#idolisation

“I can’t believe you could do something like this! You were my idol!”

“So?” She shrugged, chains clinking against themselves. “I don’t owe you anything. I don’t even know who you are.”

“But…”

“’But’ what, kid?” She snapped, evidently already annoyed despite it only being the second thing that Annabel had said. “I don’t owe you anything, you get that, right? I’m my own person and I can make my own choices.”

“Couldn’t you have made good ones?”

There was a long silence from the other side of the cell, long enough that Annabel thought she was choosing to ignore her, but the chains clinked again, and she sighed.

“I thought it was.”

Annabel didn’t have a response for that, not with the sheer amount of hopelessness that had come with that small sentence, and so their cell fell back into the silence that had reigned over it for years before, and would continue to for years afterwards.

She herself had only been in the cell for a few hours, taken from her parents that morning and dumped in a dank cell after hours of travel. Unlike her idol, she wasn’t chained up, just sitting in the cell with her back pressed to the rough brick, worried that she loose her sense of self without a grounding presence.

“What’s your name?” the other side of the cell finally asked, a sigh in her tone that wasn’t of annoyance but of exhaustion.

“Annabel, ma’am.”

“Annabel.” She repeated, and the soft smile could be heard in her voice. “I’m Chloe, although no one has called me that in… a long time.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Chloe.”

“You too. And I’m sorry for what I did earlier. I may not owe you anything, but it was cruel of me to throw you to their mercy.”

“It’s ok,” Annabel told her, “I would probably have done the same.”

Chloe laughed humourlessly, “Probably, but you are just a little girl. I’m an adult. I should be protecting you.”

The rush of affectionate warmth that flowed through Annabel was unexpected, no one had ever wanted to protect her before. Even to her parents she had just been a means of working off their debt- or selling her to pay them off- but here was this stranger, and she was a stranger no matter how much Annabel had idolised her as a child, a stranger who wanted to protect her, who saw it as the right thing to do.

“Annabel?”

“Yes?”

“You went quiet, I just wanted to check you were still there.”

“I’m still here.” She said, not knowing anything else she could say. Small talk had never been anything she was good at, never been anything she had been trained to participate in, unlike her eldest sister who was being prepared to marry high. She wondered if any of her sisters had noticed she was missing yet; they had been the only people she had- a form of protection against parents and brothers that was easily broken when each needed to defend herself.

“How did you end up here?” she asked, desperate to forget the negatives of her life before.

“Made a mistake. Several mistakes really, they ripped me off and forbid me from selling my own music and before I knew it I was several million dollars in debt to the Crown and… well there’s only one way out of that and I was an only child.”

“My parents did the same.”

“I’m sorry.”

Unable to form the words ‘it’s ok’ Annabel settled for an awkward laugh. “I’ll get used to it soon enough.”

“Yeah,” Chloe agreed, her tone full of foreboding, “you probably will.”

This means to learn that no matter how much you like and admire someone, no one is flawless entirely. That doesn’t mean everyone is a bad person, on the contrary. But you are allowed to see the flaws and things you don’t like in others and still love them!

It means you can read a nonfiction book and go “I agree with most of this but not all” - even if it’s written by an expert!

You can be a fan of someone and not love all of their work.

You can love someone’s professional work but not put them as a private person on a pedestal.

You can be annoyed or have disagreements with your friends, (chosen) family and relationship partners and love them at the same time.

Humans and our relationships are full of nuance.

If you put someone on a pedestal or idolise them, the flipside is always what happens when you get disillusioned. And you will get disillusioned, because that flawless image of them is an illusion. So your idols will become soiled in your mind sooner or later and you will feel personally betrayed and hurt - but chances are they have never pretended to be perfect! (If they have, distrust them.)

And just ...

No. I want to know how to deal with my emotions when other people lie to me. Or what I perceive to be a lie.

It's my third anniversary with my partner today and we had a falling out over the fact that he lies about previous things. He said something that was a different version of what he said before and he's all angry that I'm just looking for things and I don't even know anymore ...

He says it's inconsequential and "everybody lies" and because it's a small lie, or something that was worded incorrectly and not a lie, it doesn't matter.

It matters so much to me. It changes my view of him. It makes me feel like I don't even know him. And I can't even rationalise it in my head that it shouldn't matter because I'm so convinced that it does.

So that's why I was searching for an answer, that maybe people with BPD and trust issues and fear of rejection and idolising people, that when someone changes a story, a narrative, it really fucks with our heads.

But nothing. We're just portrayed as liars and there's no online help for us.