I have found some YouTube videos from psychologists that explain very articulately what happened between us. I was what psychologists call the “Favorite Person” [favorittperson] of someone who has borderline personality disorder. As the psychologists’ understanding predicted would happen, you eventually unpersoned me. It happens that in the role of Favorite Person, you replaced me with Pretentious, Chalky-White-Face-Corpse Artist, as he and his sister-in-law and brother have been all too willing to reinforce your morbid gestures and the façades you have put on.
Dr. Fox explains that one of the “worst coping strategies” is “emotional numbing.” Here, as emotions are often very painful, there is a great temptation to try to avoid emotions and emotional attachment. Such a policy can be phrased as “Keeping my feelings to myself has always been the safest choice.” No, it is not. As Dr. Fox notes, such emotional numbing “temporarily blocks pain but prevents healing.”
In this video, Dr. Fox says that persons suffering from BPD often have difficulties with their memories.
A therapist named Betty DeShong Meador wisely observed, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” That empowerment in life can be yours, if only you choose to commit to it. 🥲 That means returning and committing to regular psychiatric care with the proper BPD diagnosis, cutting out of your life those such as Corpse Artist who have reinforced your morbid tendencies, and not having the name of your abuser (and the maiden name of a known accomplice of an abuser) be your legal name.
Similar wisdom comes from some other people. One of them was the excellent Aristotle-influenced Renaissance humanist philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Pico was his last name; “Mirandola” was where he was from. Whereas the early Middle Ages had its Platonic theologians put all emphasis on how man is “fallen” and crummy-by-default, Pico took up the Aristotelian mantle by honoring human rationality and its efficacy. In his Oration on the Dignity of Man Pico pointed out,
...you...may, by your own free will, ...trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. ...you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life [the self-described ‘Sunday nihilists’]; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.More recently, celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton has said the same. He wrote a self-help book explaining that when you’re an adult, what is most responsible for your current character and situation is not the environmental conditioning of the past — even the horrid childhood traumas imposed upon you — as today you have the opportunity to change that, in your case by committing to the beautiful treatment that you need. Hence, Chris Appleton titled his book Your Roots Don’t Define You.
Get it? Because he deals with hairs that have roots?
That is very different, by the way, from expecting those around you to pretend not to remember the embarrassing and decidedly-public morbid gestures of your past, as though some previous “you” had vanished, with your body magically and spontaneously being taken over by some undefinable new “you” to replace the previous ones. No, remember the errors of the past, let others remember and speak bluntly before you of those errors, and choose today the mental health that will allow you to make better choices still.
Chris Appleton’s message is apt. Since the twentieth century the intellectual fashion has been to deny free will in favor of saying that what makes you who you are is “nature or nurture.” But actually you are ultimately who and what you choose to commit to being. Choose to commit not to literal mountains but to mental health, the true prerequisite and passage to your liberation and flourishing.
On Thursday, June 18, 2026, I added the quotation from Pico and the section about the wisdom from celebrity hairstylist Chris Appleton.
