Wordless Wednesday and Proof of Life

Haters Gonna Hate

I am my own least favorite subject lately. I'm just keeping myself busy with dogs and kids and cleaning and laundering. Dusting and cooking. Detailed grocery lists and itineraries. Anything to keep me focused on anything that is not introspection.

So here's a saturated picture of my current favorite tree.

Yeah.

The Blob That Stings

I'm treading carefully around myself at the moment, because I want to complain. I just want to wail and bitch and stomp and curl up with some warm self-pity. When I most feel like just whining about How Unfair It Is, I don't let myself write here. I am suspicious of my human need for attention and I don't like to indulge it by unproductive angst-wanking.

Whining is pointless, anyway. Other than letting people know you're a whiny little baby, you aren't accomplishing anything. Not solving the problems, not addressing the issues, not trying to make things better. Self-pity is a loathsome indulgence and I prefer to do it as privately as I can manage.

I've made some tentative entreaties lately, small hesitant steps in the direction of enlarging my community. I don't have any place I can discuss my mental health, unless these carefully restrained blog posts count. And frankly, the rare post that contains actual raw emotion has had unpleasant personal fallout I am unwilling to risk again. That's right, one person ruined it for everybody. The whole class gets punished. Since the punishment is "You don't have to read those uncomfortable words anymore" I guess you'll manage.

Finding fellow atheists with whom I can converse and discuss has been easy. I'm thrilled with most of the friends I've made in various forums online. There's a slew of stories like mine about the slog out of religion.

Finding other BPD "sufferers" or whatever you want to call it, that has proven more difficult.

To clarify, it's not more difficult to find them, but just close your eyes and imagine this. A room full of people, bright-eyed, unusually perceptive in some ways and startlingly oblivious in others. What they all have in common is a diagnosis that in itself means they are by nature hypersensitive, manipulative, unstable and frankly, a little self-involved.

Yeah, I don't want to hang out with them either.

I've always had this difficulty connecting. I think I've found a balance with my mostly-online social life. I love my friends, but no matter how much that is true I am compelled to keep a minimum safe distance. I disappear every so often, fade back a little, not to see who will miss me but more to give people a break from me. (The former, I am ashamed to admit, used to be true quite frequently. "I'm leaving! And if you don't chase me it means you never loved me!")

The drawback: I'm having problems and I don't know where to go with them.

I am not asking for people to step forward and sacrifice themselves on the altar of my emotions. That's not necessary and I wouldn't be comfortable accepting any such offers. I don't know how to be that vulnerable. Besides, there's no solution. There's no practical help or advice that can be offered. It would be a torrent of angst and confusion and hurt that would accomplish nothing aside from the spreading of angst, confusion and hurt.

And I try not to do that when I can avoid it.

Nothing Always Changes Sometimes

A whole month between posts? Great job. Yay.

I don't know how to describe where I've been. Am, rather. Injuries and illnesses, none life-threatening and all bothersome. Domestic chores that need doing every damn day. Children that refuse to be self-cleaning or self-amusing. Restless sleep and uneasy dreams. Endless winter gray.

There haven't been any giant moments of crazy, no spinning flamewheels of rage or chasms of depression. The one "incident" that comes to mind was an obvious hormonal fluke, handled somewhat capably and forgotten.

Spinning my wheels? I'm not that desperate. Treading water? I'm not working that hard. I'm floating. I'm muffled. I'm somnolent.

But I think the fact that I've posted is at least a sign that I'd like to wake up, a little crocus-head of hope that some color will return to my brain soon. I want it back.

Le Sigh

The task of updating this blog is on my To Do List, and we all know I am a reluctant slave to The List.

I try to remain self-aware of my emotional state, but there's one current that slips by me relatively often. A month ago, I stopped interacting. I blamed it on the busy and much-loathed holiday season, but I think the truth is I have been depressed.

You would think, since I was diagnosed with severe clinical depression about twenty freakin' years ago, that I would recognize it. But it's not all magma and explosions like the rest of my mood-related problems. It's a muddy river that sucks me under so gradually I don't noticed until I've drowned.

I just want to sleep. I want to feel sorry for myself and sleep.

However, having recognized -- finally, I know -- the issue at hand, I'm going to attempt to combat it forcefully. My To Do List is out and I've accomplished... Well, I updated this blog and I compelled myself to be social today, even if only online. Honestly, that's the only way I'm social anyhow. Now I will update the other two blogs (dog here and writing here),even if briefly. I don't know what glorious things will occur after that. Maybe a nap.

I have to remember that the degree of difficulty of my daily life has not increased exponentially. I just got less able, or something. I feel far away, as if I'm viewing the world distantly, through water. It's hard to care and I'm faking it.

All that said, I'm not so bad as I could be.

C'est Moi

For the curious, I am illustrating this post with a self-portrait I have titled, "I was trying to wipe dog snot off the lens and bumped the shutter button so I'm calling it art." The astute viewer may even notice the dog snot in question.

I feel sort of obligated to follow up my last post with a reassuring "I'm not dead yet" post. So... I'm not dead yet. I'm not feeling much better, but I'm not dead.

In the interest of trying to get my life to suck in at least a different way, I'm trying something new and terrifying that I'm not ready to talk about. If I say it here, it's harder for me to shrug off. It's nothing dangerous, I promise. And when I can bear to say it "out loud" I will.

I'm really honest in this blog. I'm a really honest person in general, to the point of detriment, so as a counter measure to that I am in reality a very close-mouthed person. In being open about issues that are important and serious and under-documented, I'm trying to tell the world to look twice. What you see is a frump, a housewife in gray, a stand-offish and over-sensitive bitch. I can't tell you those things aren't true. But I can tell you that it's not the complete truth.

Post-Failure Self-Castigation

Disclaimer: I will regret publishing this post, because I'm going to be honest. To make sure I really do publish it, I'm not going to indulge in my usual squeamish hours of editing and second-guessing. I don't really want to talk about it in a "dialogue" sense, though you're welcome to ask questions. I'm saving them in a file with the nebulous plan to answer them all at some point.)

I want to share some things with you.

But I probably won't.

Being "open" about having mental illness(es) turns out to be exponentially more painful for me than I thought it would. I think part of that is the specific dysfunctions I have and part of it is my underlying personality, what there is of it.

I am clinically thin-skinned. "Emotional burn victim." No matter how casual your touch is or what you mean by it, I can come away wounded, infected, re-injured, blah blah blah. You're smart people, you can extrapolate a metaphor. No one that has read one of these posts and responded, either in comment or in person, has been anything less than kind and supportive. That doesn't stop me from wincing and tensing and anticipating the pain.

I am also shy and insecure. I don't know if that's who I am or who my symptoms make me. I am uncomfortable with your concern. You can't help anyway, so I'm going to tell you it's fine.

It's really not fine. I'm increasingly frustrated as I crawl closer to 40 and nothing seems to improve. I'm waiting to outgrow this. It says there on the Wikipedia that people do, you know. Symptoms lessen over time, it says. Could I just wait it out?

I think that one of the hardest parts of being "open" for me is that people who know me "in real life," the people that have known me for so long like my remaining parent or my in-laws or my aunts and cousins, can all read this. I feel constrained by that. These are the people from whom I have been hiding "how bad it really is" the longest. I'm afraid of their concern.

Last and far from least is the humiliation factor. I hate being this way. I am embarrassed and disgusted by myself. I still cannot accept that I can't always control myself. A few days ago I broke down and I'm still mentally engaged in the post-failure self-castigation that will go on for weeks. I am dismayed and ashamed at some of the things that I did and most of the things I said. I can't bear my own company and I can't escape it.

I don't even remember it all correctly.

I remember being on the floor. I do not remember throwing myself there. I remember running down the street. I do not remember leaving the house. I remember the throb of bruises rising and I do not remember hitting myself. I remember being desperate for the end and I don't remember the beginning.

This is why I can't meet your eyes.



(Because I mentioned it previously, I feel obligated to mention I did actually complete NaNoWriMo. I wrote something like 50,150 words in a story during the month of November. I'm counting it as a partial success because I didn't actually completely the story. More specifically, I haven't written a single word since about the 29th. Nothing. It died. It was a desperate rush at the end to at least meet the word count, even though I knew finishing the whole draft would be beyond me. I can feel these shut-downs coming.

There are a couple things I can do to jump start it again but none of them are available to me. Sadly, these are also the things that would ease my desperately symptomatic behavior of late. So I wait and maybe it'll come back. Maybe it won't, this time.)

It's more fun if you put your arms up.

It's nothing like a roller coaster. Part of the thrill of the roller coaster is knowing that drop is coming. You're carried slowly up and swept cleanly down. It's all exhilaration and that giddy not-fear, that happy sort of terror. A thrill ride.

It's more like being shoved off a rocky cliff in the dark. There's more tearing and scraping and screaming and breaking than with the average roller coaster ride.

The worst part, sometimes, is that moment when I think I'm at the bottom. Is this it? Has it stopped? Can I start to climb?

Not yet. More falling, failing, crashing.

There's one horrified thought all the way down. This is my fault. I did this. This is all my fault. They need me up there and I don't know how to get back out.

I'm scared sometimes a lot all the fucking time.

Trudge. Trudge trudge trudge.

NaNoWriMo is teaching me a lot about myself as a writer. I'm learning that I'm ridiculously ponderous, for example, and that the idea of "just not editing" gives me hives. I'm at -400 words for the day, because I needed to eradicate a giant unwieldy lump of exposition.

When I was a kid I could erupt forth with thousands of words, whole plots mapped out within days.

I still have some of that writing.

It's utter trash.

I'm still going to finish this draft in 30 days, though.

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line...

I feel like my brain is crunching to an inexorable stop, revisiting all the intermittent issues of worthlessness and despair. As many times as I've done this, been here, felt this way, I'm never sure. Should I fight? Should I relax and let it happen? We have always started up again, rusty and reluctant but somehow functional. I wonder if I could save myself some trouble if I just accept that, for a little while, I'll be loathsome and useless. We're just at that place in the road again where we have to coast through the dark.

The hardest part right now is my crisis of confidence. It's impossibly inconvenient for me to have no faith in my abilities. I'm forcibly reminding myself that I must go forward with my projects regardless of how I feel about them now*. I have spent hours a day for the past couple of days trying to pick apart my self-esteem and attain some objective idea of how skilled or not I really am, with no luck. I'm sure everyone will be treated to a hideously masturbatory navel-gazing blog post sometime in the next couple days.

*Case in point, I'm still updating this damned blog quasi-regularly. :P

Fuck. You. Too.

"I take the very controversial point of view that cluster B individuals (as they aren't sufferers from their own disorder) should be killed."

From the comment thread on this post on some random blog. Cool, huh? BPD falls into Cluster B. That's me he's talking about, without knowing me at all.

Because I don't suffer, I only make other people suffer.

I swear to you if I thought my loved ones would be better off without me, if it wouldn't damage my babies beyond bearing, I'd kill myself. That's why I am still alive. That is the only reason. Because my husband loves me and my kids need me. If I didn't believe that were true I would gratefully end this--

Oh, wait. I'm not suffering, apparently. Never mind.

This random jackass isn't any kind of a professional. As far as I can tell, he's some smug sociopath who knows everything. But I've seen a lot of doctors, and you know what?

A lot of mental health professionals feel this way too. There really isn't help for me.

Memo

TO: Amygdala -- Putting you in a sack and hammering on you is better than you deserve, you bitch, but that's all I have.

Summary

You have a disease for which there is no cure.
There is no truly effective treatment for your disease.
There will be constant pain for which there is no salve.
No one will see your pain; it will be in your head and your heart.
Emptiness will swallow you every day.
Rage will tear at you every day.
Grief will cripple you every day.
Fear will stalk you every day.
Loneliness will erase you every day.
You will not learn who you are; you will be someone different every day. Sometimes every hour.
You will not know what you want for the same reason.
Nothing satisfies for very long. Nothing stops the pain for very long.
You will hurt the people that try to love you. You will drive them away.
You cannot trust anyone, least of all yourself. Least of all, yourself.
You will hate, intensely and passionately, the source of your pain: again, your own twisted self.
It will never stop.

Believe in me. I have good reason to go on living.


(Disclaimer: I've been writing more entries "for later," so please don't take anything you read here as a reflection of current mood or circumstances. Please don't call me, all freaked out that I'm going to swallow a bottle of pills. You should know better; I can't even take a vitamin without barfing.)

Sunset Greens

"Out of the cradle
onto dry land...
here it is standing...
atoms with consciousness
...matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea...
wonders at wondering... I...
a universe of atoms...
an atom in the universe."

- Richard Feynman

Talking about it doesn't help.

I'm not going to start in with the excuses for not updating in a month. In spite of all my best intentions to blog openly and honestly about being crazy, I've learned it's really, really hard to write down how I'm feeling in the worst of it, for a few reasons. Today I'm teetering on the edge. I'm fighting to keep out of the darkest headspace. It's not even 10 a.m.

When my moods get dark and savage, the last thing I want to do is analyze and decipher them, but that's not the difficult part. The hardest part is standing on a platform of any sort and admitting, "Your comment about the best apple to put in a pie enraged me and I hate you now." Obviously, I have made up a comment there but it's indicative of the sort of thing that can send me spinning.

I know in these cases -- and most of the time, really -- that I'm reacting inappropriately. I have tried in the past to explain the circumstances. "Your comment was upsetting to me, and I need a little space to process my mood before I can get past it." The problem is that with the exception of my domestic partner and a few close friends who make the effort to understand, I've gotten universally negative reactions. I don't believe it's worth the effort to explain how I'm feeling, most of the time.

Think about it. My moods are invalid and transient and incongruous and disproportionate. By the time I've finished explaining one mood, I'll be probably be on another. I've noticed that no matter how timidly I say, "I was a little hurt by that, but I know you didn't mean it" people still react angrily. I give up. It's so much easier to let people think I'm just a selfish, rage-filled bitch.

And I guess I am, strictly speaking. I can understand how someone would come to that conclusion.

NOTE: I'm not happy with this post. It feels whiny and at the same time vulnerable, passive-aggressive and self-pitying. I may be publishing it as an attempt to punish myself through public exposure of my own weaknesses.

I Wish You Knew

I can't help it, and that's what I hate most. It's the part of this whole mess that feels, to me, most like a cop-out. But I understand intellectually that in the same way a depressed person cannot just "cheer up," the same way a person with Tourette's Syndrome has no control over their tics, I am not able to control the intensity or appropriateness of my emotions. I am unable.

I am aware. I know that my reactions are too strong. I know also that it's equally disconcerting when I detach, when my affect is flat. I am aware, even during some of my least rational moments, of how irrational I am being. It's a helplessness I cannot describe accurately, like watching myself hurt in a car accident over and over, unable to stop it.

I am exhausted. The act of generating, feeling, surmounting, experiencing emotion is a physical act. The brain uses tremendous amounts of power and energy to manufacture moods and emotions. A simple conversation, when I am symptomatic, leaves me feeling as if I've run a marathon, especially with the added effort of keeping my bizarre reactions from showing.



I forget how much I care about you. Rather, I sometimes cannot see it. Because of the "splitting" behavior, disagreements and disappointments quickly become interpersonal event horizons for me. Whether you've made some inadvertent flippant comment I perceive as an insult or dismissal, or perhaps you in some way overlook me or forget me -- according to my perception -- the pain and anger I sometimes experience over tiny matters like this makes it inconceivable to me that we were ever close. Because how could you do that to me?

I distrust myself. Because I am aware of my condition, and I am aware that I am emotionally malleable and unstable, I have come to understand that my feelings cannot be trusted. They are not an accurate representation of or reaction to any objective reality. To make you understand this: when I feel the urge to embrace someone, I first ask myself why. Before I open any conversation on any topic, I consider my motivations. And then I consider them again. And then, usually, I dismiss the idea of saying anything. Just in case I might be wrong about my motivations.

I need you to stay. When I meet someone new, someone I am interested in, within moments of realizing I like them I wonder how long I will get to "keep them." I expect to be left, in some fashion. What you may not understand is how subtle this can be. When I am told, "Fine, I'll give your space" I hear something more akin to "I don't want to deal with you anymore, I'm going away." Abandonment issues are a pathetic, trite, and central hallmark of this disorder. If you leave to give me space, whatever that even fucking means, you have deserted me. You have left me alone, and I am not safe alone.

I fail at blogging again still always.

Been on something of a hiatus just because I'm turbulent right now. Thrashing. And even though the point of this blog is to wander frightened through the labyrinth of self-discovery, I've discovered more and more that I am awful at being "out of the crazy closet." I have very little for myself, when I'm like this, other than shame and derision. Spraying people with that kind of toxicity doesn't help.

365 Days and 5 hours and 45 minutes ago

I don't want to mourn for the rest of my life.

I don't want to make this day some annual event about loss and pain and fear.

A year, a whole revolution, and sometimes I'm still waiting for you to call me. I don't answer the phone anymore, because it can't be you. I just want to hear you say my name again. I want to release the millions of words that withered inside me because I couldn't speak them to you.

We had only days left.

A year ago I watched you leave. Have I written about that? I have all the details sealed inside myself. I remember the smell and feel of your warm cheek that last time I kissed it, and I remember the relief and the agony of just watching you end. You stopped. I watched it happen and I was so grateful that your pain had ended.

Mine is pretty much all still here.

I don't cry every day, anymore. But every single day something happens and I want to tell you. Every single day. It's not crippling, not anymore, but it's like trying to live with another handicap. I still don't know what I'm doing unless you make that face at me, the one that says, "Come on, now. You know the right choice to make." I don't know if it's alright unless you tell me so. I can't find that inside myself.

I miss you so much.

Spoke too soon.

Can you tell a crawl from a climb?

I had to fight hard today.
I didn't win.
I don't want to talk anymore.
I'm sorry.