I have Schizotypal Personality Disorder and it comes with chronic feelings of emptiness and a general lack of purpose or direction. I tend to find purpose through strange thoughts tied to moral or spiritual pursuits. But also through acceptance by other people, be they friend, family, lover or colleague. I find the recognition of a community as a whole worth less than the recognition of an individual person. The former gives me a some semblance of hollow, egotistical pride, but the latter gives me a deep sense of personal worth that I feel deep gratitude for, as well as somewhat allowing me to live vicariously through them.

To achieve that acceptance, I feel like I have to be invaluable, so I dedicate myself fully to "the project". Because of my deep moral/spiritual outlook, I take failures or my own shortcomings to be very damning. At the same time, It provides me with a very stubborn nature that is a bit of a contradiction. On the one hand, I am someone that has little personal boundaries, but on the other, when those boundaries ARE met, I become stubborn, resolute and fierce.

It means that i tend to find myself connecting to needy (or predatory) people who do not respect other peoples personal boundaries. But since I DO have boundaries, and those boundaries can have peculiar definitions sometimes, conflict can often arise seemingly from nowhere. On the surface it may appear that they take and I give unconditionally, but that is never really the case. The person I will have enmeshed with will suddenly find that I am no longer providing the selfless supply they are accustomed to, and I feel that the person is not respecting my boundaries or needs.

When the conflict arises and the enmeshment begins to break down, because I have invested so much into the person, losing them feels like losing myself. I tend to live life on a rubber band, snapping back into a state of isolation and despondency. I don't jump from one relationship to another, since the destruction of myself makes me feel unworthy and useless. When in this state, I try to build myself and my character, but inevitably I meet someone and the house of cards that I have built for myself gets blown over in the face of this new connection. I lose myself to them again, get destroyed, then rebuild, and on and on the cycle goes.