The Science of Borderline:
As understood by me.
This may seem a bit muddled, but I’ll start out with stolen words that’ll help me clarify.
The DSM-IV lists the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder as follows:
Disturbed Identity:
1. Identity disturbance; self-image or sense of self is persistently and markedly disturbed, distorted or unstable.
2. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
3. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
Disturbed Mood:
4. Emotional instability due to a marked reactivity of mood. Intense depressed episodes, irrationality or anxiety usually lasting a few hours, rarely more then a few days.
5. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
6. Inappropriate, intense anger or lack of control of anger, e.g.
Frequent displays of temper.
Constant anger
Recurrent physical fights
Disturbed Perception:
7. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideations (feelings of persecution) or severe dissociative symptoms (discontinuity of experience)
Disturbed Behavior:
8. Impulsiveness in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging:
Spending
Sex
Substance abuse
Reckless driving
Binge eating
9. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats
Self-mutilating behavior.
To try to explain these as one would if they came from a medical background is obviously impossible. But I can offer to you my own personal understanding of what it means to live within this very grim outline. A view from the eye of the storm, so to speak.
I’ll break it up into groups so you can take a breath in between.
Disturbed Identity:
To literally not know who you are. It's like being 5, almost. ‘Today I am Tinkerbell, tomorrow I shall be Alice, and then I will be someone new entirely.’ Its like that with everything, including trying to find an occupation. I went through 5 months of cosmetology school, only to withdraw, look into dance therapy and change my mind again. Now I’m thinking about looking into modeling for art classes, or maybe working at a sex shop. Socially its very much the same. Depending on the group of friends depends on who I am and what mores I adhere myself to.
Oh the fear of abandonment. The most eloquently put description of that fear was in the book "Stop walking on eggshells" by Paul Mason and Randi Kreger. "Imagine the terror that you would feel if you were a 7-year-old, lost and alone in the middle of Times Square in New York City. Your mom was there a second ago, holding your hand. Suddenly the crowd swept her away and you can't see her anymore. You look around frantically, trying to find her. Menacing strangers glare back at you.... This is how people with BPD feel nearly all the time.”
We’ll do anything to avoid that fear. Then it becomes ’I-Hate-You-Don’t-Leave-Me’. We’re so angry because we know you’re going to leave us, and we’re so desperate because we can’t stand the thought of you leaving. We’ll do anything to stop you. Threaten suicide to make you stay with us, even though part of us knows it’s only out of concern. We’ll change who we are on the surface, we’ll beg and plead, scream and yell. I myself have done things I never would have, if I weren’t driven by the fear. I’ve done drugs that I hate, I’ve said things I don’t mean, I’ve behaved in ways that made me sick, all because it looked like the only thing to keep me from feeling that pain of being abandoned. And even while we do this, we’ve already decided you’re going to leave, and so we withdraw, back into our marble prison, protecting ourselves from the pain we know is coming.
The thing of it is, though, we’re so afraid of the loss of people because it’s all the people in our lives who make up who we are. For me, I feel like I am who I surround myself with. If I lose someone, to circumstance, or death or whatever…I lose me. Suddenly I have no idea who I am anymore. I am my parents daughter, my brother‘s sister, my boyfriend‘s girlfriend, my friend‘s friend…And all of these Ana-selves need to exist for me to be stable. If I lose part of that, who do I become? If I’m not a daughter, what am I? If I’m not a sister, who am I? If these friends aren’t my friends, then what became of me? It’s a very tedious, terrifying way to live. If I am not a part of someone else, then I do not exist, I’m not real. I become a nobody, a nothing, an absent part of a picture. And that is a horrifying feeling. Even writing about it, and looking at some old journal entries of mine I feel that panic, the one that I know so well, creeping up my spine and spreading through my skin.
And I hate it. I hate being who I am. And I know, just like you, all you want is for it to stop. It’s like the worst ride ever that you can’t get off. I hate this up and down, left and right, never knowing who I am, what I want, what I need. I hate needing people so badly that without them I am reduced to something that only knows how to be in pain. I’m always asking myself, “Who am I anymore?” This body I live in, its not even mine. It’s a shell, because the real Ana is a lie…A mirage. A fake reality. It’s a lie, twisting, changing, shifting to be what you want it to be. I just want to be one person. And I want Ana to be Ana, to belong to me and not your. Not to be yours. Not hers. Not his. Not theirs. I just want to be my own person. I just want to be myself., and to know, without question that no matter what happens I will be me, and that can’t be changed by who is in my life, and who is not.
But we don’t quite get that, do we?
It all ties together in a neat little bow (only nothing about it is neat, it’s messy and violent and horrible and terrifying) when you look at it all together. I don’t know who I am, so I am who you make me. If you’re not there to make me who I am then I’m not there at all. I am empty. I am nothing
The saddest part of it all, though, is that so very often we create our own abandonment with the shifts in the relationships as well as the unavoidable underlying sense of self-hate. And then there is the emptiness.
I am going to try to explain the emptiness that we feel chronically. But how do I aptly describe that inner hollowness? If you've never felt it, then no words you read here will ever be adequate to give shape to that state of being. If you have felt it, then I have said more then enough already. But I will try, for those lucky enough to have no such knowledge.
Its like a gnawing black hole in the center of your soul, ragged edges aching bitterly. It is the feeling of dying slowly in your own skin. Decaying your soul until it is brittle and lifeless. The terror is unimaginable. Like being buried alive, totally deprived of all your senses. Severed from yourself, your body, your own life. The lines of your existence blurring into nothingness and you seep into the black hole, forever separate, caged...crushed. Gone. You writhe in unspeakable torment, your body wracked with each soul shaking sob that you needn’t even cry, because you can‘t. You try to cry, but you are trapped in the prison of your own emptiness. Your chest constricts and your heart feels squeezed painfully, as if at any moment you’ll suffer dire consequences and you’ll die a horrible death.
Only the death never comes. Nothing ever comes. Time means nothing as it stretches on into forever and there is no forward or backward, nothing to mark the time or let you know that you’ve felt differently, that you’re still something real. There is nothing. It’s like infinite space has consumed you, eaten you whole and as you’re trapped, trying to scream, in this cold, dark, painful hole you struggle to find something, anything that is different. Because the nothingness, this harrowing, hollowing out emptiness drives you to the utter brink of insanity. You become the true definition of lost.
I would compare it to being hopeless, but it’s beyond that. You don’t even know what hope is. To be hopeless, at least you can remember. You know that it exist… But in this emptiness, you’ve never felt anything like hope. It’s a nonsense word. It means nothing to you. The black hole that lives where your core used to be is sucking away all the memories and remnants of happiness until there is nothing but a rotting, festering decay that eats away all the goodness, all the light all the beauty of a soul that’s destroyed, leaving behind only unspeakable pain that no number of tears can ever soothe.
You’ll spend hours clutching at your center, trying to hold yourself together lest you fly apart and you lose all the delicate pieces that make up the fragile person you are. But it doesn’t matter, no one can see the cracks that spider web their way across every inch of you, no one sees the last of your humanity, the last of your ability to love seeping away from these small fissures in your soul. The emptiness is unrelenting as it carves you out until you’re nothing but a living doll. Hollow of everything that makes you human. An empty husk that retains enough muscle memory to make the lips smile, the vocal chords vibrate to create words and laughter. There will be just enough to trick people into thinking you’re alive when really you’re long since dead. The decay just hasn’t touched your skin yet.
There is no heart left to beat beneath the breast, no stomach left to take the bullshit that people seem to come up with. No lungs to breathe, just a hole that lets the wind rush through in a permanent exhalation. No soul left to tear apart, no spirit left to put truth behind the jokes and smiles. The eyes, those little doorways into the soul, will only lead you deep into the black hole that makes up this living-dead girl
Eventually you’re standing alone in the darkness, and all you want to do is end the pain. You don’t care how you do it, you don’t care who sees and who finds you. You’ve lost every ounce of heart, you’re not even human now, you’re half stone. The things like joy and love and tenderness are gone, replaced by unfeeling, uncaring stone.
To be touched by that emptiness is to have the death mark burned deep into the soul, forever changing the one marked by it.
Disturbed Mood:
The mood swings! Oh lord. The moods are intense and they come on like a monsoon. It is utterly exhausting. In the space of mere hours I have experienced the entire spectrum of human emotions. Shooting up and down at impossible speeds. Going from gleeful to suicidal in mere moments.
I’m sure you know as well as I do what it feels like to ride the highest highs, and crash to the lowest lows. And I’m sure it’s happened in fairly quick succession before at some point. Now if you can recall how harrowing and exhausting that was, pull that to the front of your mind and imagine if that were the case monthly, weekly, sometimes even daily. There are parts of it I don’t mind. It means that sometimes I can be dragged out of depression to carefree joy, but the dark side of it means that my good days can be dashed against the rocks as easily as causing a ripple in a pond.
Part of it is the lack of ability to maintain relationships. See, I guess the way I work is really different, and not in a good way. There will be an intense response to someone, some sort of idealization. And that high will last for awhile, a sort of hero-worship. But then something shifts. They do something, say something, forget something and it crashes down around the both of us. Suddenly they’re human, and imperfect and fallible and it causes a devaluation of them in my mind. I can only imagine how frustrating it is for them, but I know how it is for me. Because I hate the swings between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. Friend and foe. Love and hate. This is called splitting. It’s a double edged sword. It serves a real purpose. In cases of abuse, for example. Let’s say there is a kid who is getting beat by the caretaker. But there are other times the caretaker is loving and caring. Splitting allows the brain to separate the two. There is the wonderful, loving, wholly good caretaker, and the evil, wicked one who is in no way attached to the good. Two totally differing beings.
Like the ‘I-Hate-You-Don’t-Leave-Me’ I touched on earlier. If you think about that statement in two parts, it’s like it was meant for two different people. I hate you. Don’t leave me. I hate the devalued part of you, because you make mistakes, you hurt me, you let me down (never mind the fact my expectations are nearly impossible to meet) and therefore I don’t like you anymore. But you’re now part of my life, and therefore you’re part of my identity. If you leave, I am disrupted. So I need you to stay. It’s a very complex web we weave, those of us who are BPD. We cannot escape our own entanglement.
I want to touch on rage here. Because that’s one of the things that people have the hardest time understanding. What was an annoyance for them resulted in a massive melt down for me. Its not anger, keep that in mind. It is rage. It is so unlike anger. Anger can adapt, it can be productive. Anger can be a tool. But not this rage. It is desperate, out of control. This rage is the type of thing that knows no words. Like a cornered beast, fighting for it’s life, uncaring to any damage it does to itself or the surroundings. It’s like a poison that swiftly boils through the body, destroying all that is good. It is a forest fire, a hurricane, a monsoon. It is unstoppable, unreasonable, it is like a force of nature that is trying to reside in fragile skin.
It’s unrelenting, it is unforgiving, it is uncaring. It will rip through me when I least expect it, when I don’t know what else to do. And it will over take me. I find myself burning in the flame of my own rage, hating everything. If I could harness the power of this rage and turn it towards something, I would be an unstoppable force of nature. But as it is, I live in chaos, waiting for the next time the tiger breaks loose and wreaks havoc on the world around me.
Disturbed Perception:
Oh the things stress can trigger in those of us who are Borderline. It’s so baffling. The two most frequent responses to stress are paranoia, the second is dissociation. This type of paranoia has no positive aspect to it. It’s nothing useful or even tolerable. It’s the type that tells you that everyone is plotting sinister things behind your back, and that you’re a horrible human being, one that doesn’t matter to anyone which is why they’re planning terrible things against you. When daily life gets too stressful, I find myself in a panic because I know without a doubt that I am alone in this world. That no one cares about me, that everyone is out to get me because I am a horrible, wretched human being. I find my self suspicious of everyone around me. I don’t trust anyone. No one is safe from these delusions. My mind finds things like lies or inaccuracies in everything people say, what they do. It will boil over with wild stories of what people are saying behind my back.
Often I find myself having to seek out reassurance. No, I’m not being cheated on, no my friends don’t hate me, no one important is out to get me, not everyone hates me, I’m really not all that bad of a person. It will be okay. I’m going to be fine.
It’s led me to do some horrible things. From sneaking in to people’s private belongings, to eavesdropping. Thankfully this is something I’ve gotten some control over. Its no longer an uncontrollable compulsion. Now its just a desire that I can almost always quash. Of course, whenever someone does something that might be considered an intentional slight to me, I find myself struggling with these issues all the more.
When the stress doesn’t trigger paranoia, it triggers the dissociation. We mentioned this very briefly earlier. But I’d like the chance to explain a few more things relating to my own personal brand of dissociation. As I said before, there are a few different levels of dissociation. When I “go away” into the womb of my soul, when I remember nothing, there is more then one set of traits that surface. Traits that are most assuredly not filtered through the personality of Ana. They’re almost like the distilled essence. Pure sexuality. Pure innocence. Pure rage. Pure joy. Pure cruelty. Pure tolerance. Pure violence. When all that is Ana goes away, the others come out to play. In all my reading and all the people I’ve spoken with I’ve found a few things.
1) This is called a multiplicity.
2) Most people with BPD don’t have one.
3) My unique blend of the two makes it a little bit like Dissociative Identity Disorder.
(And something I might touch on later. Not now though.)
It all boils down to a whole different set of problems that I get to deal with. But what I do share in common with everyone else is the loss of time, location, awareness and even my identity. What little of it I have.
Disturbed Behavior:
This is the one that people find to be the most controversial. And the hardest in some ways to accurately diagnose. See, the stress, or even the emptiness that we feel, results in impulsive behaviors, that can sometimes be quite extreme. Could be drugs, sex, eating, spending, driving…Anything that could potentially be harmful. Personally my flavor of impulse was spending. I used to be a true believer in the whole “retail therapy” thing. If I was upset, I’d get my papa to buy me something. Clothes, music, books, a movie…Things like that.
When the emptiness set in I could be a huge tease. My personal flavor of trauma kept it from ever reaching actual sex, but I was probably the bane of a few high school boys, causing more then enough frustration to last a lifetime. It’s how kisses ended up basically being party favors to me. I could kiss anyone and not have it mean anything else other then something nice, or affectionate. I love kisses. Not the healthiest habit, but hey. It happened.
I popped my fair share of pills too. Mainly painkillers. Morphine was my weakness, it could get me every time. A few times I did speed, but I had to hit a huge number to get the effect cause of my ADHD. It’d even me out, and then I’d have to take even more then that to get the high I needed. I also went through phases of eating issues. From binging to starving. It was always an attempt to control, to fill the void that throbbed right beneath my heart.
And when those impulses weren’t enough, I would cut.
It was the ultimate release of overwhelming emotions, the most eloquent expression of self-loathing, the cleanest display of rage, the most sincere punishment for my crimes and sins, and the only dependable anchor when I was empty, when I was numb to my own heartbeat. It was a ritual of reliving painful memories that festered in my injured soul, it was a way to block out things that I didn’t want to confront, a way to shelter myself from emotions I didn’t want to feel. It was so beautifully addicting. It’s something I still fight with. My arm is threaded with a hectic pattern of white scars, some slightly raised, some dimpled. All tell a story of a moment when I could not exist outside my own pain. When it was so extreme I thought my only choices were to bleed or die from my heart ripping it’s way out of my body. And I always chose to bleed. Because it was so much sweeter then the pain that clawed its way through each fiber of my being, eating away at every atom of my existence.
Suicidal thoughts and feelings. The desire to be dead (but not necessarily to die, mind) was in response to the sheer number of life crises I had, and continue to have. Peer rejection and bullying always make it that much worse. It isn’t so much the actual desire to be dead, but the pressing need to be protected from the unrelenting pain. The constant code red, the unending state of crisis. When we cannot die, we wound. We cope. We respond like wolves, we just curl up and wait to die, or to live. Because we suffer. We hurt. Inside our own skin we are in perfect, distilled agony.
These four groups of symptoms. Notice how the key word here is ‘disturbed’? I told you, medical terms lack compassion. That is the best I can do to explain the symptoms. These symptoms I’ve lived with for almost my whole life. But it’s only been about six years since I found out that my life will consist of these irrational mood swings, uncontrollable rage, crushing depression, whimsical flitting from one thing to the next, the self-injury, the lack of identity, a skewed sense of self, unstable relationships and an emptiness that will never go away for good.
Six years of struggling to find myself, to link myself to my own past. Six years of fighting to make and maintain relationships with family, friends, and romantically. Six years of finding a path to follow and changing my mind abruptly when I fall out of love with whatever idea I just had. Six years of having to be ashamed of my own weakness as I admit to another bout of self-injury. Six years of violent rages and depression so crushing I can’t get out of bed, can’t make myself shower, can’t even make myself eat. Six years of hours missing, of memories people share with my body but not with me. Six years of days spent reacting out of paranoia.
It seems so long, but it’s only about a quarter of my life that has an explanation for the emptiness so deep, so dark, so huge that I cannot escape it. Because I don’t even know who I am. But with each day since my diagnosis at least I’ve had the knowledge to know that I can keep moving forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment