Every time I meet someone new, I can’t meet them fast enough. If someone sparks my interest, I want to know everything about them. This is what it’s like to be a whirlwind.
I usually start with birthdays. What’s your sign?
I believe we’re ruled by the planets so I want to know how you jive with me–a Scorpio. Then I’ll move on to the good ol’ MBTI/enneagram. If they don’t know what those are, I just assume they aren’t very introspective.
I’m a personality junkie.
Tell me your traumas.
Give me that high.
Let me give you my two cents on anything and everything. At 25, I’ve experienced enough. (And now at 30, republishing this, I have to say “hold my beer” to my past self).
Trauma makes me uncomfortable so that means I cope with humor, and there’s not much I shy away from. Let me make you laugh at my expense, my treat.
Keeping trauma at an arms length, still close enough to touch and feel but far enough not to drown in, it keeps me present. My empathy is worn like a thick coat, covered in antennas, reaching out to relate. Sometimes the coat turns into a suffocating slime where I’m overwhelmed by everything I feel, whether it’s my own feelings, or others. This is when my empathy turns to spite. When it turns into “you should suffer like I’ve suffered” because I lose patience trying to relate and help; and usually people DON’T want to be helped. People don’t like to change. (Five years later, this still rings true. I’ve had 5 whole years to develop my eye for an eye approach to living and past me would have her flabber’s ghasted).
Here, I am going to tell you all my darkest secrets. Not because anyone asked about them, but because I hope that if even one of my stories can touch someone and help them, maybe they’ll decide to make a positive change. Whether that’s to get help; to love themself a little more; to be more patient; to let go of something too heavy—anything—it’ll be worth spilling all these beans!
I’m going to take you from A to Y. Just because I’m not yet to Z.
✨
Sometimes life happens to you and you sit on the experiences for fifty years and never tell anyone about anything that happened because it was too painful or embarrassing. Your life isn’t a secret. We all live so afraid of exposing the people that fucked us up. We pay money and go to therapy to get unfucked before we do it to someone else.
Luckily, I did this at the ripe age of twenty four and before I had children (and now at almost 31, children appear to now be off the table entirely).
Most people go it alone and think they’ve broken the cycle successfully, and maybe some do. In my experience, 99% of them don’t. This blog is a testament to the work I did with my therapist to unfuck myself, as well as a collection of stories on how I got fucked up.
As Anne Lamott said “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
The easiest story to tell is your own story, right? Wrong. The tricky thing about your story is all about perception. Only you can experience your life. A lot of life is muddled with miscommunication. A lot can go wrong between the message: A, and how you receive it: B.
As someone with BPD (surprise!), a lot of the time, how I receive and perceive information is filed under the “C” category, meaning the “B” stage is where my brain is taking the information and slandering and skewering it, and then shitting it out as something unrecognizable.
Now, that’s not to say that having BPD makes me unreliable. There’s a reason I have BPD. Check “TRAUMA” underlined, highlighted, and embossed in my neural pathways. I have to take extra time to perceive things as the driver in my life.
Is that a deer jumping out in front of my car? No! That’s just a flight or fight response brought on by one of my many triggers. Does Sally Sue HATE me today? No! She very clearly is just having a bad day, and while her demeanor and tone of voice is very triggering for me, she doesn’t in fact, hate me. Why am I so fucking angry about this minor inconvenience? Oh yeah, I forgot not to react and practice some good old dialectical behavior therapy.
That’s all BPD is to me. What is BPD? At the risk of my own emotional labor, I’ll keep it short. BPD is borderline personality disorder. It’s an umbrella term for a wide range of mental illnesses and it manifests similarly to bipolar disorder. There’s nine boxes you have to tick, but it’s okay to tick as few as five to be considered diagnosed.
These include:
- frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
- a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships, characterized by extremes between idealization and devaluation (also known as “splitting“)
- identity disturbance: markedly or persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
- impulsive behavior in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (mine is spending and binging)
- recurrent suicidal/self harm behavior
- emotional instability in reaction to day-to-day events (this differs from bi-polar because it usually resolves within a day vs. weeks)
- chronic feelings of emptiness
- inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger
- paranoid ideation/severe dissociative symptoms
BPD is important for this story because not only is that my reality, but it also explains the WHY. Why did this thing hurt me? Why did I react this way? Why am I like this? Why does my story even matter?
Because it’s about me.
Now, every life is pretty insignificant when you take into account the eight billion people that inhabit our earth in the lord’s year of 2020. However, not one of those eight billion people is me. No one alive has ever had my experiences, my mistakes, or my wisdom–until now.
I want to share my story because that’s just what you’re obligated to do when your life is fucked up. You become the champion of the broken, the beaten, and the damned. I’m hoping that I can help at least one person do something. Whether that’s to pursue therapy, to understand BPD, to forgive themself for something they had no control over, to feel less bad about their own life, to find courage to tell their own secrets. I’m here for all of it.
This is the only story that makes sense to me and I won’t be able to move on until I write it.
It’s going to be shameful and embarrassing, but it’s also not going to matter because I am nobody. I’m not a celebrity. I’m just a young adult that grew up in a small town in the Midwest. Let’s talk about it.