You probably know my name, my face, and my story. You may at some point looked up to me. That’s fine. I sought out a role as a leader in the community for a reason. I thought I could help, and people tell me I have succeeded. Researchers tell me their studies keep coming back with the same result; study participants keep saying the group that I somehow ended up leading saved their lives.
So, I have always sort of wondered if I were to be bipolar or something, though I’d never been formally diagnosed as such. To my mind and observation, I’ve always had a fairly… unstable emotional balance. High highs (occasionally) and low lows. I finally brought this up actively to my psychiatrist. I’m sick of it, and I want to know what’s wrong with me.
My wife died four months ago. We had fought the night before, ending with her saying she was taking a bunch of pills. I thought she was joking. I woke up next to a corpse. I woke up with a black eye I didn’t remember getting and spent five minutes trying to clean the vomit from around her mouth until I realized she was dead. Time stands still, memories fail. I called 911 and the person on the line tried to get me to move her from the bed to the floor. I tried, moving a women my same height to the floor, dancing with rigor mortis. A rush of urine. It was then, holding that corpse, that it first hit me.
One of the most common things people with BPD have in common is abandonment/attachment issues. Mine run incredibly deep & I feel that I need to warn people about in advance so they can give emotional consent about whether or not they want to invest in a relationship with me. I feel the need to warn them that I’m incredibly sensitive, have a lot of unexplainable triggers that result in dissociation (a whole other article!), and that I have problems trusting that people aren’t going to randomly disappear. And while I own these feelings, actively work on them & and try my hardest not to bring them into my relationships (often going as far as to isolate myself for periods of time when I’m feeling them), they still come up. They still permeate every single aspect of my life. With such BIG emotions, I have to ask for a whole lot of patience & understanding in all types of relationships. People who are diagnosed with BPD often have the tendency to either dive in way too deep or constantly prevent themselves from dipping their toes in the water at all, all due to fears of abandonment. Some of us are trying our hardest every second of the day to figure out some sort of healthy balance for our interpersonal relationships to the point where it gets super confusing. Many of us are very, very tired a lot of the time because of this. Sometimes, I sit around and think about how fucking un-cute that must sound to all of my potential dates and I feel really fucking defeated & lonely.
I still don’t know how to talk about agoraphobia. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain it to people since I was 16 years old, but I’ve been largely unsuccessful at putting it into words. I’ve mostly just stayed quiet about it and used vague “anxiety” euphemisms to describe why I can’t hang out / go to work / go to class / go grocery shopping / whatever, and have also spent a lot of time struggling to come up with “legitimate” ways to account for what I do with my time while NOT doing these things, especially since spending [lots of] time alone or in my “safe zones” is actually super positive for me. For almost 20 years, I’ve had no concept of how to talk about this enormous part of me that has both limited me in humongous ways and also shaped me into the wonderful weirdo that the people close to me know and love.
Trigger Warning: Self-Harm, Abuse, Rape, Human Trafficking
I’ve been half-aware that I’m multiple since about the age of fourteen, when I started to realise that it really wasn’t usual for people to experience severe blackouts and time loss and memory issues (lasting hours, days, weeks, months and even years); that it wasn’t usual for people to so routinely and constantly be addressed by a completely different name by strangers who will insist that you have met them and that your name is something else; that it wasn’t usual for moods and personalities and tastes to change so drastically and so constantly. I had no word for what I was experiencing; I had no knowledge and no understanding and after about a year of being so, so aware of this I finally told my (then) therapist about those experiences. The result? A long lecture about self-diagnosis and “making up more lies to make my supposed PTSD more believable” followed by being asked about where I had researched Dissociative Identity Disorder and that I did know that it was made up and not real and that nobody would ever believe me. So, for almost ten years I hid it except from a very close friend online and one of my partners (he lived with me so it was very difficult to hide).
The value of life, the value of your life, is one that will be questioned in variables and determined by the abundance of self help books with anonymous authors who will tell you a few basic things. These things, as I have learned through the many books “gifted” to me or sent to me in depressive episodes are this;
A life worth living, a life worth value, consists of:
Some might say that religion is just a manifestation of mental illness (I’m looking at you, Richard Dawkins), or literally call your religious beliefs “crazy.” When you think about it, it is actually pretty crazy to literally believe that a man can walk on water, or that G-d speaks through a burning bush, or that [...]
It is my pleasure to introduce the newest series, “Tales of the Mental Hospital” to QueerMentalHealth.org. Spending time in a hospital can be an unpleasant and scary experience for many of us. Taking a more lighthearted look at our experiences can be healing for many of those who have had to stay in a mental hospital for some time. Chandler came up with the idea to write about his experiences, and after discussing it together we decided it would be a great idea to make it into a series here. We encourage anyone to add their stories to the series as well!
During my formerly frequent stays to various psychiatric facilities in MO & FL, I’ve met quite a few characters. They’ve ranged from scary violent psychos, to hilariously deranged schizophrenics, to the just plain bizarre. That statement also includes some of the people who worked there. Sometimes, the staff is just on the wrong side of the desk.Needless to say, each separate hospitalization was a truly unique experience. With all the E/N depression threads I’ve seen pop up, I think now is a good time to share some of the hilarity that an inpatient psych hospital can offer. That’s right, the hospital can be fun.
Trigger Warning: mention of abuse
When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher assigned the first essay of the semester. The topic was “time I felt different”. This proved to be a surprisingly difficult topic for me to write about. Why? Then, I had no idea what it was like to fit in. I had no frame of reference.
