothing there but a reflection of a reflection, looping on forever.

Eventually the reflection becomes indiscernible, unsustainable, and this inevitably ends the same way as all their other relationships, it just takes a little longer for them to wake up to the fact that they’re not real and neither is the other person, and that means they don’t exist. But that idea’s intolerable, so they lash out and hurt the other for making them aware they don’t exist, or withdraw completely so they don’t have to face that.

Now they get to go around for the rest of their life and tell everyone their ex was crazy. They both get to tell a story of “I loved someone who didn’t love me back.” The narcissist says it to you to get you to say they are worthy of attention, special, a victim, their ex was crazy haven’t you heard? Oh my god she really was crazy. The borderline asks you to validate that they are loveable in spite of their abandonment, “wow you did so much for him and he still treated you like that? What a jerk, you deserve so much better!”

They both need these things to be true and they need to hear it from someone else for it to be so. Acting out their defense again and again by exporting their sense of self to another’s perception, because being an actual person is too much for them.

Time is a flat fucking circle for these people, and the circle is a mirror.