A Fluffy Post About Johnny Depp and Amber Heard

Because I want to get this off my chest

Anyone who grew up around someone with borderline personality disorder can tell you what a struggle it is to deal with someone who is completely committed to their own lies, manipulations, and short-term advantage. Books have been written on the subject.

Based on my own observations, if you grew up in such an environment, one of three things happens to you (and these are observations only; I make no claim to explain causation):

(1) You become a person with borderline personality disorder yourself.

(2) You become a person who is to some degree damaged by the relationship, and your struggles may also involve becoming intimately involved with abusive people.

(3) You become a person who is to some degree damaged by the relationship, and you devote a lot of energy to avoiding becoming intimately involved with abusive people, especially the type with borderline personality disorder. In fact, if you’re really adept, you think you can spot them at 50 paces, and indeed, perhaps that’s necessary to maintain your well-being.

People who’ve ever found themselves on the wrong end of a relationship with someone with borderline personality disorder might have a hard time avoiding the sordid details of the Johnny Depp defamation trial — but listening to it, hearing about it, thinking about it might also be chipping away at their well-being. What to do?

Well, I’m just going to say my piece. This is how I perceive the Johnny Depp / Amber Heard mess. It’s how I see it, completely subjectively, but I’m also pretty confident about it. Whether I’m right or wrong, no one knows. And really, who should care? These are celebrities whom none of us knows personally. Feel free to tell me how you perceive it too.

Johnny Depp is someone who grew up in a chaotic, abusive, not-nurturing household. He is a sensitive, creative person who became professionally successful. He spent a lot of personal energy in not becoming his parents—in trying to remain in category #3. He seems to have had a lot of success, too: he is known for being kind and generous — and not just to people who can do something for him, but to people he employs, to service people, to friends down on their luck, to random fans he encounters, to children in hospitals. He is widely known as “the nicest guy you’ll meet” or “really the sweetest guy in the world.” He is known for being very concerned about his children, protecting their privacy, creating a nurturing environment for them, and wanting to spend time with them.

He is also someone who, if I had to guess, like anyone who grew up with abuse and chaos, struggles with anger and resentment at the way he was raised — possibly especially toward his mother, who sounded in the testimony much like a person with borderline personality disorder. Despite this, Depp had successful relationships, including a very long-term relationship with the mother of his children, who still speaks of him positively (despite being dumped for Amber Heard).

Overall, considering his own childhood, Johnny Depp did pretty well for himself, but he also has had struggles with numbing himself with alcohol, opiates, and other substances (which is another common struggle for people who grew up in chaotic homes). This probably made him at times difficult to live with or work with. Even acknowledging that, does anyone but Amber Heard say Johnny Depp was unkind or abusive to them? No. And his life was more or less stable, long-term.

Enter Amber Heard. He described her at first as “too good to be true” (classic borderline personality red flag). All the little annoyances in his long-term relationship with Vanessa Paradis, all the dreary day-to-day imperfections of being together for so many years, of raising kids together, of resolving differences — all that looked like crap, I guess, compared to Amber Heard, and how pretty and young and attentive and understanding and adoring and “too good to be true” she was.

So basically Johnny Depp, in his middle age, struggling with his set of life experiences, his abusive childhood, his fame, his struggles with substances, fell into a common mistake: to leave the mother of your children for a princess, who turns out to be a mentally unwell witch.

This is a guy who’d tried hard to have outcome #3, but he fell into outcome #2, and it’s completely upended his life. He absolutely played a key role in this bad outcome, but I also feel really sorry for the guy.

He exercised terrible judgment. He made an extremely bad set of choices when it came to Amber Heard. It was completely predictable — from a distance — that “too good to be true” — the perfect fantasy love of his life — would become an emotionally unstable nightmare once he became involved with her; and then, if he ever abandoned the relationship, it was also completely predictable that she would go completely nuclear, making up defamatory stories about physical and sexual abuse. Because when someone who is “too good to be true” is done idolizing you, they want to see you annihilated.

Fortunately for Depp, Amber Heard is also a truly terrible actress. Hopefully the jury realizes there is no evidence, no medical reports, no police reports, no photos, and a plethora of witnesses who saw nothing abusive in his behavior and who say Depp never physcially harmed her or anyone. There are only Heard’s vague, unconvincing stories that don’t match any other woman’s experience of Depp, and some really unconvincing crocodile tears. [Edited to remove the thing about ripping off lines from movies; thanks, AppleCrisp.] Perhaps the jury will decide that Heard defamed Depp, and he’ll get the vindication he wanted in the public eye.

Let’s hope Johnny Depp feels this nightmare lawsuit was worth it and that it accomplished what he wanted, because right now, I’m seeing a lot of “crying Amber clips” — he’s dredged it up all over again, and if you’re not following the details, a lot of people are probably thinking “ugh, Johnny Depp, what a monster” — because who would lie about stuff like that, right? (Who would lie? A person with borderline personality disorder, that’s who.)

Let’s hope Johnny Depp rebuilds good relationships with his children and their mother. Let’s hope he’s apologized to them from the heart and is making genuine amends. Let’s hope he gets control over his substance use. Let’s hope a talented actor is able to resume his career.

And let’s hope Amber Heard fades into the sunset, and other potential partners have now been duly warned to keep their distance. (The most distressing bit of trivia I learned was that this woman has a baby now. I feel really sorry for the baby. Wait about 30 years for the tell-all book.)

That’s it — that’s my fluff post. It assumes that you’ve followed the trial at least a little bit and know basically what’s been said by whom. If not, you probably don’t care enough to be reading this at all. If you do have an opinion, tell me what you think.