Bad Girls Don't Cry

Some Context

I was born in Montreal to two loving parents who had emigrated from Romania during the communist regime in the 70s. My parents came from nothing and worked their asses off to give me everything. I guess you could say I lived a life of privilege. I got sent to the best, private, Jewish school in the district; we always had plenty of food on the table and I never experienced what financial struggle looked like. I had a wonderful, live-in babysitter that I loved like a mom.

My mother was always a genius and my idol when I was growing up. She was an engineer who had worked her way up the corporate ladder in a man's world to become the Vice President for the St. Laurence Seaway. She was always so loving and such a warm soul. She worked a lot so I didn't get to have her around as much as I would have liked. When I was really young, I thought my babysitter was a second mom, so naturally I must have had thousands of brothers and sisters all over the world, and that is what I told people. My father was an architect working for McGill University. He was always very artistic and engaged in photography, film, painting, etc. He was also very handy, often either at his computer or in his workshop building some new piece of furniture for the house. My parents were both very eccentric characters, but I don't think I ever really knew it until I was much older and I began seeing so much of both of them in myself.

I was always a weird kid. I would tell strange lies, almost believing them. Lies like 'when I eat salad my face turns green'. My parents would tell me that I was too impulsive because I'd often fall down the stairs or run into walls. They laugh to this day about how I needed to wear a helmet in the house until I was 6. I'm still not sure it's a joke. My dad would tell me stories of how I tried racing an 80 year old in a swimming pool when I was 7, or how I climbed up 2 flights of stairs and into my crib at my 2 year old birthday party when I thought the room full of people too loud. I was strong-willed and fearless. I loved putting on performances for anyone who would watch me. In the early days, it was easy. There were few expectations back then. I didn't understand what being different meant yet. I wore my eccentric personality on my sleeve for all to see and I trusted others would do the same. It was a rough discovery when I grew up and found the world so full of fear and self-loathing, and I joined in that dance for a long while.

I guess the one part of all this that's missing is that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. In simple terms, this means I lived in a constant fight or flight mode, always on high alert, existing only in extreme dichotomies. There was never any middle ground; it was all or nothing, black or white, right or wrong, up or down, and never a moment of relaxation without anxieties and the stigma of mental health issues looming above my head. I wasn't diagnosed until my early twenties, so I had spent much of my adolescence confused and angry with myself for my impulsivity and my lack of self-control. I was always frustrated with everything and everyone around me, and that was so incredibly exhausting. I was so lucky though, in retrospect. I was given the most amazing parents by the universe who taught me to be brave and to allow my artistic side to flourish. They put me in any and all classes I wanted to take: martial arts, horseback riding, painting, pottery, tennis, dance, singing, swimming, skating, skiing, and the list goes on. I started writing songs at a very young age and they always listened and tried to encourage me as best they could. I didn't understand that their criticisms were coming from a place of love. Over time, I guess I felt I simply wasn't good enough: not intellectual enough to be my mother's daughter and not refined enough to be an artist in my father's eyes.

I was the younger of 2 daughters, the baby; the one who could screw up a hundred times and would still be coddled and told it's all going to be OK. I never really felt OK, though. Long before the diagnosis I knew there had to be something wrong with me. Especially when I began telling my fantasies to my friends and they stopped talking to me. I was so depressed for much of my life, and that's in large part what led me to my erratic behavior and eventually to chasing danger. But also, I think it goes so much deeper than that. We're human; complex beings with hundreds of factors influencing our every move. We can't give too much credence to any one thing.

I never had many boundaries; even when I did, I always had to push them and experiment with what I could get away with. I guess that's what led me to becoming the ultimate brat; challenging everything and finding cracks in the rules. I was balancing on an interesting tightrope between wanting to push my boundaries and wanting to please my parents. Maybe I felt I could never really please them in the ways I thought they had wanted. My parents did everything they could to keep me out of trouble, but there was a powerful force that was guiding me throughout my young life. I was a master debater and always managed to get my way in the end. I was persistent and sharp; a dangerous combination for any child to have.

My sister and I were once very close. I used to follow her around and wanted to be exactly like her. But we were very different characters. I was extroverted and intense while she was introverted and shy. It was only many years later that she told me she felt I had taken all the attention and energy in every room and she felt there was no place for her. She felt forced to take care of me when my parents weren't around and she saw how my extreme behavior tore me apart and she couldn't do a thing to stop it. In her helplessness, she spent her teenage years locked away in her room burying her nose in her books and her own safe, fantasy worlds. She was a character, though. Like for my 7th birthday, she stood on a table in the middle of the party room and ordered all my friends around. They were scared! I still laugh about that with her to this day. I think her need to always be in charge was important in my own development. It certainly aided in my rebellious phase. When I came to taste an inch of freedom, I needed to reach for the whole kilometer, (I know, a mile sounds better but I'm Canadian and the metric system just makes sense), and nothing less would suffice.

My sister was the first person to tell me about The Game I had been infatuated with that I didn't yet understand. I decided to call it that, with capital letters and everything, since I began writing this book. And it just makes sense to me as being this thing, almost alive in its own right. Keep reading and you might understand. When I was around 14, my sister told me that the husband in one of her stories she was reading would pretend to break into their home while the wife slept to add some excitement in the bedroom. I remember the day she told me that like it was yesterday. I had had so many taboo thoughts about consensual-non-consent, or force play as I like to call it, that I didn't understand were actually a thing. That was the first time I realized I was not alone in my fantasies, but it was far from being the day my obsession began.