A Confession of Sorts

By Pretty Paradoxical on Tumblr

It’s 3:30 am, I am sitting on my balcony and drinking jasmine green tea in an attempt to relax enough in order to write this.  In fact I just wrote a facebook status about it, in hopes to lessen my fear about this, to admit to the people I know that this is something that’s bothering me.   Of course some people in my life know about this, and pretty much everyone I knows about my struggles with depression, but this I feel has so much more stigma attached to it. 

You see, it’s hard to write something down when you feel ashamed of it.  I have tried writing this a million times, each time scrapping the two or three pages that I come up with – because I just don’t want people to know.  

I have spent a good part of my life really guarding my thought processes, I have actually have become quite adept at disassociating myself from what I am thinking, in order to rationalize it at the same time.  However, despite the fact that I can see that I am acting irrationally at times, I am unable to stop it until it’s run it’s course. 

I want to talk about Borderline Personality Disorder.   I want to tell you about what it means, what it means about me, and what I am going to do now that I am diagnosised with it, and as equally as important what I am not going to do.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), is obviously categorized as a Personality Disorder in the DSM-IV.   The symptoms include: unstable relationships, poor or negative sense of self, inconsistent moods and impulsivity.  There is often an incredibly intense fear of abandonment that often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.   Someone with BPD will often yoyo between pushing people away and being clingy/needy/helpless because of this fear and all in attempt to avoid getting rejected. 

As well there is an element of self-harming behaviour, suicidal tendencies and other destructive behaviours.  There also tends to be difficulty of monitoring emotions, for example someone with BPD who becomes sad can be inconsolable, or if they’re happy they’re bouncing off the walls ecstatic.  

There are some key indicators of what can cause BPD, but I won’t be discussing those here.  If you are interested there is a lot of literature on this topic all over the net.   

First of all, I need you to know I am not suicidal. However, I do often think about suicide, often feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness bring these up.  I fantasize about how I would kill myself, whether it be from downing a bottle of pills to jumping off the balcony of my apartment.  I have a rule though:  it’s okay to think about suicide, but it’s not okay to follow through.   I have this same rule about self harm and cutting – which I used to when I was a teenager.   It’s actually worked a lot for me.   So you, my friends and my family need to not worry that I am going to kill or hurt myself. 

Now with that all the way, I want you to know how this personally effects me.  A lot of you, my friends have seen the push and pull that I have done, get angry and bring you back into mylife.  I often yoyo with this, and there’s a few of you that know me well enough that have never really allowed me to get away with this.  In intimate relationships I am often a lot worse, I often feel like I don’t deserve to be loved, and often question anything and everything a partner does until it drives them off. 

I feel things so out of proportion that I have very little control over how I express my emotions.  The smallest thing could set me off, I could see a really cute puppy on the street, and this could make me so happy I would cry.  I can take a sarcastic comment the wrong way and go into a rage because of it.  

To touch on the anger issue a bit more, I quite often will not speak to the people that I get pissed off at, especially when I get to the point of snapping at them.   There’s a couple of reasons, one I honestly feel wronged in the situation, I either have been unable to communicate this, or if I have it is rare that I feel that the person takes responsibility for the way they have wronged me and it pisses me off more.  The second is that I am often so embarrassed by what has happened that I don’t know how to get back from it.  

A lot of my destructive behaviours are in the past for me.  The cutting, the promiscuity, putting myself into dangerous situations, smoking, drinking, drugs, a lot of that I have completey cut out.   But there are other things I have replaced them with – eating, needless spending, escapism into tv shows, movies, books, video games.   I disassociate myself with the world around me and escape into something else. 

Now, you might ask yourself what I really have to be embarrassed about.   This all has come off to be rather clinical, and it looks like I have a good handle on this.   I promise you, that I don’t, but I am trying. 

Where my embarrassment and shame about this disorder come from is the fact that when I look back on the past 10-15 years of my life it explains so much about me.  Some of the behaviours I’ve read about I am so embarrassed by them because I identify with them so much.  

IT’s come to the point that upon getting this diagnosis I feel like there’s really nothing left of me.  That I am not a real person, that I have no real personality, that I’m just a bag of emotions that can’t really succeed at anything.  I feel that this disorder defines me so completely that I will never actually ever be able to be a real person, and one will ever be able to see anything  beyond this disorder.

I feel that I am a complete success at being a complete failure, and that too is defined by the BPD.  I am unable to find love, do well in school or keep a job.  In fact, I feel this diagnosis had a lot to do with me loosing my last job, in a self-prophesizing sort of way.

I have decided though that I can’t let myself get caught up in this thinking.   I have taken this step to get better and that I need to keep moving forward.   Getting caught up in how this disorder has shaped my past is going to continue to let it shape my future.  I think that there’s amends with certain people that I need to make, but even with some of the people I have pushed out of my life I need to let myself move on from and not obsess about.  

What I am going to do over the next ear and a half, of when I start treatment, is that I am going to allow myself to be selfish.  However, not hedonistically so, I am going to be productively selfish.   I am going to do things for me to make me feel better, but not necessarily give me instant gratification.  I am going to take the time to get better and not feel shame in doing so.    I am not going to throw myself into my causes, and lose myself in them , I am not going to volunteer my time, instead I’m going to look into hobbies, some old and some new.  Cooking, community theatre, baking, singing things like that, I need to take the time to find me, instead of helping other people by throwing myself into a political cause, although I admit to some and even to me at times being altruistic can be self-gratifying.  

I am not going to let myself to feel guilt over any of this.  I have to take the time to get better so I can be happy, so I can be who I want to be, and more importantly discover and be happy with who that person is. 

How To: Dating Someone With Depression

You’ve just had an amazing date.   So much so that you’ve ended up back at their place.  You’re having a great time connecting with them, really chatting and getting to know one another.

The next think you know, things are getting a little heavy.  You’re making out, and you’re pretty much about to go all the way.  But it’s been a long day, and before anything happens you want to freshen up a little, so you politely excuse yourself to the bathroom.

While in the bathroom you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, wash yourself up a bit, and then you go into the cabinet to grab the toothpaste, to do the old, use your finger as a toothbrush trick.   When you do though, you knock over a couple of prescription bottles,  you pick it up and you read what they are.

Take one pill once a day.  

100 mg Bupropion,  

DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL

Take one or two pills as needed for anxiety.

0.5 mg Lorazepam

DO NOT TAKE WITH ALCOHOL

You take out your phone, you quickly google these medications.  You quickly find out that your date suffers from depression and anxiety. 

What do you do? What should you do?

Well I’m certainly no ‘expert’, meaning I don’t have a bunch of letters beside my name and a piece of paper from a patriarchal bureaucratic institution that supposedly gives people the license to present opinion as fact. 

But here, as someone that’s surviving depression and anxiety, let me give you a few pointers on how it can and could be done. 

1)      Respect.

2)      Compassion

3)      Honesty.

4)      Loyalty.

5)      Patience.

6)      Reassurance.

7)      LOVE.

Honestly, if you’re not really doing all of the above, how are you dating at all?

I am not going to sit here and give you a list of how to be a decent human being to others.  As long as you’re taking the time to be honest and listen to the person you’re dating, no matter how long you’ve been together, whether it’s been a week or a decade,  you’re going to keep going strong. 

I’m not going to deny that dating someone who is surviving and fighting - depression and anxiety isn’t going to have it’s challenge.   I certainly won’t deny that I am not the easiest person to date.   I’m kind of high maintenance and I need constant reassurance.  Right now, if I was to enter into a relationship, I’d be constantly terrified that it was all just temporary, that there’d be nothing I could do to stop the eventual end.

I’ll tell you, that particular insecurity has cut short a few relationships of mine. But in the end, they also weren’t showing the above list, and really I think you need to do all of the above list no matter who you’re dating if anything is going to last and be healthy. 

“I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.” 
― Marilyn Monroe