Paralysis in the face of crisis

My life is currently filled to the brim with doctor visits and appointments and paranoia and the occasional urge to beat my head against the wall. Of course, more frequently I'd rather beat other people's head through walls. I'm not actually a masochist after all.

I have the strangest flare ups in my stupid Borderline.

And I do mean strangest.

Like today, I wanted nothing more then to stay at home all day, hidden away from the world so I could just learn to breathe again.

After all, some days I just forget how to function. Today was one of those days. I call them 'reset' days. Because I take the time to just do little nothings that allow me a sort of meditation because I'm busy while I focus on my breathing. It's actually very calming. (You should try it some time.)

I'm very paranoid right now. I'm not sure if it's my intuition ringing a bell, or if I'm just very seriously paranoid. Sometimes it takes me a few days to tell me which is which.

In fact, I'm not sure if my intuition is related to my BPD. Because I have an UNCANNY ability to have dreams or nigglings in my mind when something isn't right with someone in my life. When someone is lying to me, or has...intentions that are less then stellar or fair for me.

But occasionally it's just the BPD paranoia. Sometimes it's just me not trusting people. Often, I don't trust people that aren't counted among my closest friends. Of course, I've never been given a real reason to trust humanity.

Why should I?

They have mocked me, they have terrorized me, they have abused me, beaten me down. They have slandered my name, and shown me an encompassing amount of disrespect. So to be fair, my paranoia isn't entirely based in fancy.

And to be fair the more time I spend contemplating what's going on in my life, the more I realize that I've almost always had reason to be paranoid.

I've reacted harshly, to be sure. But not always because I was wrong, sometimes it was simply because the emotions were a suckerpunch.

Sometimes, as a Borderliner, if I'm expecting the emotions I can do soemthiing about it. But if I'm taken by surprise, if I'm slapped in the face, so to speak, I can't get a hand on the reins of my emotions.

I think of them, sometimes, as a living thing. Something that is part of me, but still separate because I can't always control them.

And I know, I've heard it a million times: OF COURSE YOU CAN CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS! :D

....No.

That's the thing!

"Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering."

So my psyche has third degree burns. I have no emotional skin. No protection.

The slightest bump, the tiniest jostling is the equivalent of stabbing someone emotionally.

How the hell do I control that, when it hurts so bad, and all I can do is lash out because it's the only logical (yeah you heard me, logical) reaction to that sort of pain.

It's not fair. Not to you, not to me. Not to anyone. It's not fair to me that you can hurt me with the littlest upset. It's not fair to you that when it hurts me, I lash out. It's a painful process, and one that I try so hard to keep control over.

Just please, understand me.

I don't ask to be pardoned- just forgiven. I don't ask to be right- just understood. I don't ask to be loved- just respected. I don't ask to be coddled- just for some care in your handling of me. I don't ask to be protected- just to have a safety net.

The only thing between you and me is the wall I jealously guard

The last couple of days have been a curious series of events. And I'm not sure how to feel about any of it. Actually, that isn't even true. I know how I felt.

I've been swinging violently from the highest of highs, to the most absurd rages. Just total anger for no real reason. There isn't a real reason for it, things are actually going fairly well in my life.

I've recently hooked up with an old childhood friend, Mat and I have been arguing very little, I've been doing people's hair, I've been out and active fairly regularly.

But maybe this is the problem. Maybe it's that I've stepped too far away from where I'm used to residing.

I was going to make today's blog entry about makeup and clothes. About the different masks and armor I have worn to protect me from the people who surround me. And I think I'll touch on that.

So here's the thing...I've always been different. I've been everything from a drama queen to a quiet lurker. And in school I had a very small group of people who stuck by my side, for the most part I was disliked, treated with disdain. Treated like a carrier of the plague. I've always been different and awkward. For many reasons.

First of all, in my childhood my family were Jehovah's Witnesses. And let me tell you, being raised in the equivalent of a cult (especially in a small town in the Midwest) is one hell of a way to turn a kid into an outcast.

But on top of that, I'd been home-schooled until I was of 5th grade age, but stayed behind a year because I just didn't get everything, and my social skills were lacking.

And the crowning sign that screamed 'DIFFERENT!' was that I behaved differently, I expressed myself differently.

My teenage years were hell. Picked on, teased, bullied, attacked, ostracized, and spoken down to... Ignored, unwanted. You bet.

I wasn't ever asked to go to parties, go to dances, or even to dance when I went. I wasn't asked out by people. The few boyfriends I had between middle school were guys I asked out, and its an embarrassingly small number.

So, when the actual outcast thing started to kick in, I suited up every day in my 'armor'. First it was the goth clothing.

A slouchy looking set of bondage pants (almost always in black), some sassy, dark t-shirt (occasionally a tank top or long sleeve), huge hoodies, and either massive boots or skater shoes. To be fair, occasionally I woke massive, angry looking boy-styled bondage pants too. Always full of chains and straps.

Then I discovered the jewelery. Angry looking leather bracelets, rings on multiple fingers, chokers and chunky necklaces.

My hair was dyed every color under the sun, each other more outrageous then the last. And I almost always wore it down, unless my depression got so bad that I let my hygiene slipped and I was gross. Then it was yay pony tail.

When I wore makeup it was either elaborate and uncanny looking, or it was smudged darkness around my eyes, and a pale glow to my skin, with too dark lips.

With my headphones on my head and a dark backpack low on my back, a sullen and almost violent look brewing on my features, and an angry gait you've got me in highschool.

I wasn't happy, I was bullied and treated like shit. But I lashed back out at the people who called me names. For every time I was called I freak, I yelled out that they were sheep. For every time I was called a bitch, I sneered out that they were pathetic. They'd get in my face, and I'd get right back in theirs. I wasn't gonna take it laying down, after all. Plus, it was a good way to take out some anger.

I recall in my freshman year, some senior got right into my face and called me something. I didn't hear it, but I heard the tone, the one they used for every time I got called bitch, slut, freak, fat, ugly, stupid, cunt, whore... And I stepped toe to toe with him, and told him, in no uncertain terms, that his life meant nothing to me, and if he died a horrific death, I wouldn't even laugh because he was worth so little to me, I doubt I'd acknowledge his demise. His face drained of blood. And I walked away.

But under all that anger at their treatment, I believed them. And that was why I was so angry, why I'm still angry. Because I can't look at my body and not feel let down, and even disgusted. I am frequently heard saying that I'm better looking with my clothes on.

After those years, I believed I was ugly, fat, stupid, unwanted, horrible, and even that I was a tease.

And this isn't okay. Because to be totally honest, there is very little that can convince me otherwise. On my best days, when I see myself all I think is, "Well, I'm not ugly."

Here's a Youtube Vid I found...I think it's very powerful. It brought me to tears when I watched it because...I got it.


But now...

Time to SWITCH directions!

So even though things have been going well, there have been a number of anger outbursts, and I'm so exhausted.

See here's the thing...when I have a bad spell, though it sucks, it's actually fairly mellow...I've got a long period of time when I feel like shit and I hate life...but it's consistent.

When life is good, I have more anger outbursts, and I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, so when it does...I'm devastated.

I'm so fucking tired. So tired and just wrung out that I almost cut today. For the first time in AGES....

I'm holding it off. Hopefully I can until the desire passes, or until something distracts me, but here I am. Another fucking battle.

And even though tonight I will fall asleep, I'll wake up to the same fucking battle tomorrow.

I'm so tired.

I should go try to sleep. It's like 3 in the morning.

If I pretend to be strong, will you see the flaws?

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.

Borderline Personality Disorder: A personal revolution

Borderline Personality Disorder

My diagnosis

(WARNING! There are some aspects about this post, and probably this whole blog, that will be triggering and not totally appropriate for children. Just saying.)

Teenagers are supposed to see themselves as invincible, perfect, creatures of infinite possibilities. At 15 years old, I’d lived my life in total chaos. At 15 years old I was sat down by my therapist, Dr. Katherine Handcock, with my anxious parents next to me, to listen to the three words that explained my past and destroyed my hopes and dreams in one fell swoop.

Borderline Personality Disorder.

Everything else faded into the background at that moment, as Dr. Handcock explained to us what that diagnosis meant. And with that, my life shifted. We had to find a new therapist, a specialist. My mother bought books that she frantically read, trying to gain some insight and understanding of me, her marked and permanently damaged child. My world was forever changed.

I would never “get better.”

This fate was overwhelmingly horrific. I was the odd little ‘goth’ girl who had always wanted to be accepted widely, if not universally. I wanted to be embraced for ideals, ideas, and thoughts that were unique. The one thing that can be said for me was that I was an odd little child, filled to the brim with thoughts of life as one might expect from Faerie, or Neverland, filled with universal love, adventures, the ability to be who you wanted to be that day, and someone else the next. I didn’t want to be pinned down by who I was. What I craved was the ability to glamour myself into someone new, whenever it was I felt like it. I wanted my whimsical nature and plans to be encouraged. All of that, I found out quickly, are common parts of Borderline. In fact, everything I had ever done wasn’t really me, it was a symptom of my mental disease.

Talk about a blow to an already fragile sense of identity, not to mention sense of originality. It seemed to me that I wasn’t a unique human being anymore, I was now part of a collective. I was part of a ‘terminal’ mental illness. Those first few months of specialized therapy with Dr. Sarah Marsh were the worst of my life.

Homework and books. Hours spent reading, writing, and looking into the reasons for my behavior. Everything about me that was different was swiftly explained to me in medical terms. If you aren’t already aware, medical terminology isn’t very compassionate. Personally, I feel like those formative years are, by far, the worst time to learn of something so world shattering. It wasn’t long before I was positive that whoever I had been no longer existed and, in fact, had never been real at all. It was as though I was a badly written character in a terrible story.

Everything gained a new, harsh face. My ritual of release, of taking the invisible emotional pain and making it physical, visible and ‘real’ had a new name, a title… ‘Self-Injury’, one of the cornerstone symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. Even my behavior towards my own my family, my friends… Now called ‘splitting’ and ‘I-Hate-You-Don’t-Leave-Me.’ And strangest to my, then teenage, mind, the concept of ‘intense and unstable interpersonal relationships.” These words took all my intense pain and turmoil and turned it into a science project.

Living with BPD, no matter your age, is harrowing and painful and extremely frustrating, in ways that others will never quite get, just like we don‘t understand how it is that they exist the way they do. We have all the empathy in the world, when we‘re in our good phases, but we can‘t ever understand what it is to live without our pain and our confusion and our fear. But I also had to learn that most of us don’t get diagnosed until adulthood, which was unsettling. Finding out from someone who is still practically a stranger that it isn’t like seasonal depression, that doesn’t ever go away…that was utterly heart breaking.

It was explained to me, finally, in a way I could understand. “Most depression is like a cold, or the flu. It comes and foes, but you can get better from it with the right medication. And when it comes back it is inevitability something slightly different. It will never be exactly the same. But Borderline, or any personality disorder, is more like cancer. It manifests in different ways. Very rarely, and only with some types, will there be a ‘cure.’ Most only have treatments. It will never go away, it doesn’t get fixed. In fact you should expect to have relapses and that hospitalizations are likely. You will most likely be Borderline for the rest of your life.” And with that my entire world came to a careening stop. I’m still not sure if it has ever recovered from that blow.

Surviving the storm: Living with Borderline.


Borderline: The sliver of emptiness where I exist. It’s tucked away somewhere between the total chaos of true insanity and the relative stability of neurosis.

For those of you who are fortunate enough to exist outside of this spectrum allow me to explain this statement. True insanity is, as my mother would say, doing the same thing over and over again and honestly expecting different results, because you’re that disconnected from reality. You’re lost in a whirlwind of colors and noises and pictures you can’t quite see, and it drives you to absolute madness. I’m sure you’ve experienced something like that…a noise that’s just beyond hearing teasing you until you want to scream. And neurosis, on the other side, for all that there are quirks and oddity, generally means you will respond to treatment and that you can mostly function like non-quirky people. You have longer, more frequent lucid moments then the insane counterpart. And me? I live somewhere between the two. Always have.

My childhood seems to me as if it were a series of snapshot moments, punctuated by trauma, rage, and loneliness. I was constantly finding myself locked in combat with everyone around me, while battling with everything inside of me. I was waging a hopeless war against my own emotions, my very existence. My parents didn’t know what to do with me anymore then I knew what to do with myself.

Being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder was both a blessing and a cure. My otherness could be quantified, but it also meant that I was, and am, irrevocably damaged. My world went from endless possibilities to a narrow path that I will struggle along for the rest of my life.
Before the diagnosis changed my world entirely, I had assumed that once I’d confronted all the demons and monsters from my terror-struck and abused childhood I’d be heavily scarred, but totally functional just like everyone else.

How does one grow when the environment is incompatible? How do you live in a world that was created to hinder you at ever turn? Or, to be totally fair, how am I supposed to live and grow in this world when it seems as though I was created to live in a different way, in a different world? In a way I can compare it to a fey forced to live in our world, unable to return to the splendor and beauty of Faerie. It’d be Tinkerbell, never able to return to Neverland, the land of her birth and creation. Emotions, all the responsibilities, relationships, all the human interactions we experience every day. The ones we require to find a sense of well being and happiness… To live in this world, I must first become a living lie.

The hardest part of living with BPD is the ever present battle within my own soul. It’s almost as though to live I must constantly die. We all know that to be human is to change. To be unchanging is to be dead. It’s one of our species most admirable traits, the ability to adapt, to change. But for me, as a Borderliner it seems less like evolution and more like forced mutation, or as if I were losing myself to nothingness.

While watching my peers, my friends and my family, I find that I feel so stupid. They know how to connect to the people, the world, around them. They know how to live! When I see how effortless it appears for them to create and maintain relationships and general human contact, I feel so dumb. No one had to teach them how to live, or how to function. But not me. I had to learn to be empty so that professionals could fill me up with lessons, I had to let them take my mind apart so they could rewire all my thought processes, my very instincts, my reactions. They had to teach me how to feel, to connect, to respond in the correct manner. They had to build firewalls, and stop-gates. Things to keep me from behaving as I would normally. Because normal for me is unhealthy for the rest of the world.
There are things I have to think about that some others never even have to consider. I have to always be on guard, wonder if I am responding in an acceptable fashion, check to see if my emotions are my own or if they’re imitations of the emotions of other people around me. I constantly have to question my motives, my rationality, the logic of my choices and reactions, and a thousand other details that crowd my mind to keep me and my BPD in check.

After long, hard years of therapy, I’ve learned to cope as best as I can. I’ve had to learn how to act around other people, how to ‘fit in’ to the best of my ability. But most of it is just a front. Borderliners are the greatest actors of all. We don’t always know how to feel, how to act, how to behave. So, even though nothing has changed under the surface, I can take my cues and perfectly mimic relationships, desirable traits, normalcy, you name it…for a time, anyway. I wish people could understand that, you know? That no matter how hard I fight with it, no matter how long a period of time it is that I seem normal, or that I’m just an average young woman, I’m not. I don’t know when it’ll go away again. I can’t tell you when next I’ll be plunged into darkness and fire and chaos. I can’t give you a timeline, because so very often I’m the last one to know. I can’t tell that it’s shifting so much of the time. My Borderline is part of me, to an extent it is me. To me it is as normal as breathing. It’s how I lived. It’s my reality.

But those facts escape people’s minds so easily. They forget that I am different. They forget that I have to struggle to find something, in each and every day, that links me to the yesterdays gone by. Something that connects me to a past I don’t feel like I’m actually part of. I can never have the luxury of forgetting, even for an instant, that I live in a free fall. Completely disconnected from everything that grounds most people. When I feel depressed I can’t remember what it is to be happy. When a rage comes on, I can’t imagine ever being calm again because I don’t even know that word anymore. And when I’m hurt, when I feel betrayed, I swear I will never again trust anyone because time will never heal those wounds. I cannot recall my past on a whim. I remember my life mainly as one would remember a movie from their childhood, something that is hazy, separate, not of them. The only time that ever really changes is when I’m triggered, for good or bad, by something. Then the associated memories are released into me like a drug, filling my mind, my blood, my soul in an all consuming rush, just long enough for me to realize that it is mine, that I am real, no dream-thing from some warped mind, that I have a history that extends behind me, but just like that it is locked back into the recesses of my mind that I have such trouble getting to.

It is so lonely. Living trapped in this isolated realm. Feeling like I’m not real. Like I am a compilation of emotions that make no sense. I am a creation of every emotion I have ever absorbed and projected back onto people. I am the mold of every hand that has ever touched me, I am every name I have ever been called, I am every persona that people have offered to me, I am every role I have been given to play. I am like a shadow. I do not exist without the combination of two separate entities. When I am alone, I cease to be real.

There are many things that make me so I don't exist. Dissociation is the most distressing. I work hard to maintain control, but when I dissociate from myself I truly am not real. I can't always remember
my own actions. To behave differently but have no memory of your own actions...I do my best not to shirk my responsibility of my actions, even if I don't remember them. But sometimes it strikes me as very
unfair. There are, of course, varying degrees to dissociation. A mild form that leaves me feeling like my head is twenty feet above my body, swaddled in cotton, attached only by a thread. Or the types that feel
rather like a realistic dream, and you can't be sure what is true, the type where you auto pilot. And then there is the type where hours pass and I have no idea where they've gone or what I've done.

This is my life. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year.