Last week I lost a cherished friend and it was because of the manifestations of my Borderline Personality Disorder. She was an e-mail pal I had had for nearly three years, and my psychotic episodes and petty insecurities finally drove a stake into the heart of our very special friendship. Has this ever happened to any of you? Do you wish you could take back words borne of jealousy and misplaced anger and that the clock would magically turn backward before that fateful day that the world came crashing down around your ears? Well, I recently did. I had made a dear friend, someone from the U.S., who shared my intense love of R.E.M. and had many interests that were common to mine. We wrote one another long and chatty letters, she sent me photos of Michael Stipe and bootlegs that were impossible to obtain here in Canada, but, most importantly, she cared about and loved me. But I destroyed all that, with my numerous sojourns into the mental hospital and long absences from the Internet when I was too depressed to go online. Months turned into a year, and finally, when I thought I was well enough to resume our lagging Internet relationship, she had grown rather weary and impatient with my long silences and talk about illness and medication and such. In other words, she was burned out being friends with a sick person. Finally I got up the nerve to ask her if she was angry with me and she answered in the affirmative. It seems that I had had one too many of my "scenes" online in our R.E.M. group and she had, well, had enough. Feeling furious, betrayed and abandoned, I wrote her an extremely vituperative letter, telling her she was "47 years old and not 17" and that she had upset me so much I was serioulsy considering suicide. Some friend I turned out to be. She wrote me one last letter, saying it was her last and for me never to write or phone her again, as it was "psychologically stalking". I had never heard it put in those harsh and damning words, but as I thought about it, that is exactly what I had been doing to this poor woman.

Why do we do these things? Well, I have come to the hard-edged conclusion that we are not very likeable people when we are ill. That is not to say we can't be pleasant, have a good sense of humour and be sociable, but that there are times when we are best left to ourselves. This was a very hard lesson to learn and it cost me dearly, but from now on, when feeling particularly unstable, I will either stay off the Internet entirely or write out an angry letter and let it sit there for 24 hours. By then, my anger and paranoia have dissipated and I can simply delete the vituperative e-mail. Oh, if only I had done that last Friday......