self-injury Archive

Living with panic attacks

When I panic, it feels like my heart is stopping, or that my guts have been turned inside out, or that some sort of massive steam shovel or something has pulled out all my insides and rearranged them and dumped them into random places in my body. Sometimes I feel like the walls are falling in on me, and I can feel the space I am in (or at least my perception of it) going dark. Sometimes I start self-harming by punching myself or slapping myself or punching walls or hard objects or hitting my head against them. Sometimes I become dissociative and do not remember the incident. Sometimes none of these things happen and it manifests quite differently.

My Experience With Borderline Personality Disorder (Breyonne)

I am a 33 year old woman. I received a diagnosis about a year and a half ago of Borderline Personality Disorder. At first I didn’t really understand what it was. I thought, Isn’t what I have more serious than that? I was pretty sure I had something else, something more recognizable. Something I’d actually heard of, for instance. Turns out it’s serious enough. On top of the shitstorm of feelings and thoughts I have on a daily basis, professionals are reluctant to treat people with BPD. We’re notorious for being ‘hard to deal with’.

Devotion

I would like to welcome the newest member of our writing team, Reba Overkill. In its first post with us, it speaks through poetry to recall its struggle with being heard by the people who matter. Thanks for sharing with us, Reba!

Trigger Warning: allusions to sexual abuse, self-injury & suicide attempts.

it all came together a few nights ago, weak and bent
in your lap, feeling lost, feeling like it was years ago when
i was never anything like the me that you know. i was
someone who was trying to speak, nobody listened and i didn’t
understand because i can hear so fucking well, i listened and
i heard sirens, and songs that i would sing with people who i did
not end up loving very kindly. i heard calm assertions by
people in authority that left cracks in parts of me. i heard
the breath i took in when i woke up and was not dead, even
for all my trying. i heard people leaving hints for their departure,
inclining heads towards one-way tickets to not existing.

HALT! Take Some Time to Think!

HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. You should never make any important decision when you are any of these things.

My Experience with “Bipolar Disorder” (Corvus)

I have the innate human longing for community and love, and also decades of experience that teaches me about group dynamics and human behavior and interaction. I know what I am susceptible to, who and what can trigger me, and who can lead me in the direction of becoming someone I am not, or someone I do not wish to be. I have embraced the autonomous individual from a social species. And that is who I am.

For me, being “bipolar” is about my environment as much as it is about my mind. Almost 30 years of experience to put into words… It is impossible. So I am spitting out the feelings instead.

My Experience with Schizophrenia (Coda)

Trigger warnings for description of psychotic episodes and a suicide attempt, in detail, and violent imagery.

I have Schizophrenia. I find certain words can lose their sting when we just come out and say them. So I’m saying it. I live with Schizophrenia. This is my story.

Redesigning the Rollercoaster

Trigger warnings for discussions of drug addiction, alcoholism, sexual assault, suicide, and other possibly sensitive issues.

My experiences with mental health and sexuality have been just that. Rollercoasters. Rollercoasters of self discovery, of emotion, of fear and shame, of love and experience. Always traveling up and down throughout my life. Here’s the shortest story that I could condense these parts of my life into.

In the news: Marsha Linehan comes out (about mental illness)

Marsha Linehan, the psychotherapist famous for developing Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), initially for people with Borderline Personality Disorder, is now talking publically for the first time with her own struggle with mental illness. As it turns out, DBT might never have existed if not for her own experience with mental illness. Read the story at […]