Another day, another sink full of dirty dishes. As I sprayed hot water over the sugar ant convention in our sink I supressed an urge to giggle maniacally.

How, exactly, does one giggle maniacally? It's really quite easy. Imagine that you're a goddess, looking down from on high and smiting the ungodly heathens below. Or that you're smiting the infidel enemy invaders. Either way, it can be both fun and mildly alarming to your loved ones. My husband is used to my little insanities by now. Just as well, because I am tired of coming up with new and unique ways to hide it.

One of the things common to those who live with borderline personality disorder is that they view life as a non-stop drama. We script out soap opera-ish fantasies in our heads that cast us in the role of whatever psychologically damaged hero/heroine catches our fancy. We'll watch tv and movies and rewrite the whole thing in our head to accomodate our fantasies. This can seem at times more real than the world we're moving through. A constant temptation is to try to bridge the gap by taking as much of the inner dialogue into our real life relationships as we can get away with. I think this is why so many of us are alone- we burn out the ones who care for us, we overload our friendships and destroy our romances because nobody can ever live up to the constant drama and playacting that goes on.

Not that I'm saying this is deliberate. Far from it. Most of us don't realize what we're doing or how much we're doing it until it's too late. It took me 10 years of therapy to both realize it and to learn how to avoid doing it. It took almost losing the Boy I love and it took breaking my heart to give me the incentive to learn. Now that I know how, it's still hard sometimes to avoid the drama. I crave it almost as much as I crave the addiction of self-injury. As much as I crave control over my body and food intake. I look at my husband, I look at my daughter, it lets me find the strength to keep it together. I will not bring my daughter into my dramas. I have that much pride. I won't let things get bad enough that I have to give her up, even temporarily.

I've chosen to be a grownup. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I love it.