My best friend of several years has borderline personality disorder. She often has severe episodes in which she goes on emotional rampages, simultaneously self-destructing and taking it out on everyone around her. I have made a place for myself in her life as the person who has always been there. I have always been willing to go out of my way for her. However, it has begun to feel like more of an enslavement than a friendship. I have always cherished her friendship and still do (why else would I do these things?) but her actions and my efforts to be a rock for her have at many occasions threatened my own well-being, as well as placed undue burdens on my family and other friends (such as the time she trashed my shared dorm room in a fight with her boyfriend after I let her stay with me during a crisis and the time she stranded me an hour from home on a work night and my dad had to drive out at midnight to bring me home).
During a recent episode, which was particularly stressful for me as my brother was nearly hit by a drunk driver going to the aid of a friend that got caught up in one of her crises, I told her that I simply could not drop everything to help her this time. I was in the middle of a very time-sensitive project at work and did not have time or energy for the drawn-out epoch that the simple task of picking her up from somewhere she had stranded herself would inevitably lead to. I made the choice to not put my job on the line or allow my family to be subjected by proxy to a difficult friendship that had volunteered for but they had not.
The situation escalated due to my refusal, ending with her on 72-hour hold. I decided to stick to my guns and not drive the hour and a half to visit her in the psych ward, despite her begging me, after I had already done a 200-mile trip that weekend. I told her that I am still her friend and I still love her, but I simply can't drop everything every time she has a crisis. Again, this is not just an objection to what she was asking of me. I may have been willing to make the drive to console her if I had known that was all it would be. However, everything with her inevitably takes hours longer than it should, and I simply couldn't afford hours on a Sunday night, over an hour away from home, with work the next day.
She has taken this as a total betrayal and decided to end our friendship. I tried to talk to her, explaining that this is not about me being angry with her or spiteful toward her actions. I try to be empathetic with the fact that she has a disorder and this is more painful for her than it is for me. It's simply her refusal to acknowledge the effects it has on me and my life and that I can't afford those effects, so I have to draw boundaries. For once it's not about her; it's about me. According to her, this makes me no friend at all. However, I don't think being a friend (or lover or family member) should ever mean being unconditionally tied to another's needs. So I stand by what I said. I feel liberated.
However, I am sad. I'm sad because I already miss having her as a friend. I'm sad because I know this is probably killing her right now. I'm sad because I feel like I've given and given and given, but I don't always feel like I've gotten back. I feel like I was an addiction, not a friend. I feel like I let go of a drowning person because I couldn't deal with constantly being pulled under.
Maybe I am a cruel person, but I can finally breathe.