Please forgive me the following post. I'm drunk, and going to take some liberties in thinking I know the situation when really I don't, but I'll write just the same because... well, just because.


My take on this issue, for what it's worth, is that your friend has a paucity of self, and whatever is in his mind right now represents the entirety of who he is. There is no thread of self-hood running from one moment through and into the next, but an entirely new self is created around each successive emotion. His world isn't one in which he wakes each day to dab more paint on the masterpiece of his life, but one where his canvas holds no paint. He swings his brush upon the air, and though in his mind that swipe represents an image, it is only known to him, and only for a moment. Then it's gone.


That's fine if he keeps you at a distance, because social custom is to treat colleagues with politeness and maintain a clean unemotional involvement, but as soon as he let you get close that boundary evaporated. You brought to him the masterpiece you've been painting your whole life, refining, adding, changing as you mature and find different things pleasing to the eye, but he... He let you into a world where there is no painting, where he is in earnest with his brush, but has nothing to show, desperate to behold an image in his effort, and frantic to create a lasting one. Because you were good, because you were kind, because you did not outright reject him, he tried to paint himself onto your canvas, tried to entwine his faltering, jarring, disjointed and tumultuous existence with the steady evenness of yours.


You seem like a good person. You could have outright rejected him, but I think you understand your reluctance to do so fuels his desperation. He finds in you the rejection of a parent, which is probably exactly what he is trying to act out. When a parent is cruel, for instance, they are yet a parent, and almost never reject you entirely (to the point where your group of friends rejected the guy in question, for instance). What you became when you didn't outright reject him is a parent figure, in both a good and bad way (for him that is - it's mostly bad for you). It's good in that he can act out as an infant and try to learn what it is to be a real person - a person whose past persists into the present. In order for that to happen he has to be accepted no matter what. By 'acceptance' I don't mean you have to be a thrashing board - better that you respond with maturity and wisdom and keep a firm boundary between his tantrums and your even emotionality. I mean accept it without neglect, which is to say, give value to what is offered, even if the value is negative. That's the way any parent teaches their child right from wrong. You may not want the burden of being a parent to someone who isn't your child, or even a child at all, and that would be an entirely fair thing. You have a life to live.


As I said, it is also a bad thing for him to have a 'new parent'. You, ultimately, aren't his parent, and you won't give him the attention his soul so desperately needs to make him whole. His very soul is an abyss, and he desperately wants to stem the painful and continual disappearance of his world, but he will gladly settle for something akin to what his real parents gave him - neglect and negativity. He will cling to you the harder if you push him away because (very likely) that's what his real parents did. He will use you to relive their abuse of him, behaving badly until you have no choice but to neglect him, to reject him, and he wants that, but then when he gets it that goal, and the self that wanted it, will be gone, and the new self will feel the pain of rejection and want to mend the damage. So begins a trail of tumult.

Probably his emotions were never validated, or else they were outright rejected. In either case the emotion never gets threaded into a narrative, but exists as an island, and that is his life. A sad and painful existence fraught with terrible upheaval and a frantic search for something solid to hold onto as everything he thinks he knows about himself slips endlessly through his fingers. Nothing is ever real except the moment, the raw and immense moment, and the vastness of reality is a frightening thing when you intuitively realize you know nothing. So you scramble for purchase, try to build another you, another map for navigating existence, but it's writ upon sands in the wind, and you've lost your way in a lonely desert...