BOOK CLUB

I recently read the novel "White Ivy", by Susie Yang for a book club with my high school friends.  A synopsis of the book is that Ivy Lynn is a Chinese American who is a thief and a liar, in short she has a  personality disorder, so no one sees this part of her.  I couldn't articulate my view of her last night with the exception of knowing she was a personality disorder.  My view of her was vastly different from the group, yet I couldn't really articulate what exactly my view was.  After sleeping on it, I realized why my view was so different.  I know this character from the inside.

Personality disordered people have a huge sense of unworthiness that they are trying to cover up.  Often they have been criticized, beaten, or told that they are worthless and not living up to some expectations that others have of them.  They cover this up by making a personality or character and they present this to the world.  This is not a deliberate planned decision, it is a way of adapting, a way of being alive and going on, and is mostly unconscious.  With that comes the lying and manipulation, in order to "be" something you are not, you cover up, lie, try to get your needs met other ways than being yourself.

Deep down, I felt so unworthy, and lying and manipulation were so much a part of me, like breathing, that I also couldn't trust anyone else's motives.  It colored my perception of everybody and every experience. I was always, underneath believing the worst motives of others, that things were not the way they seemed.  I was hyper-vigilant about non-verbal cues and often misread them in others.  I watched people closely and listened to their words to try and figure out what they wanted from me, and I would give them that, even if it was contradictory to what I had told someone else 5 minutes before. It has taken my a lifetime to unravel all of it, to really get to know myself, and I still have times when I have trouble setting boundaries. 

For these reasons, I entertained the idea that she, Ivy Lynn, was not seeing things clearly. There were specific times when she read situations completely wrong, I could see it, because she was fueled by her deep sense of unworthiness.  So, thinking that Gideon's family was not as well off as they seemed, that he was gay, that people in some room were probably talking about her, that her sister-in-law hated her, all of these things in my opinion could have been born out of her own  lack of self worth, or self hatred.