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Stuart K. Hayashi

I’ve published posts here for the benefit of my troubled friend but the truth is that if she ever came across this blog again, there are much better and more helpful posts I have written. Years ago I made an entire blog on the subject when my knowledge of it was much fresher in my mind: Letters to Derna (Stouthammer).

Also, I have written much-more-interesting blog posts exposing some falsehoods she and I were both told on topics of political economy not directly related to BPD. The truth is in my essays “Is the Pirating of Intellectual Property Just a Form of Intra-Industry Competition?” (spoiler: it’s not) and “Libertarians and the Myth of the Winner-Takes-All Patent Monopoly.”

Years ago, I wrote a post titled “More BPD Treatments on Oahu.” The links on my old post are mostly outdated. Therefore, if my friend somehow stumbles upon this, here is an update.

Psychology Today magazine still has a directory of mental-health professionals in Hawai‘i who treat BPD and with whom you can speak in person. The link to the updated directory, as of my typing this, is here.

I was also impressed to learn that DBT-Hawaii — dialectical behavior therapy is one form of treatment for BPD — is still in operation, and at the same URL as it was so many years ago.

I have found some YouTube videos from psychologists that explain very articulately what happened between us. I was what psychologists call the “Favorite Person” of someone who has borderline personality disorder. As the psychologists’ understanding predicted would happen, you eventually unpersoned me. It happens that in the role of Favorite Person, you replaced me with Pretentious, Chalky-White-Face-Corpse Artist, as he and his sister-in-law and brother have been all too willing to reinforce your morbid gestures and the façades you have put on.

   

   

   

 In this video, Dr. Fox says that persons suffering from BPD often have difficulties with their memories.

   

  

Dr. Fox explains that one of the “worst coping strategies” is “emotional numbing.” Here, as emotions are often very painful, there is a great temptation to try to avoid emotions and emotional attachment. Such a policy can be phrased as “Keeping my feelings to myself has always been the safest choice.” No, it is not. As Dr. Fox notes, such emotional numbing “temporarily blocks pain but prevents healing.”

A therapist named Betty DeShong Meador wisely observed, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” That empowerment in life can be yours, if only you choose to commit to it. 🥲

Which Is Her Real Personality? All of Them

Stuart K. Hayashi

“...we don’t have to let that stop us from being who we want to be.”

—The Gentle Princess, Slay the Princess

There is a hit video-game visual-novel called Slay the Princess. It’s independent, made mostly by a husband-and-wife team. What is meant by “visual novel” is that it’s a story told mostly in the form of illustrations, text, and voice-acting, but there are many areas in the story where you choose which path the characters will take, not knowing exactly where it will lead. In Japan, this genre is also called “dating simulators,” as these visual novels are mostly about romance. And Slay the Princess is very decidedly not an exception to that.

As are many others, I’m intrigued by how explicitly and unabashedly philosophical Slay the Princess is. There is even one point in the game where you can have the player character say, “Contradictions don’t exist.” Something about that line sounds familiar . . .

In the game, the titular princess can take on many forms. She has many facets, many alters. Some of them are benign. Others are very frightening. You might wonder which of these is her “real personality.” My answer is “All of them.” All of them show different-but-incomplete aspect of her. As in real-life mental health, it is important for all of these personalities ultimately to be integrated into a single whole — that is actually the root of the word integrity.

I’m going to embed some of my favorite YouTube videos that touch upon the philosophic ramifications.

 

 

 

 

 So far, these have been my favorite YouTube “play-throughs” of it (the most famous one, not shown here, is by Markiplier).

 

On Wednesday, May 13, 2026, I added to the beginning the quotation of the Gentle Princess pointing out that you are ultimately who and what you choose to be. I also embedded the longplay YouTube video of “FunkyFrogPlays.”

I Miss My Troubled, Unwell Northern-European Friend

Stuart K. Hayashi

 

I still worry about my troubled, unwell Norwegian friend, the one I wrote about previously. I mean my troubled friend who was obsessed with child molesters: the one who kept bringing up, out of nowhere, her fascination with child molesters, only for it to turn out later that her paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all credibly accused of sexually abusing girls over whom they were tasked with watching over.

I dearly wish for reconciliation, but that is not to happen absent of her returning to regular psychiatric care and ending contact with those who were, and likely still are, reinforcing her morbid gestures. I know that that is a prerequisite, and I know it because of what already happened years ago.

Soon before returning to Norway for the summer, she promised me unsolicitedly that when she returned to Norway, she would resume seeing a mental health professional. I did not initiate asking her about it. She took the initiative to make that promise, unprompted by anyone else. While I did not ask this of her, I was greatly relieved by this promise. When she was back in Norway, I asked her about it, and she claimed not to remember. Then she said she doesn’t need a mental health professional anyway. Soon after, she became mostly uncommunicative. But in one of the few times in that duration when she did communicate again, she said she was having panic attacks daily. Then when she returned to O‘ahu, she was uploading onto social media the photoshops that an internet-famous Norwegian artist did of her where she was photoshopped to have a chalky-white face like a corpse’s.

After two years of that, and after returning to Norway for the long term, she stopped uploading the dead-body photos. But then Corpse Artist started uploading pretentiously photoshopped images of himself up in the mountains with his mountain bike. Then my friend followed with photos of herself — no longer with the dead-body face — always hiking on mountain tops. Corpse Artist doesn’t do the corpse art anymore, but his influence is still very much in the picture (sometimes literally). 

And my friend made a big show of legally changing her last name to match her father’s, a last name that was also the maiden name of her paternal grandmother who feigned ignorance about the child sexual abuse inflicted by her husband (my friend’s paternal grandfather). (Previously, my friend’s legal last name was her mother’s.) With my now knowing the history of what happened on her father’s side of the family, I think that though it is much more subtle than the chalky-white-face dead-body photos, the legal name change looks like another morbid gesture. It seems a very try-hard attempt to convey that her relationship with her father is fine; even great.

If I resume contact with my friend, and she’s not angry but instead welcomes reconciliation but doesn’t return to mental-health treatment and stay with it, I know what is going to happen. It will be a repeat of what happened before. She might return to treatment for a little while. But eventually she will stop with it and, when I ask about it, she will feign memory loss about it as she did before. And then all of our interactions will become a repeat of what happened that summer. At first it will again seem be a happy situation. But then my friend will resume making morbid gestures with the expectation that I play along and act as if they are safe and fine. And playing along and acting as if that is safe and fine is tacit reinforcement of the morbid gestures.

My friend first establishing regular psychiatric treatment is necessarily a prerequisite to any attempt at reconciliation.

If my friend sees this: legally remove the name of those who facilitated abuse: the last name of a father who facilitated abuse and the maiden name of a paternal grandmother who “looked the other way” to maintain plausible deniability about abuse that she knew had happened. Cut out of your life and social media those, such as Corpse Artist and his sister-in-law and brother, who reinforce your morbid tendencies. Rather than thanking them for their morbid images, they always should have been blocked, just as they should be now. Return to regular psychiatric care and have the borderline/ emosjonelt ustabil personlighetsforstyrrelse diagnosed properly. Make this known publicly. With the danger you have consistently imposed on self and others, even people outside of the inner circle have a right to know about your psychiatric condition and the risks of it. Such important steps would not be for me, but for your own happiness, well-being, and peace. But just as it was in our last phone conversation, you already know that.

‘I Am What I Choose to Become’ Was Said By This Jungian, Not Jung Himself

Stuart K. Hayashi





“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

That is an excellent and wise quotation. It is a perfect affirmation of the presence of free will. 

All too often in our culture we hear the phrase “Nature versus Nurture.” The insinuation is that your personal identity, as an adult, is the result of you being passive in being shaped by forces external to your conscious decision-making. As the phrase goes, what molded you into you was either inborn biological mechanisms beyond your control (“nature”), or conditioning from circumstances impinging upon you (“nurture”). Those factors do have some influence. But as the quotation reminds us, the biggest factor in making you the person you are as an adult is the one that goes unmentioned and unacknowledged. That factor is the series of choices you made on your own, proactively. (It is no accident that “Nature versus Nurture” was coined by Sir Francis Galton, the founder and namer of eugenics. He favored Nature over Nurture, and ignored free will completely.)

And all over the World Wide Web and in memes in Google Images, and even throughout works you can find in Google Books, that quotation is misattributed to Carl Jung.

Here is the actual source:

Betty DeShong Meador, “Uncursing the Dark: Restoring the Lost Feminine,” Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytic Psychology vol. 22 (no. 1, 1989): 27–39.

This was in a journal published by the C. G. Jung Foundation. That is how the quotation ended up being ascribed inaccurately to the man himself.

As I write this, I must say that this psychoanalyst and therapist, Betty DeShong Meador, died relatively recently. She was born in 1931 and died on February 20, 2023. I wish that it could have been within her lifetime that this quotation was sourced properly to her.