The Darkest Year.

*Talk of suicide / grief related to it*

 

 

One year ago a truly brilliant light went out, leaving the world in darkness and changing my life forever. My wonderful, special, beautiful friend Liv, couldn’t survive her demons and tragically ended her own life.

I haven’t dealt with it, even now. Before this lockdown business I had intended to reach out for bereavement counselling, to get me through this difficult time. I’ve not managed to sort anything out, so just have to cope with it alone.

Even just a couple of days ago I sat in disbelief that she’s really gone, and that she’ll never be in this world again. I feel I’m in massive denial at times. There are times I feel I’ve ‘accepted’ it… if you ever can accept your only remaining friend taking their own life… I carry on, I talk to her… I try and talk about her – people get uncomfortable though and don’t engage in conversation about her. I guess that’s contributed to me not dealing with it. I have nobody to talk to about her and about the loss of her. So in a way I’ve had to stuff it down and just carry on.

But my life is so different now as a result of her decision. I’m not the same person I used to be. The world is changed. Nothing will ever be the same again, and nobody could ever fill the void her absence has left me with. She’s irreplaceable. I wish I could’ve told her that. I wish I could’ve told her I couldn’t bear the thought of a life without her here. I should’ve told her. For years I had feared something like this happening…. but I never truly thought it would happen.

So for it to happen when it did, it was a shock to the system. It seems strange to say that she was the best friend I ever had, yet I only actually met her in person once in my lifetime. I feel like a fraud saying that. But I knew her for thirteen years of my life. We met because of our mental health struggles and bonded over our shared appreciation of a certain Irish boyband, by the name of Westlife. People always mocked them and their fans, but we didn’t care. We knew our taste in music was awesome. Nobody would ever change our minds on that!

 

 

We’d been there for each other through the ups and downs of life. She was the one person I could always count on for support, advice and unconditional love. She was the only person who never gave up on me, no matter what. We never fell out. She never judged me. She never left me feeling I was alone in this world. She never let me feel invisible. She was perfect in every way. She just couldn’t see it. She was too humble and far too hard on herself. She couldn’t see all the wonderful things we all saw in her. She hated herself inside and out, but she had no reason to. In the end, her demons won and she gave up on herself.

I feel so grief-stricken and heartbroken that I couldn’t do anything to save her. And now I never can. Once she made that choice there was no going back…. no second chances for those of us left behind, to do something to keep her with us. We have to live with that forever now. I still have my moments I feel angry with her. But mostly I’m devastated and miss her so much. She was my rock. I may not have been her best friend – in fact most people in her life wouldn’t even know I existed. But in terms of quality and duration – she was the best friend I’ve ever had. I will never know anyone half as wonderful as she was.

I find it hard at times… thinking of all the things she’s missed and will miss in the future. I can be listening to one of the latest Westlife songs, and I think ‘She never got to hear this song’. I can be unsure of what to do about a situation and want her input, but that’ll never happen again. I can see a video she’d love, or I can do something creative that I think she’d really like, but I’ll never hear her feedback on any of it. I may be able to talk to her… I do it often… but she will never reply again in this lifetime.

And I think I’ve been taking it day by day, but when I consider the future…. the many years that could lie ahead… she’ll still be gone. She’s gone forever. I don’t deal well with ‘forever’ and ‘never’… it’s something I’ve always said. The thought that I’ll never talk to her again is a brutal reality to face. She was the only friend I had left. She left me on my own. Five weeks before I would finally see her again, she decided life wasn’t for her. I never got to see her again. I never got to hug her, like I wish I had done the first time I met her. I never got to share that front row Westlife experience with her. Five weeks…. that’s all it was. I know it’s selfish, but I wish she could’ve held on until then…. I feel at least I’d have had a chance to see her, speak to her, change her mind in some way, even without knowing her intentions. Being denied that opportunity is what drives part of the anger. The rest is the being left totally alone thing.

Her death has forever changed me. I don’t like who I am anymore. I hadn’t for a while anyway – ever since my first experience of grief two years earlier… that changed me. It worsened my mental health… that caused people to avoid me… it made my best friend abandon me forever… Liv was the only one really there for me through it. She helped me cope with the new experience of grief. But now there’s nobody to help me with my grief for her. She’s gone. And I feel like a ghost… invisible to all. Avoided by all. Irrelevant to all.

The loss of Liv has made me more depressed, anxious, paranoid, untrusting… I’ve withdrawn more. I’ve felt suicidal myself most of the time. I already was before she took her own life. Losing someone to suicide does put you at higher risk of it yourself – the Samaritans told me that. But I already knew it because I’d researched about suicide grief, as I had nobody to talk to about it.

I’ve become unreliable… flaky. I hate that. I push people away. I take forever to reply to people… if I ever even do. They eventually all give up on me. I don’t blame them. I probably would too… I just wish they knew I’m not deliberately being like this. It’s my mental health, but more than that it’s the grief. When we lose someone we love, we don’t just lose them… we lose a part of ourselves too… who we were with them in our lives – Liv made me feel like a ‘somebody’…. now without her, and without others treating me like a somebody, I feel I’m a nobody. It’s hard to reach out when you feel you don’t exist. My ability to communicate isn’t as good. My concentration isn’t good. My memory is atrocious ever since. My self-esteem has crashed even more than before. My motivation and will to live just went. I felt certain I would take the same path as Liv eventually – it seemed inevitable. Last Christmas and New Year felt like the last ones…. I even said to the Wellbeing Centre that I’d be lucky to see one more birthday – I was only holding on for that birthday, as I was seeing Westlife on that day – but that’s unlikely to happen now, so who knows….. I got a bit better at the Centre, because I was inspired by someone I formed an attachment to. But being separated from him now for the foreseeable future makes everything even harder. So yes, those ‘inevitable’ thoughts have crept back in.

Death changes people. Suicide even more so. It leaves all the questions of ‘why?’ and ‘what if?’… I’m isolated in my grief…. due to lack of friends, and loss of peer support during lockdown. I fully expect social media to be all about her today, but I’m an outsider. Nobody knows who I am. They don’t know how important she was to me. They will support each other, and not support me. Social media can be quite cliquey like that. So I told my family I might need a bit more support, and I’ve asked my key worker to phone me too, just to check in with me. She said she would, but didn’t. That’s how alone I am with this. But at least I asked for that support. That’s progress for me. One day I might get some proper help to work through this. I hope. But no amount of working through this will fix it. She’ll still be gone. Nothing can bring her back. That’s the worst part.

Do you know how deafening silence is after you get home from a live gig? That’s what life is since she left. Deafening silence. Not to imply she was loud in any way as she certainly wasn’t. But her absence is deafening to the soul. It sounds cliché but the world is definitely darker without her. It’s hard to find any meaning with her gone. Time is distorted, as it seems to be in grief…. part of me thinks ‘how has it been a year already?’… the other feels she’s been gone so much longer than that. How can I have lived in a world without her for a whole year?

I still remember the day of the funeral. I remember the courage I had to find to go there. I had to travel to a place I’d never been before, all by myself and work out the bus system to get me where I needed to be. I remember turning up and knowing I was in the right place, because of people wearing blue items, and the police officers there. Then obviously I saw people I recognised from her photos / friends list etc. So many people turned up, they couldn’t all sit down. She was so loved. I wish she knew.

I felt so alone there, but eventually got chatting to someone. We sat together, and she gave me a tissue as I started crying as they brought her past to Westlife’s ‘I’ll See You Again’. It felt too surreal that in five weeks (a week or two by the time of the funeral) we were meant to be seeing them together, and now here I was, listening to them at her funeral. It was a beautiful service, but two things still haunt me… putting my hand on the coffin, telling her I love her and saying goodbye – it broke me… and seeing the pain on the faces of her family – it’s an image I can’t shift. I know I didn’t have to go…. as unassuming as Liv was, she would never have expected me to go… I wasn’t exactly invited and found out about it by chance, through her partner. But I had to be there. Because that’s how important she was to me. She may not have known how special she was in life, but I would’ve done anything for her. Although it was traumatic, I am glad I went to the funeral and said goodbye. It made it more real. And I couldn’t have lived with myself if I didn’t go.

But I have a lot of work to do to process this still. Today I’m going to be gentle with myself, as Liv would advise me to be. I bought some tulips yesterday, to lay in the garden next to the ornament I got in memory of her. I’ll light a candle, probably play some Westlife at some point, and remember the wonderful friend I had, and how lucky I was to know her for as long as I did.

I love you Liv. I miss you. And I wish so much I could’ve saved you from yourself, because life without you is no life at all xxxx

 

Poem: Drowning Through Life.

 

Drowning Through Life

 

That place between life and death,
That void…
That’s where you’ll find me;
Swimming around in an ocean of emotions
Too immense for the human soul to witness,
Or the human body to contain.
No breaths of relief can be taken here.
I choke on the fluidity of people’s inclination to care,
To stay there,
To see my worth;
I drown in the words unspoken,
Unheard,
The lack of sentiment, the lack of words.
I gulp down indifference
And gargle blame,
Lost in this sea where nobody recalls my name.
Even the sharks that usually circle at the scent of blood
Care little to devour me –
Nowhere to be seen;
Though I bleed profusely from my wounds,
I bleed not red but emerald green…
The colour of envy –
Envious of those who get to live on solid ground
And know not the horror of drowning through life;
Jealousy of those who matter to someone,
Whose cries can be heard and are satisfied
By a love, an interest, a connection,
The warmth of affection –
Not left to the ravaging currents of these ice-cold depths,
Forever alone…
My blood is water,
Water, my blood –
My broken heart feeding salt to the sea
Which then in turn reminds me of how those tears came to be.
Can anyone see me here, sinking under the waves?
Am I worthy of being saved?
You’ll see my face in a crowd
But I am not there –
My mind is elsewhere,
In that far-off land – unable to live, not ready to die,
With no-one to help me or to bid me goodbye.
Look for me in between these worlds,
Find my soul;
Please see me
And return me to myself,
Or else
I fear
These days will be my last.

 

 

 

The Borderline See-Saw.

 

 

It’s all ‘too much’ at the moment. Everything is hurting my heart. It seems everything I do is ‘wrong’. And I’m overthinking every minute detail, within seconds. Someone doesn’t reply to me… they don’t like me. Someone drops out of a conversation…. I said the wrong thing. Someone takes a long time to answer a question…. I came on too strong and made them feel awkward. Someone doesn’t look at what I’m showing them… they’re bored and I’m being annoying. Someone doesn’t respond when I talk to them…. they don’t care about me.

 

Every tiny moment is analysed within seconds of it happening. I can’t switch it off. I’m programmed now to notice rejection everywhere I go, from every person I meet and none of them ever let me down with that.

 

Did they get the message? Did they pass on the message? Did I say the wrong thing? Are they sitting back expecting me to talk to them before they’ll ever message me again? Do they not want to talk to me ever again? If so why the hell are they ‘friends’ with me online? I’m invisible, to everyone, all the time. And I don’t know what I’m more upset about – people treating me as though I don’t exist, or me being upset about it. I’m sick of reading so much into other people’s lack of words or actions. But this is what life has done to me.

 

I don’t know how many times and different ways I can explain how this feels to me, and what I need from people. But I’ll try once more.

 

 

I NEED CONSISTENCY, CARE AND COMMUNICATION.

 

 

The biggest of all is consistency. Because after so long of people ignoring my existence, if you come along and notice I exist, I’ll come to life again… but the minute you switch back to nothingness, you’re dropping me from the edge of space.

 

I can’t stand the ups and downs. I can’t stand the hot and cold treatment…. because picture for a minute Bipolar Disorder…. the highs and the lows. These tend to happen at a slower rate (or so I believe – I don’t know much about Bipolar myself so I’m sorry if I’m mistaken)… people have periods of deep depression and periods of mania. BPD is similar in some ways, but the speed and frequency of the mood changes is scary. It happens in reaction to what’s going on around us at any given moment – we’re more reactive to changes in our lives and interpersonal issues. If you treat me like you care one minute and then drop me the next, you are triggering those mood changes – the ones that make me feel sick of experiencing emotions altogether.

 

I once really liked a guy but he was the king of hot and cold. He’d show interest in me and then ghost me for months at a time. This had me messaging him over and over, trying to keep him in my life and get him talking to me again. Usually every year on his birthday he’d start talking to me again, but the pattern always repeated. It was all likely a game to him, feeding his ego and I bet he was laughing about how desperate I was, and how much I ‘wanted him’. Little did he know it was one of the symptoms of my illness…. that fear of abandonment. He was constantly triggering it.

 

I’d had people disappear on me before him, but he was the one person who blew hot and cold so much I think it actually made me unstable emotionally. If someone feels intense emotions in reaction to external stimuli, namely the state of a relationship with you, and you turn on the charm one minute and ghost them the next… lather, rinse, repeat… you’re going to destroy their spirit. That’s what he did to me. Until one day, three or four years ago, I stopped going back. And that was the hardest thing I had ever done until that point. I cared about him so much. He never appreciated that. I still care. I know he’s lost someone close to him recently and I feel deeply for him. I feel sad about it. I wish I could reach out to him about it, but I will never open that door myself again. Ever. I will never beg for attention and I will never be accused of running back to him. I don’t feel that way for him now. He hurt me way too much and was never even sorry about it. He was just like everyone else in my life – they’ve all hurt me and didn’t even feel bad about it. They all taught me I’m nothing. So I have certainly moved on from the feelings I had. Of course I still care when something like that happens… I’m human and have a heart. And I’m not ‘over it’ in the sense that it ruined my life, so it’s hard to trust men anymore. It’s hard to feel anything for anyone anymore. And it’s hard to feel good whilst talking to ANYONE now, because the moment the conversation just stops, it feels like I’m being toyed with again, like he did to me. He broke me. And right at this minute I’m so sad and hurt by this.

 

If you treat someone to care, kindness, attention or anything good, and then drop off the face of the planet, you destroy their hope, their trust and their happiness.  You need to be a steady support for someone with BPD. We need to know you’re not going anywhere. I don’t have that luxury anymore. This guy might have not liked the symptoms of my illness that his endless abandonments and flip-flopping brought out, but had he treated me better, more consistently, it would never have set in my anxieties and doubts. If people want to see the best in me, they have to be the best of themselves, and if they can’t bring that to the table they should be honest about that. They should tell me they don’t want to hurt me… that they don’t want to mess me around…. that I deserve better. Then they should walk away and never entertain toying with my emotions again. I hope he’s grown up and learnt more since that happened. I never will see an apology for what he did to me. I have to accept this, and do my best to undo the damage it caused inside my mind. If I can’t undo it, I have to just try and survive it.

 

I really do hate that when people talk to me and I suddenly get all invested in them, as someone actually noticed me and doesn’t hate me, I have to stop and tell myself to calm down, don’t say the wrong thing and scare them off. Life shouldn’t be like this. But it seems to be for me. I live in fear of saying the wrong thing, coming on too strong (in a platonic way I mean) and putting people off. I’m extra-sensitive to everything at the moment… and I do interpret silence as a bad thing. I can’t stop these paranoid thoughts racing. I can’t stop feeling like people dislike me and want to avoid me. I try my best, but if I break my own silence and talk to others and have periods of communicating with people, I start to expect consistency, and nobody seems capable of maintaining that (I can’t really expect them to if I can’t do it myself….), so it triggers what would be considered the ‘depression’ phase in Bipolar. It’s like getting your hopes up and being let down, but this happening every day. It’s sickening. I don’t know if I’m explaining it well enough…

 

It almost feels better to have no expectation or hopes…. to expect the worst from everyone… to believe nobody cares about me….  because the minute I think maybe I’m wrong and someone does care, I’m just as quickly dropped back to Earth when they ‘reject’ me again. I can’t take the see-saw of emotions and the lurch in my stomach and the suicidal feelings that come from falling back down. I just wish people would stop picking me up only to drop me again. I hate being alone and wouldn’t wish for people to just eternally ghost me and leave me alone, but I wish if they picked me up they’d take care to not drop me, as I’m incredibly fragile at the moment. I need to be handled with so much care, and the problem is most people can’t manage a drop of care for me.

 

I feel it’s better for other people if they stay away from me at the moment. I don’t want this. But I’ll only end up mad at them for letting me down… and as nobody so far has been ‘all in’, and they have all been half-hearted about it, they’re only going to make me worse right now.  I don’t know the answer. I do know a lot of people with BPD reach a point they feel it’s better to not have any friends, as the relationship issues that stem from this illness are too much to bear. I want friends. But I want friends who are consistent, open in communication and who truly care about me. I think anything else right now is damaging to my mental health. Maybe isolating myself isn’t the best thing, but getting my hopes up at the slightest ‘like’ or word someone says to me… it’s breaking my heart slowly… because the truth is I’m alone. I have no friends. I’m nobody’s friend. And nobody cared enough to give me a conversation. They all walked away, whether by hurting me, just ghosting me, or leaving this world, none of them cared enough to give me closure. None of them.

 

I live in silent pain… unable to move on… unable to actually live. And nobody knows how lonely I feel, but how trapped I feel too… I have to be this lonely, because hoping for anything more only hurts me. I can’t even think of forming new friendships, because I believe I’m only tolerated at best… I hate every single thing about myself now. I hate how I look, I hate my voice… so much… I hate the way I walk. I hate the way I laugh… I just hate everything. I hate my personality. I hate being who I am. I’m still haunted by the beliefs from school – that I’m boring. I feel I’m an embarrassment to be seen with or to know. I feel so ashamed of so much about me. I feel judged for my illness. I feel misunderstood. I feel I’m not good enough for anyone. And I can’t trust anyone anymore. I doubt people’s motives. I believe people only use me when they have something to gain, otherwise they won’t talk to me.  I believe people will drop me as soon as they find out about my illness. I am such an ugly person inside and out, and I hate that I’m wasting oxygen while good people are dying. There is nothing good about me anymore. Anything there was, was killed off by people who never cared.

 

There’s too much damage to fix now. I have to keep people at a distance because they will hurt and abandon me. But none of them want to be closer anyway… proving my point. I just want someone in my life who looks at the horror that is me, and sticks by me regardless. Someone who sees something in me that I can’t see. Someone who won’t let go of my hand during the storms. Someone who has my back every time. Someone who reassures me of their care without me having to ask for it. Someone who communicates consistently and wants to soothe my emotions, not trigger them. I want this. I need this. But I can’t have this. Because if it was anyone in my life currently, they’d be doing this already. The only person I had who did this was my friend Liv… but she’s gone now, forever… there’s nobody else. So it means reaching out for new people – I can’t trust new people. I will never believe that anyone could like me or want to be my friend. The scar runs too deep. I’ll never believe anyone ever again.

 

I feel defeated tonight. I just want it all to go away. I want to not be me anymore.

 

 

 

Unstable.

*Suicide theme*

 

 

It’s the instability aspect of “Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder” that troubles me the most at the moment. It’s not a rollercoaster. People enjoy those… supposedly. The build-up and then the rush when you come rocketing down…. you see…. with a rollercoaster you see it coming…. you feel the anticipation build as you wait to hurtle towards the ground. With EUPD/BPD you don’t see it coming. And it’s not a rush when it happens. To many who go on rides (which I don’t), the best part is the drop. With BPD it’s the worst part. It comes out of nowhere and threatens your life.

 

Just yesterday I was more or less okay. I don’t really remember how I was. I just know there was nothing particularly wrong. Next thing I know I’m sat writing suicide notes, crying my eyes out and having palpitations. I don’t know what triggered it. All I know is I was meant to be writing a list of things to take on holiday… not writing suicide notes.

 

I don’t know why I did it. Maybe it was a safety valve. Picturing me not being here anymore. Maybe it helped ease whatever I was feeling.

 

The other day I wrote something I wanted my former best friend to see. I felt so positive I was going to send it to her (somehow…. not sure how, as she moved house and didn’t tell me where to, and has me blocked online). The next day I decided against it. I now feel the next time she will hear from me will be after I’m gone. Unless she makes the move to sort things out with me in this lifetime, we won’t speak again until I’m dead. So I wrote her a letter for when the time comes. I don’t know if I honestly want that to happen or if going through the motions of it just allowed me to release what I felt towards her, in a more raw way, without all the BS.

 

I started writing other ones too. It was upsetting. It was very hard to wake up this morning and pretend this hadn’t been my reality last night. I thought I would have to take my emergency meds last night, but managed to get myself through without them. So it ended up being a success story anyway. But I am still unsettled by it all.

 

I wanted to reach out to people last night, and earlier. To tell the truth about how low I felt. Yesterday I typed out a status for Facebook. But I backspaced it all. I don’t ‘attention-seek’ anymore. Nobody cares what I have to say about my mental illness. I keep it all inside. I sort of feel if I write notes and then go straight online and talk about it then it’s just for ‘attention’. It’s not real. But this was real. Or the most real it’s ever been. I still feel incredibly low from what I wrote. Because what I wrote is my reality. I’ve spent so long talking about ending my life and not doing it, so I’ve stopped talking now. This being the exception.

 

Looking through my CMHT assessment letter I see “You described thoughts of not wanting to be around however there is no intent to act on these”…. “Fleeting suicidal thoughts with no intent and plan”. Of course that was in January. We’re in October now, and I lost my only remaining friend to suicide in May. These thoughts are not ‘fleeting’ anymore. I’m unsure of ‘intent’ now… I can’t guarantee anything. Same with a ‘plan’… no fixed plan, but ideas… it’s coming together. Planning ahead. I’m beginning to think about what I want people to know when the time comes. When… the time comes. Not if. That’s how things have changed since my assessment. It feels like a certainty now, that I will leave this world by my own hand. I just don’t know when. That’s how dark my mind has become. I see no other way. The death of my friend and the cold abandonment by the other friend, it’s all changed me forever. There’s no way back from that.

 

But like I was saying, it’s the instability that gets me. I can be plodding along just fine and then be swamped by painful emotions, or even numbness. It’s like a great looming suicidal cloud wafts in and takes over everything for the rest of the day. But then today, I was doing some tidying whilst people were out, and dancing like a maniac to some great music. Now I’m sat writing this blog… feeling the weight of depression and despair behind my eyes. Feeling paralysed by reality. Feeling detached from it all. Feeling I’m already dead.

 

Part of me sometimes feels hopeful, now I’ve finally taken the first step to getting some level of help. It’ll probably be at least a month to wait for an assessment, but at least it’s something to hope for… that they can help me want to live life again. I just don’t see how they could possibly fix someone this broken. I just hate how there are times I feel there’s a bit of hope. That I can do this. That I have to do this, because I have plans next year and want to be better by then…. and then there’s other times I’m certain I won’t be here for those plans. That none of it matters…. that it’s only a matter of time until I go.

 

It’s never been quite so extreme as it has been this year. In the past people may have noticed me seeming happy one minute and then being down the next…. feeling so lucky to have such great friends, to nobody caring about me….. but this is more dramatic than that. The highs aren’t high at all. But the lows would fool you into thinking there were great highs… I fall so hard and fast, and so far below where I used to fall. Having a day where I don’t contemplate ending my life – that is a ‘high’ point for me now. Though maybe I do feel happier than that sometimes, and just can’t see it right now, as I’m in one of my ‘lows’ again.

 

I have this difficulty that when things are bad I can’t ever remember them being good. I actually found the term emotional impermanence once – at least I think that’s what it was…. the idea that you can’t recall a previously felt emotion in its absence. I was looking at that from an aspect of relationship problems – that if someone isn’t showing caring towards me, I feel like they don’t care. They may be kind and say nice words at one point, but if they then go off the radar for a month or two and never check in…. that kindness, caring and those nice words no longer exist. They weren’t permanent. They were fleeting. I remember saying in a video journal I did sometime last year, about friends saying they care about me, and my thought was ‘How long for? A message? Then back to radio silence?’ – that’s one of the problems I have…. it’s why people like me need so much reassurance when we’re ill. We forget. We need reminding. It’s what I needed from people last year…. reminders that people cared. Rather than people assuming I know they care and are there for me, as they offered it once upon a time, I need them to remind me when I’m struggling. Because when I’m most ill I truly feel nobody cares. I need evidence that they do. Current evidence. So for the last year I probably seemed like I was ‘attention-seeking’ by saying nobody cared etc. – that was me asking people to reassure me that they did. So yes, I was seeking attention… but not to feed my ego or whatever, but because I honestly couldn’t remember the feeling of being cared for. I still don’t know how that feels. Kindness and positivity feel alien to me now. It’s like there’s a shield around me whenever anyone tries it. I can’t connect to either. I wish people would think of it like amnesia or something…. they wouldn’t blame me for not being able to remember something they said a few months back, if they offered support. But they expect me to remember it when I’m struggling with my mental health. I can’t. If something isn’t happening right here right now, I don’t know how it feels and find no comfort in sentiments that may no longer exist.

 

It’s like people saying to remember the good times with my granddad and how it felt. I can’t. I’m detached from my feelings. Apart from lacking actual memories with anyone, I can’t recreate feelings that are gone. Like looking at old photos – I can’t connect to them on any level. I have to trust that was me and I did those things. I sometimes do think I have some sort of amnesia. I look at photos and think I had a wonderful upbringing and was loved. But I’m basing that on photos and how much I love my family. I don’t recall how I felt growing up. I don’t know what sort of childhood I had. I have no memories of it. It’s like it wasn’t me. Sometimes I feel like an imposter in the body of this girl in the photos. I feel like a separate entity that has taken over her body but does not share her memories. It’s weird and slightly terrifying.

 

And my former friend… I miss her. I keep thinking about everything we’ve been through together and never will do again…. there isn’t a possibility in my mind that she ever really cared about me. A lot of the troubles towards the end came from me needing her reassurance and her not understanding this, so rather than reminding me she cared about me, she made me feel like a burden to her, and the distance kept widening between us… when all I wanted and needed was her to care about me, because I couldn’t remember a time when she did. The more silence there is, the more I split and forget how people once felt about me. She then effectively ghosted me and I’ve never been the same since. It was the final nail in the coffin of my sanity. I was left to fill in the blanks with my paranoid thoughts. I was left not only with an absence of her, but an absence of her care and supportive words, and worse than that, a feeling of being nothing to her but a nuisance. I see our whole history differently as a result. I don’t see any care in the highlights my mind offers me. I see detachment. I feel used. I feel tolerated. I feel pain and hatred. And all of this because about 12-14 months ago she couldn’t say ‘I care about you….. you matter to me’ and give me an hour of her time to show she still cared about me. None of this would’ve ever happened if she could’ve just reminded me of our friendship and who I was to her. That’s why I’m sad at the moment.

 

That and my recent loss. I remember Liv saying that the 4-8 month mark was bad for her mental health after her loss. It’s been almost five months now since she left. And I’d agree. I don’t know how I’m going to cope with this. I don’t know how to get through it. All I know is I can’t talk to anyone about any of it now. They’ve all made sure of that. I suffer in silence now.

 

My circumstances are the hurdle to me recovering. Having one friend ditch me and another take her own life…. leaving me with nobody…. no support network…. no safety net…. no rock to keep me going…. no reason to live…. I’ve never had to pull myself out of a place this deep and dark, and I’ve never had to do it alone. I know that will be the point… this has happened so that I can prove my strength to pull myself out of this wreck… and if I can survive this I can survive anything. The trouble is I don’t think I will survive this. Not right now. And if I do, then what? What am I surviving for? What life am I trying to get back to? I have none. I have nothing. I have nothing to aim for. If I somehow manage to survive and get well, I will be starting my life all over again…. but at a time where I’m also likely to face more painful loss all alone, as nobody’s getting any younger… which will just knock me back down again. It feels like a hopeless uphill struggle right now. I can’t see the light. I can’t even tell which way I’m facing or where the ground is.

 

I’m taking blind steps at the moment in terms of seeking help. It took me ages to send off the forms because I couldn’t fill in the box about my goals, and what I hope to get out of using the service. So in the end I was totally honest… told it like it is. Said how bad things are, that I can’t see a future so can’t say goals… listed all the problems etc. Obviously this worried them so they want me to see my doctor while I wait to be assessed. I have a tendency to put things off. I’ve been seeing my doctor every month for the last year or so…. there’s nothing she can do to help me. She knows how bad I feel. What’s the point in going back to see her to tell her ‘yep, still feeling suicidal’…? All it does is make me feel like a burden. I don’t like worrying people. I can’t do it in the next two weeks anyway, so not much point. It’s nice that they cared though. It’s an odd feeling, that unsettled me. Brings back memories of therapy two years ago… a problem in itself. But yeah I’m just going to have to put blind faith in them to help me find my feet. I’m just worried I’ll be beyond the realms of support they can give…. and I know CMHT won’t see me until they help me… so I’m kind of stuck at the moment. Too ill for anyone, but CMHT don’t want to help at the moment, plus the grief stuff kind of effs it all up too. Who the hell do I see first, and what for?? I don’t know how to solve the chaos inside me at the moment. I’m hoping talking to them might clear that up for me. It’s good they want to know why the mental health team didn’t refer me themselves and left me to self-refer. Gives me hope that they’ll do the right thing by me and get me to the right place.

 

It’s a long way off though. Many suicidal days to survive first. It’s exhausting. Especially hiding it from everyone and pretending to be ‘normal’. But I can’t open up anymore in real life. It’s impossible. Have to just take it a day at a time and put up with the unstable emotions and raging thoughts. Don’t have another choice. If I could sleep for a long time and wake up when I’m healed and life is better, that would be great. But sadly that will never happen. I have to tolerate this existence or opt out. Although my mind is preparing for it, I’m not ready to quit yet. So I must battle on.

 

 

 

 

Mixed Bag.

*Just getting stuff out of my head tonight… haven’t proof-read – just blurted*

 

 

I have a mixed bag of feelings at the moment. It’s like a re-ordering of issues. Some things are losing their importance and others are returning. Grief is something that goes up and down… I have my moments where I still can’t believe it’s true and I’m flooded with emotions. We’re approaching the two year mark, so I’m finding that difficult… thoughts of what we went through in the process of loss.

The therapist I was ‘transferring’ on (had feelings for) has reappeared in my mind – I don’t know why… and I miss him a lot. It’s not because of grief, as was explained to me. The feeling lessened because something even more difficult took its place – losing a friend… so now that’s done and dusted, the feelings from before are coming back. Think I might do some work on all that old stuff again, just to sort out my feelings. The key will be not fighting against it… I feel it for a reason, I just need to work out what the reason is and what I can do about it.

The friendship I lost was a big deal. I cannot explain what it did to me. But at this point I don’t actually care anymore. She fucked up. She made the wrong choice and time will reveal that to her. I have my recovery to focus on.

I’m trying to come off one of my medications at the moment. I’ve been on it a long time – over ten years and I’m on the highest dose, so I’m doing it gradually as I really don’t want to risk the withdrawal symptoms possible with it. My focus is on this and managing any problems that come up as a result. I dropped too fast the first couple of days and felt ill and had headaches, so increased by half a pill since… I mainly just have a slight nagging headache every evening. Other than that I’m not sure what else is because of coming off the pills or just because that’s how I am at the moment. I’m trying not to think too much about symptoms. I’m trying to be positive about the step that I’m taking. I’m also hoping for the weight I’ve put on to gradually come off too….

Alongside coming off the medication, I’m about to give up chocolate for Lent, for the third/fourth year in a row… AND I’ve just started my charity walk of 50 miles in 50 days for Parkinson’s UK, in honour of my granddad. Any amount I can raise will be wonderful, but I’m doing it for him and also to help my physical and mental health at the same time, which I know would make him so happy. He would want me to be well – for my mental health to be okay. Getting out every day and walking at least one mile is my attempt to achieve that. I’ve only done three days of it so far, but it does help.

It may seem an easy task – most people walk over a mile a day in their everyday lives right?? But my mental health deteriorated last year to the point I would only leave the house for appointments or to visit family. I don’t socialise. I don’t do the shopping… only occasionally. I became a hermit. I was too scared and too depressed to leave the house. I’ll be honest – I was too depressed to leave my pyjamas most days. That’s how crippling my mental illness has been in the last year. I couldn’t bring myself to open the front door and be seen by people.

So for me to go out every day is a big step. It’s something I don’t really want to do, but I’m determined to because it’s for charity, and it’s for my granddad. I don’t see it as a choice now. I have to get it done. Right now it’s tiring… I’m hoping by the end of the 50 days I’ll be fitter and feel better mentally, so much so that I want to continue for my mental health and weight loss. That’s just a dream at the moment. I can’t imagine wanting to do this – but time will tell.

So I’m trying to focus on doing what’s needed to get me well. I’ll be looking into the Wellbeing Centre and Recovery College side of things next week. Stepping away from a hesitant friendship for the time being was another way of looking out for my mental health. So I feel proud that I’m taking the right steps at the moment, as hard as they are to take.

In one respect I’m feeling more positive. But I’ll be honest … I still struggle with my ‘paranoid’ thoughts that nobody actually cares. It could be because I’m approaching the time from last year where people failed to show they cared about my grief and didn’t support me. Maybe I’m predicting the same lack of care again… or maybe it’s because people don’t interact with me as much at the moment. I see people on Facebook who have likes and comments on most of their posts – that’s because they have between 300-500 friends. I have a very small group of them because I prefer privacy and sharing my feelings with people who I think / hope care. I guess in my mind I put too much pressure on them to care and talk to me. This is something I have to work through.

I do go through these periods of people not interacting with me as much and me thinking they don’t want to know me anymore. That I’m invisible. And it’s time like this where I usually withdraw from people more. I isolate myself as they don’t notice I’m there anyway, so they wouldn’t notice if I disappeared. I’m fighting those thoughts at the moment. It’s hard. I don’t know if they’ll win this time or not. I just feel so much that I don’t matter to anyone. It comes in waves – I’ll get people’s support, care and attention in bursts, usually all at the same time… but then I’ll get silence from them all at the same time too…. it makes it feel like a rollercoaster… there’s no consistency… stability… it’s scary for me, because it affects my emotions so much. It affects my self-worth. I feel stupid appearing to talk only to myself 90% of the time. That’s what makes me withdraw. I feel nobody cares to hear what I have to say. That I shouldn’t be so egotistical to think that what I want to say is worth hearing, and that I should be heard. And I know people would say they just have their own lives and it doesn’t mean they don’t care… I know that. But I’m talking about paranoia. I really am trying hard to tell myself this. It then makes me feel like a selfish person for wishing not to feel invisible. It’s a constant battle in my head. But I’m trying to win that battle at the moment.

It’s good to have things to focus on though, like walking and medication changes. And I’m also trying not to self-harm. This month I managed eight days in a row, followed by four days where unfortunately I did, and then I’ve so far had another seven days without it at this point. My aim is to get to nine days at least, to beat the last ‘record’. It feels like it’ll be hard to achieve though as tomorrow will be difficult for me to get through. I’m tempted to take a diazepam to get through the day unscathed. But not sure….. I’m also feeling extremely irritable tonight. Everything is pissing me off – even I am pissing me off. I don’t know if it’s because I’m worried about tomorrow, or if it’s everything else…. or if it’s coming off my pills…. I’m mainly just accepting my reality at the moment. But it’s annoying to be so moody like I feel tonight.

 

So yeah… a mixed bag of thoughts and feelings. Just needed to organise them.

 

 

 

Full Stop.

 

I’m struggling at the moment. It’s a difficult time of year for me. It was hard enough last year, not having the support I needed from friends. I’m anxious about that happening again and that I’ll end up isolating myself again. But this year it’s even worse. Not only will my best friend not be there for me, she’s given me even more to think about by blocking me.

I am so angry with her at the moment. I hate her for what she’s done. But that anger comes from feeling hurt, confused and frustrated. I don’t understand what the hell happened to us. I know I’m far from perfect. I’ve made mistakes… probably more than I would like last year, as I was having a breakdown. But as far as I see, the only thing I was guilty of last year was… being mentally ill … and trying to express my emotions and explain my thought processes, to help others understand why I am the way I am and how they could help me. I did nothing to deserve being treated the way I have been, and I really don’t understand what’s going on.

She said to me that I must think she’s heartless and doesn’t care about me … I’m afraid to say she’s very right at the moment. I didn’t think she was heartless until she blocked me. Who does that?? I had just expressed hurt at feeling rejected by her, and she thought the best response to that was to block me – the ultimate rejection of a friend.

I’ll tell you just how hard I’ve tried. Anyone who knows me or reads my blog knows just how ill I was last year. I was isolating myself. I was experiencing paranoia for the first time. I had no support, professionally or socially. I was splitting on everyone. Despite being too ill and too at risk to myself I pushed myself out of isolation and through paranoia, to talk to my friend, to try and save the friendship. Any effort I made was rebuffed. I WAS rejected by her a lot. And that bloody hurt me. It made me isolate more and made me more ill. I feel like she found every symptom of BPD and triggered each one off. And in my paranoid mind I feel this was deliberate. I do feel she did things to deliberately make me feel insecure, jealous, hurt and angry. If she read this she would be offended, rather than appreciating that her behaviour contributed to my state of paranoia. Rather than feeling bad for me that I felt a certain way, I think she’d be annoyed that I thought such things about her, and particularly that I SAID them! The only reason I’ve talked about these things is to explain my thought processes… so that she and other people understand how I form my beliefs… what they’ve done to make me think such thoughts and how it makes me feel. It’s never been about attacking her, and I’m so annoyed that it obviously came across that way to her. I just feel no matter what I say, nothing will ever make her see things as they are. And in my over-active mind that is because she’s just done with me and wanted an excuse to ditch me. So she’ll never listen to reason. Just like a previous mutual friend…. she didn’t want to change her view of things because she’d already discarded me. She obviously feels her life is better without me. So here we are.

But I fought for her. Even when I had very little fight left in me for even myself. I put our friendship ahead of my mental health… because she mattered that much to me. As soon as I said to her I had to do what was right for my mental health and take a step back, she blocked me.

I told her what she meant to me… I told her she was like a sister to me… that I loved her, cared about her and worried about her and all the family. I signed off my last message to her saying I miss having my best friend. She blocked me.

She didn’t like that I blogged about my feelings. So I stopped. At Christmas I wrote to her directly. She didn’t respond… I chased her up on it, putting in yet more effort for her that she would not reciprocate…. we discussed things a little…. I talked about feeling rejected a lot by her. She blocked me.

I sent her and the family cards and presents at Christmas along with a letter. The letter was for after Christmas. She read the letter, but didn’t open the presents. She didn’t give the kids the presents I made and bought for them. I wanted them to have them. I didn’t hold our falling out against the kids. I don’t understand why she did. This really upset me to hear. I had wondered why I heard nothing from her about it. She had snubbed me over Christmas. No card for the first time in however many years we were friends…. no text…. no thank you for the presents – no acknowledgement at all. I guess she thought if she didn’t open them she wouldn’t have to acknowledge them…. she was wrong. It was rude and very hurtful. I expressed being upset about this. She blocked me.

She told me she runs away when things go bad. I expressed concern about this as my illness means I have a fear of abandonment and rejection. I also expressed sadness that she could work things out with other people she’s not known as long as me…. so why not me? Was I not worth it? She blocked me.

I told her I needed to take that step back so I couldn’t see her posts anymore, as they were feeding my paranoia, and causing me pain seeing her move on happily with her life and her other friends, whilst dithering over whether to be my friend or not. I think this was not only quite reasonable but actually a sensible and mature decision to make. She blocked me.

I do not know her reason for blocking me. But as you can see above there are many possibilities. It could be because I was going to unfriend her. Maybe she thought ‘Well if you’re going to do it to me, what’s the difference me doing it to you?’… there’s a huge difference. I was only going to unfriend her. I hadn’t yet done it. So I was still friends with her when she blocked me. It was also done without an explanation from her, so was taken as yet another rejection / abandonment. It was quite a ‘final’ action. It’s a bit like slamming a door in someone’s face or sticking your middle finger up at them. I had explained quite reasonably why I was taking the action I was. It was to stop my paranoia and preserve a future friendship. It was for both our sakes. It was so she could continue to write freely about her better friends, and it wouldn’t hurt me. Win-win. Had I been able to do it that way I would have been the one to make that choice, and the paranoia would’ve ended. By blocking me she took away my choice. I had no say in if and when I could communicate with her again. She’s effectively said she never wants to hear from me again. I was afraid she could unblock me at any time and say something hurtful. Then I discovered you can block people who block you. So I can now take my power back. But she still ruined everything. Because where there was going to be an end to the paranoia she has denied me that. By doing something as stupid and dramatic as blocking me, I now have an endless amount of chaos in my head… so many bad thoughts about her and what her motives were. I wish she hadn’t blocked me. If she’d just accepted what I said and agreed it was best for now, we could have had a peaceful break and come back together again. But because of what she’s done I don’t think I will ever feel good about her again. She has spun my paranoia and splitting out of control. She can’t expect to close that door on me like that, move on happily with her life and then reconnect with me again in the future, with everything being flowers and rainbows. Blocking me was at least a passive-aggressive action…. if not an aggressive one.

I wish she could’ve communicated with me like an adult. I tried my best to do that with her, even though I wasn’t up to it. She didn’t know what the next step was. I told her it was to meet up. She wasn’t ready. Funny that…. I was the one who was wronged and yet I was prepared to meet her and talk, to save our friendship. Yet she needed more time. I don’t understand why she needed more time, but it’s fair enough if she did… I had to make that call in the meantime though. It wasn’t fair to leave me hanging, like certain other people did in my past. I deserve better than that. That’s why I did what was best for my mental health. I just wish she hadn’t crapped on that by blocking me. Right now my mental health is no better than before, because of her stupid action.

 

 

 

I’m frustrated because I don’t understand what the hell was going on in her head. And it was having such a huge impact on my life. And I was expected to keep it all to myself. She has a support network. She has other friends, a husband a big family. I only had her to confide in. It was unfair to expect me to know how to cope with things totally alone. I’m frustrated because no matter what I did I couldn’t turn back time. I couldn’t make things better. I couldn’t understand her or be understood. She wouldn’t listen to me. She wouldn’t be compassionate. She just kept getting colder and colder. I’m frustrated because I didn’t deserve that. I needed warmth. I needed love, care and compassion. I needed effort. I didn’t get it. But I damn well put it in, especially recently. I gave the effort I wish she gave me. And not only was it wrong that I did that when she wouldn’t do it for me, but she didn’t appreciate it at all. This tells me she gave up on me ages ago. And what frustrates me is I don’t understand WHY.

I can only assume it’s because of my mental illness. Either that or she just got bored of me. A lot of people do. I clearly didn’t mean much to her. She was prepared to let me go without a fight… thinking she hated me. She interpreted me isolating myself as not wanting her friendship, despite me repeating over and over again that it meant the opposite. I was pushing people away to see who cared enough to notice and pull me back. I wasn’t doing this knowingly or in a manipulative way… but it was a protective thing… to find out who I could trust and count on. Those who pulled me back I could then feel safe and secure with, and those who let me go were never really on my side to begin with… it saved me being abandoned further down the road. I needed more than anything to feel safe, secure and certain about the people around me. Nothing else in my life feels certain. With my illness nothing feels certain. It’s unpredictable. I don’t always feel safe – from myself, but also with my paranoia I don’t know what’s real.. I don’t know who I can trust… or what I can trust. I feel like people mean me harm. But also since my granddad passed away two years ago, nothing feels certain anymore. It’s changed the way I see life and the world around me. I need people around me who add stability and security to my life. I thought she was one of those people. But when I pulled away she made that wrong assumption, against what I was saying, and just let me go. I cannot express strongly enough just how much this hurts me. It is a hard pill to swallow, realising that someone who had been my rock all those years suddenly didn’t have my back at the worst time in my life… that they’d let me slip away without a fight. It’s not okay. I hope any reasonable person would understand why I’m upset about this.

When my granddad passed away I had just had my medication increased, so my emotions were numbed. I truly felt this. And at the time I was grateful for it. I’m now informed that this stopped me grieving fully until the effects wore off. By the time that happened other people had moved on and forgotten I was grieving. But for me it was new grief. It was all the things I hadn’t felt before when I was newly medicated. So a year ago, in the lead up to the first anniversary of his death, I needed my friends’ support more than they knew. So when nobody (except one person) was there for me it started off a spiral downwards in my mental health and how I related to other people. That’s what caused me to split on absolutely everyone and isolate myself as a result. The problem though wasn’t that my friend wasn’t there for me on that date… it’s that I didn’t hear from her for a couple of months and it was a reluctant message when it came. She thought I was annoyed with her when my problem was more with everyone else. I didn’t feel it was with her at the time. But it became about her as she appeared to assume it was so didn’t talk to me! We met and talked and said we’d never go through this again – we’d talk to each other next time…. fat lot of good that talk did! I saw her once more, this was in June last year, and then things started getting worse.

Any time spent apart was time for my paranoia and splitting to convince me that she didn’t really care and was simply tolerating me. She’d go weeks without talking to me at all. I was still isolating very badly. It was next to impossible to reach out, to anyone. It was nothing personal. I had to send the kids their birthday presents last year as I didn’t get to see them after February and only saw their mum in June. It was kind of her to post me my birthday presents, but at the same time I read into it that she didn’t intend to see me. It was bittersweet. I felt at that point she was done with me. I’m sorry but that’s how paranoia works. It infected my mind, and every action and every word was seen through the lens of paranoia. It was not a very nice way to feel about her. It’s partly why I kept to myself because it wasn’t fair to inflict that aspect of my illness on her. I knew that. It was not deliberate and it actually distressed me.

One aspect of the paranoia I found particularly distressing was in relation to her other friendships. This did not come from being possessive and thinking she shouldn’t have other friends. It came from insecurity about our own friendship because she didn’t show the same appreciation and effort for me as she did for them. We were rocky – not talking most of the time, and she was writing about the great time she had with other people – the great company and laughs etc. – I wasn’t jealous but I felt I was being replaced. And I actually started to think I deserved to be replaced. This is because I felt so badly about myself. My self-esteem and self-worth were six feet under and I felt inferior to these other people. I felt my friend deserved better. I thought she preferred the other friends – that they had more in common, being married with children, plus they aren’t as completely messed up in the head like me, and could be more supportive to her, more than I was able to be last year. I was also scared of losing her. She meant such a lot to me and I was afraid of losing her…

I wrote about this… about the fact that the fear of losing someone can actually lead to it being manifested. I was right. When I blogged about this – about paranoia, my fears and insecurities, I don’t think she was very happy about it. One thing I noticed after she read it was that there was definitely an increase in her writing about her other friends. Even a rational person would be forgiven for thinking it was deliberate. I was paranoid, so of course I was going to think the things I did. I thought she was doing it to punish me for not meeting her right away to talk about it (I couldn’t as I was overwhelmed and terrified of her. I thought she was angry with me and I felt under threat, so left it a week) …  I thought she may be doing it as a way of saying ‘I’ll do what I want’… as though me expressing my feelings about her posts was me saying she shouldn’t do it. This was not the case at all. All I was doing was explaining what was going on in my head and heart. I was pretty much seeking reassurance if anything. That’s all it would’ve taken. She gave none.

Every post since that was ‘evidence’ that she was trying to hurt me. Posts about Christmas with all their favourite people were digs at me, telling me I’m no longer one of her favourite people…. hinting about moving house was to make me feel abandoned and like I was going to be left behind now we’d fallen out…. the point was everything was hurting me. I didn’t want to stop her posting what she did. But equally I had to protect myself from it all. Taking that step back seemed a logical thing to do. I don’t understand her reaction to that.

She’s confused me so much. She twisted many things in her mind… thinking I asked for space when she was the one who told me her priorities, as though I was a burden. I gave her space she needed. This is a fact. She made it seem like the opposite. It worried me that she would never have spoken to me again based on this misunderstanding. It tells me how little I meant to her.

I knew that the only way to clear everything up and sort things out was to meet up and talk. We couldn’t afford to write to each other anymore as there appeared to be too many misunderstandings as a result. I felt far too upset by her to resolve anything in any other way. Things would only spiral further downwards until we met up. But she wanted more time. More time may have helped her be ready but it would also have made our situation worse, as it would’ve added to my paranoia and illness. Time is not going to heal this for me. Effort is what will heal it for me. Her effort. Time will only add to the ‘hatred’ I feel towards her. I’ve been put off for long enough… time is not what is needed… a difficult conversation is. If she didn’t have the balls to do that then that’s too bad. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it myself. But I knew nothing would improve until it happened. In my mind the next step wouldn’t actually have been meeting up. It would’ve been making up for what she’d done. Acknowledging where she went wrong, apologising… thanking me for the presents… and maybe making some sort of gesture to match my efforts. I feel that her reluctance to do that, or to know that’s the next logical step shows that she doesn’t think she did anything wrong. That she thinks it’s all me. That I’m the one in the wrong.

Everything she’s said and done has painted that picture that I’m the one in the wrong, and that she needs more time (to forgive me presumably)… it is usually the hurt party who ‘needs more time’. She acknowledged there’s a lot of hurt and upset, but it wasn’t clear whether she was taking accountability for that hurt and upset or whether she was blaming me for it. I hate that it looks like I’m in the wrong…. that she snubbed me, whilst I was chasing after her apologising and trying to make amends… I made effort for her… she showed indecisiveness about progressing, and then she blocked me, as though I was harassing her or something!! It pisses me off.

The fact is I was mentally ill, paranoid, trying my best not to inflict that on her or anyone, kept out of her way, felt shit about myself and inferior to others, thought she deserved better, wrote about my symptoms, apologised when I was in the wrong, kept a lot to myself… I was hurt, rejected, neglected, misunderstood and abandoned … blamed for everything…. yet I still made the effort, extending an olive branch at Christmas, which she snubbed…. I further chased things up, for peace of mind…. when she couldn’t make up her mind if she wanted my friendship or not, I made the tough decision of stepping back for my mental health, whilst leaving the door open to talk and meet when she was ready…. and then I got blocked.

It doesn’t make any fucking sense. It’s confusing. It’s not fair. I feel angry that everything she’s done has made me feel like it’s all my fault… even if that’s not how she feels about it, that’s what her actions have communicated to me, and that just adds to my paranoia and splitting and makes me hate her, for lumping that shit and blame on me, when the above paragraph is the truth. When I was the one who put in the effort for her that I needed from her. I get blamed and blocked. It’s not right. And I’m rightly upset about it.

I will not accept the blame for any of it because I know the reality. I was trying to communicate the reality. She knows her reality for sure, but wouldn’t level with me. It’s like in her mind she knows her truth and that’s enough to make the decision to ditch me. And I feel like ‘How dare you blame it on me?! Just admit you don’t want to be my friend anymore. Own it. Say it’s your fault. Don’t abandon me and then make me feel like I deserved it’. … I’m just at a loss for what to think and how to feel.

I’ve been unable to put it into words for a long time. I’ve tried. But because she misconstrued a blog post before and had a go at me for it, I lost my confidence in writing. I felt anything I said would offend her, so I started censoring my posts so much that I didn’t get the feelings out and it was a total waste of time writing them, so I gave up. None of my posts have ever been or will ever be about attacking her. They’re about explaining what the fuck’s going on in my head. It’s exploring my thoughts and feelings and making sense of why I feel the way I do. Sometimes I’ve wanted reassurance and understanding from others… it has been to communicate… communicating my needs. But if people are on the lookout for insults they’ll see them where they don’t exist. It upset me that she saw attacks where there were none. I remember the post that upset her she said that people will think she’s a total bitch who doesn’t deserve my friendship…. I was baffled by this because I had just written about the fact I felt she deserved better than me. How could anyone interpret from that that she didn’t deserve me. I have to understand though that she was obviously in a delicate place herself and on the defensive, so prepared for battle with me on anything I said.

I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I know it was a misunderstanding that got out of hand. I would’ve forgiven it had she had the courage to admit it and make up for it. But blocking me was the exact wrong way to go. Trouble is I’m an understanding person… I give people the benefit of the doubt… I defended her and made a lot of excuses for her that she’ll never know about… and I’m doing it now. I’m thinking about how she might be stressed or struggling with her own mental health at the moment, and has her own fears that manifest in the wrong way too. But I’m sorry… the time for making excuses is up. It’s been two weeks since she blocked me. That was a bad choice. I’m not responsible for her choices. I’m responsible for my recovery, and that’s something I need to focus on now I don’t have to worry about her. I spent so long fearing being abandoned, and being paranoid about her intentions that it was making me more ill. Now she has officially abandoned me and solidified the split and the paranoia, as upset as I am about it, I have to see it as a positive… no more uncertainty. I needed certainty… although I don’t know the reason she blocked me, blocking me is a sign of certainty. It is a ‘goodbye’ (more like a ‘fuck off’ but yeah…). I wanted certainty, I got it. Just unfortunately the opposite of what I wanted. But now I have to move on.

She may or may not regret the mistakes she’s made, one day in the future. It’s not my problem. That’s her problem. And if she wants to make things right one day then it’s 100% up to her to do so. I will make no more effort for that girl. I did enough and got snubbed and blocked for it. The loss isn’t as big for her – she’s only lost me. She has other friends. I don’t. She was my one and only real friend. I won’t ever have another like her – even those who say they’ll always be there for you will eventually let you down and walk away. I can’t trust anyone anymore. I can’t afford another loss like this. Not when so many wounds from losses are still wide open like they are today. I lost her, the family, the kids, my one and only friend… it seems like a bigger loss for me… I definitely think it’s more traumatic for me based on that alone. But I’m being told it’s her loss. Because she gave up on someone who wouldn’t have given up on her… someone who cared about her, put in effort for her… tried to be understanding and forgiving… someone who fought for her even whilst I was very ill. And she just let me go. So I’ve lost someone who doesn’t see me as worth fighting for… someone who refused to understand… someone who didn’t appear to care…. someone who didn’t put any effort in and who needed telling what to say and do next…. someone who just gave up on me. I’ve heard it said that ‘Is that really a loss?’

The loss I feel is the loss of the kids. I will never bond with friends’ kids again. It just means extra loss when the friend abandons you. I loved them so much and always will, and I’m heartbroken that I may never see them again. I already missed a year of their lives…. they won’t remember me. That bond was special and made me a better person. They were ripped from my heart against my will and it’s hard to not be angry at my friend for that, as I couldn’t see them if I didn’t see her. I need to take time to grieve for that loss. No other kids will ever be as special to me as they were… only my own if I’m ever lucky enough to have any. Even then, they’ll always be so important to me. They taught me a lot about myself and made me so proud to watch them grow. I hope they turn into lovely people. I’ll miss them so much. I wanted to be there forever. I never saw things ending like this….

 

 

 

This is a very difficult time. I find myself feeling similar to how I did a year ago… but I have to try and remind myself that’s in the past. Yes I’ve lost this friendship, but it doesn’t mean other people don’t care. And I’m going to start branching out soon hopefully too. All I can do is have faith and hope that things won’t feel this awful forever.

I’m trying my best to battle on… trying to return to volunteering again… physical illness seems intent on holding me back, but I have to try and push through. I am doing better than a few months ago. Heck I even managed to go to a concert on my own a few days ago – had to take a sedative to do it, as my anxiety was through the roof, but I actually enjoyed it and had a good night…. I then had a better feeling week… I even managed eight days without harming myself in any way. Yeah I’m annoyed that that’s all I managed at this point, but I’ll aim for nine days without it next time. Progress is progress. And I’m trying my best. That’s all I can do.

Nobody will ever know how hard the last year has been for me. It’s a miracle I’m still here, breathing. I guess pain means I’m winning… that I’m still alive and fighting… Trying to frame things more positively. It’s a work in progress!

Hope everyone’s well, and I hope to get back to blogging more soon… this one was about breaking out of the shell I was forced into, and assessing my feelings. I know it will have offended at least one person should they read it. But it’s helped me start to make sense of something that’s messed my head up entirely. It helps to let it out. I don’t ever want to let someone silence my voice again. It’s dangerous to stuff it down. I should know… it’s what I do best.

 

All the best to you all,

 

 
xxxx

One Step Forward, Twenty Back.

I hate the unpredictability of my illness. One minute I’m excited because I got a ticket to see my favourite band next year, the next I’m punching a wall because I’m such a stupid person, who shouldn’t be allowed to talk to people.

 

It’s like once the anxiety and excitement of getting the ticket was over, I was suddenly hit with a full bag of negative emotions… I had anxiety and guilt over buying the ticket and panicking about having to go on my own… that then opened the door to the troubles I’ve had with my friend who would normally have gone with me…. I had someone raining on my parade, someone who keeps winding me up lately… I started having paranoid thoughts that people don’t like me again…. where I’m trying to keep in contact with people, I worry about saying the wrong thing – am I being too needy or demanding? Am I annoying them? I should just shut up…. then I got in the state of mind that I can’t say anything right and I became alert and sensitive to others’ words… or lack thereof. And I suddenly felt very isolated again.

 

I hate that it can switch just like that. Once it happens though it’s hard to break out of it again. I feel like shutting down. I cannot shake the feeling that people are just tolerating me…. they don’t like me… they don’t care… they want nothing to do with me. I view every interaction and every event through the lens of ‘I’m an awful person and they all hate me’. I interpret people’s words as them thinking I’m an idiot, being annoyed with me or that I’ve said something wrong… and I feel the need to ‘fix’ it and apologise, when I’m not even sure I have annoyed someone….  I view non-responses as me being too overbearing (it makes me dredge up other times I’ve felt this way, to back up that belief)…. and I just become this big rocking, foot-tapping mess, obsessing over what a horrible person I am – an embarrassment and a nuisance.

 

I’ve been trying to push myself forward through the paranoia… being sociable when I don’t feel up to it and whilst hating myself for existing, let alone speaking to people. It’s hard. And times like now I hit a wall (pun unintended) and think ‘See, this is why you shouldn’t open your mouth’.

 

I worry that sometimes my intentions aren’t clear and I come across the wrong way in what I say. That people misunderstand me. I also feel annoyed that people don’t LISTEN to me and to what I’ve said. And when they have to piss on my happiness, making me feel bad about it. Oh, and rejecting my friend requests when everyone else accepted. That upsets me too. It’s a combination of things today that have caused me to start splitting on everyone again. It’s a horrible feeling. I felt I was making progress but now it’s all back to how it was.

 

It’s not my friends’ fault… it’s my mind’s… my illness… I just hate that it does this to me. I feel alone enough as it is. I find it hard enough to speak out, with the voice inside me screaming ‘NOBODY GIVES A SHIT!!’ … but when my own mind does this it makes it more difficult.

 

I guess maybe I’m not so much splitting on others as I am splitting on myself. Going to hating myself and then going back over things today, and interpreting them as being in response to bad qualities in me… and then ‘hating’ others for what led to that. I don’t know… my head hurts too much now to know what’s going on. All I know is I don’t feel stable… or positive. I don’t feel emotionally comfortable. I feel anxious, tense and ashamed. My mind is like a very noisy, busy traffic junction of thoughts and emotions and it’s going to be hard to reconcile my paranoid thoughts with the truth, and not give them the power to isolate me again.

 

Getting the ticket today has given me a ‘reason to live’ until next June at least…. but it doesn’t change the fact that I feel I have every reason to die at the moment… for the reasons I said in the previous post. Yes there are little things to look forward to next year. But surviving this one will be the problem. In all honesty I’m not doing okay and I’m at a loss to know what to do about it. Today should have been a good day. Instead I’m going backwards. This illness seems to be a struggle – whereby you take one step forward and take twenty back… you end up going nowhere, except backwards. It’s frustrating. Demoralising. This feels like a battle I’ll never win.

 

 

 

The Urge To ‘Fix’.

I’ve always had this issue whereby if I have a falling out with someone, or feel in a bad place with them, I feel the need to ‘fix’ it, or resolve it as soon as possible. I guess this is to avoid the uncomfortable negative emotions associated with it.

I’m having to tell myself to leave it be for now. We need some distance. Nothing has changed for me – my circumstances are the same as a week ago, and nothing will have changed on their end, so for now I have to just accept things the way they are, and I have to try and tolerate the emotions and not overthink things. Easier said than done.

To feel a sense of peace, rather than the anxiety I feel right now, I have to see it as an ending at this point. We’re done. Yes, hopefully we’ll speak again at some point, but right now we’re obviously not good for each other’s wellbeing. We can’t be there for each other, and maybe the time apart will be a good thing. I have to try and believe that.

Yes I am hurt, upset and a little angry. There’s a lot I want to say. But that can come in time. Right now I need to get back to accepting reality as it is, and using it to push forward. I need to take this time to focus on getting better and not let it eat me up. Very hard not to obsess over it, especially late at night. Not been able to go to sleep until the early hours of the morning lately. My mind’s too active. It takes me to dark places. But I can’t let this destroy me. Must put it to the back of my mind and focus on what I have, rather than what I’ve lost. That’s my aim.

 

Haunted Love.

Sod it. I feel like I’m choking on my heart. I have poetry screaming inside me, that I am too scared to put to paper… I’m afraid to open that door and let the words out, because a whole heap of crap will come out with them. I have too much pain and love and grief coursing through my veins right now, that I have to let it out. I have to be the most honest I’ve ever been about something. I have to risk the embarrassment, the shame, being vulnerable, because this is gnawing away at me more each day.

I love you. I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks anymore. It means nothing. It’s irrelevant how I feel. I know that. But these are my feelings, and I do myself no favours in denying them. I shut them away for a long time. I stopped talking about you. I never stopped thinking about you. Not for a second. But I pretended it was no longer an issue. I still don’t talk about you, and I won’t. Because the second I do, I’ll be judged. I’ll be told to move on. I’ll be told it’s not real.

If it’s not real, then why the fuck does it hurt so much? I miss you so much. Afterwards, people said it must feel like a break-up (even knowing it was nothing like it!)… they recognised the feelings I was going through…. and I recall saying at the time it’s more than that. It was like you died. Because I knew I would never see you again in my lifetime. I knew your life would go on, so it felt like grieving for someone who was still alive. But in terms of my life, you did die.

Your memory speaks to me in my dreams. Your ghost even appeared to me the other day. And just as painfully that ghost disappeared, and I was reminded of your passing. Your ghost reminded me I haven’t grieved you. But I don’t want to grieve you. I don’t want to accept you’re gone forever. I don’t want life to be this way. I escape into my mind sometimes, where we can be together. And I’d much rather live there. You come to me in dreams, and I never want to wake up from them, yet a part of me forces myself awake, at the pain of realisation it’s only a dream. You’re gone. And I’m in pain because of it. What’s so wrong in admitting this? Why do I have to pretend it’s ‘not real’ in order to escape the embarrassment of actually experiencing such feelings? I was attracted to you in every single way possible. The first therapist to talk to me about it asked if I ‘fancied’ you. And whilst yes, I very much was attracted to you in that way, it was unbelievably so much more, and she cheapened it. From then on I felt stupid for how I felt about you. She compounded the problem.

I just got upset a moment ago, thinking about the way everything went…. wondering how different my life would be now if I had just kept it all to myself, pretending I felt nothing. What if I’d just dropped out of the group instead? My life hurtled out of control because of a stupid choice I made, and I couldn’t put the toothpaste back in the tube after that…. I had to just go with it. But it’s left me with such immense regret for my decisions. Opening up about all of this has been one of the hardest, shameful experiences of my life. I’ve felt pathetic. I’ve felt not ‘good enough’ to feel this way for you. I’ve felt hideous. Deluded. Ashamed. I feel embarrassed to talk about my feelings for you. My personal life is personal, and I’ve had to be very open about my lack of experience with such things. I don’t want people knowing the ways in which I think of you. I don’t want them pitying me. I don’t want them thinking I’m just fantasising or that I’m immature in my approach to feelings, and in my views of ‘love’.

Who is to say what ‘love’ really is.. what it means? Love is what you make of it at the time. Love is love. Sure I might meet somebody and fall in love with them, and realise that whenever I thought I was in love before, I was wrong… that this is real love. But something even stronger could come along after that….. it doesn’t mean I didn’t love before. Love changes. There isn’t one mould for love…. love isn’t something you achieve – it’s not something where you go ‘Aha! This is what love feels like! This is love, and anything before this was not love’. I used to believe that, but after meeting you I see love in a different way. There are also different kinds of love. Obviously this is unrequited love. This is ‘I love you even though I’m nothing to you’. Of course if I meet someone one day who loves me like I love them, that is what I will call real love.  But it’s a different love. It doesn’t mean the love I feel today didn’t exist. Love is an emotion. That is why I have to accept that I feel it towards you, because you can’t help how you feel. Obviously I’m not daft – the love I feel for you is different to the love your wife feels for you. I’m not totally insane, saying that ‘I love you more than anyone else ever could!’ – I have more sense than that. I try not to be too logical about how I’m feeling…. that would indicate that I think I stood a chance. I’m a dreamer – but I am a realist. I know the reality. I don’t need to get into the complexities of reality. But with the knowledge that my feelings of love are miniscule in the great scheme of things, I have to be true to how I personally feel, and accept that this is how I feel… as embarrassing as it may be. I’m working on it. I know I have to let go. I have to move on. But even though this was not any form of ‘relationship’ in the slightest, I have to allow myself to heal as though it was something. It takes me quite a time to recover from my feelings for men – I have such feelings so rarely – I become quite devoted in my affections and desires. I have to treat myself with the care I would in trying to overcome a break-up.

In some ways this is worse than a break-up, because a break-up would indicate you were together in the first place. You had your time. You had memories together. You had your shot, and in theory you could have that conversation to get some sort of closure. But with you and me, there was no ‘you and me’. There was no relationship. There was no time together, no memories. We didn’t ‘have our shot’. We didn’t have a conversation and closure, because the situation did not call for it, being a purely professional one.

This was nothing. I know that. I was reminded of that… that there’s no need for closure as nothing existed. I’m not stupid. I know I don’t deserve closure. I’ve had bad experiences in my past where I wasn’t given closure, and although this wasn’t a situation that warranted ‘closure’, it just would have been nice to be given a chance to heal those wounds from the past. To actually feel like things can be different, people can be wished well and given a chance to heal…. rather than everything always being left unfinished – wounds gaping open, and the world hurting.

I just feel so upset right now at the way things were handled. The scars I’m left with because of this, both physical and mental. And I feel doomed to experience the same pains over and over in my life, because not even fucking therapists want to help give me hope. Not even fucking therapists could see an opportunity to fix the broken bits of me… the bits that believe I’m not worth a conversation…. that people come and they just leave – leave my heart gashed open…. that I’m a burden. I feel so upset right now. I can’t stop crying, and all I want is for you to hold me and make it go away. But that never was, never will be, and I feel sick with myself for even wanting that. I feel like a bad person. But I just want you here.

 

I wish I’d never met you. Because living without you, having discovered you exist, it’s too much. If I close my eyes in the daytime, if I don’t think of you, all I see is destruction. It’s like everything else has died. Everything is dead. The only time I see light, is when I think of you. But that doesn’t last long… it turns to tears when I realise it’s all make-believe. Even you are dead in this world I’m living in, in reality.

 

I often try to think how to describe the pain I feel about all this…. it’s not easy. It’s like a pent-up scream…. like roaring in pain and sadness, but on the inside. If you externalised it, it would be just that – a noise. A very loud noise. But because it cannot be released vocally it sends painful waves throughout my body – you know that pulling in your chest when you hear something that breaks your heart? It’s like that, but through my whole body. It’s a heaviness. A depression. It travels straight to my eyes – sometimes I can cry, sometimes all I can do is stare blankly at the floor, feeling like I’ll explode from the grief. There is anger there, and I want to punch walls because of it. But it’s a lesser emotion. Sadness, grief, despair, hopelessness, heartache…. these are my emotions. And I’m not so good at coping with those emotions. They’re less reactive emotions, and more ruminative. I find it harder to pull myself out of these emotions… they paralyse me. It sometimes feels like someone is reaching into my chest and squeezing my heart and won’t let go – it feels like my heart stops beating, like it’s giving up… and I can’t breathe. I don’t even want to anymore. It’s in those moments I think ‘How am I ever going to carry on living with this pain, and you gone forever?’ That grasping of my heart, the despair of loss… it’s enough to make me not want to live anymore. In those moments I just want the world to end. If I can’t know you, and I can’t forget you, I can’t exist with the memory of you. It’s too much. It’s just too much.

 

Free Mental Illness For Everyone!

 

There is something I find frustrating regarding mental illness, which some would find controversial…. People who say ‘we all have mental health’… and imply that depression and anxiety are something we all experience. Someone saying we all have nerves – yes, but not everyone has anxiety – a medical condition. Just like we all feel down sometimes…. but not everyone has chronic depression and wants to end their life.

There seems to be this movement to ‘normalise’ mental illness, and do away with diagnosis. And whilst I applaud people for trying to make those with mental illness feel they are normal, and make them feel less isolated, they’re actually doing more harm than good. What’s happening is it’s making people feel misunderstood and like the intensity of their suffering is being dismissed. It’s saying ‘We all feel like that – it’s normal. It’s human’… but I highly doubt that every person on this planet hates themselves that much, that they cut into their own skin. I doubt they see everything as a means to hurt themselves or end their lives. I doubt they stay up at night, worrying and ruminating on the past, waking up in the morning, seeing no reason to get up. I doubt they starve themselves or make themselves sick. I doubt they have panic attacks. I doubt they pick at their own skin, or pull their own hair out. I doubt they take anti-depressants or anti-psychotic medications, or mood stabilisers. I doubt they struggle with their emotions as much as someone with BPD. I doubt they’re obsessed about germs or doing things in numbers. I doubt they all have hallucinations, delusions and paranoia.

Mental illness is not ‘normal’. It’s not something we all have. To make a statement that we all feel the same, minimises what people actually experience. I had it said to me the other week that we all have nerves…. they don’t even know a thing about my mental health. To say that they know how I feel is ridiculous. I have chronic depression. I have anxiety, and trichotillomania. I self-harm. I have BPD. Can you say the same? At which point I’ve noticed some people turn on their inner arsehole and say ‘It’s not a competition’. No, it’s not a competition… exactly. We don’t all have to have it. But to get anxious about something, or be down in the dumps for a few days because of something, and saying that’s on a level with people with diagnosed mental health conditions, is condescending and trivialises our experiences.

Nobody knows what it’s like to have BPD… except for those who have it. For people to say that ‘being borderline’ is somehow normal is actually quite upsetting. I understand people are trying to break stigma by claiming we are just experiencing being human, but I don’t personally believe that. If having BPD is just being human then surely we’d all have the symptoms. I believe those with BPD ARE different. If you’re telling me this is just what life is like, and there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with me, then that definitely makes me not want to live life! Believing there’s something wrong with me gives me the hope I can get better, and life will be better. If I have to accept this as ‘normal’ then I might as well give up now, as it’s too painful to live with.

 

 

Some people don’t want the concept of diagnosis. They don’t want labels. But I actually find it helpful. It’s nice to be able to put a name to what you’re experiencing. It’s just a name to cover a set of symptoms. It should help to form the right treatment path. The stigma of BPD doesn’t come from the name… it comes from what people are told about ‘people like us’. I admit ‘personality disorder’ is not the most helpful of terms, as it implies something is wrong with our personalities. But even if the name changed we’d still be ‘those difficult ones’. This is because of a culture where these opinions are rife. We’re the ‘arm-cutters’, the ‘attention-seekers / manipulators’, the ‘lost causes’. Regardless of the name, people will continue to think these things about us. I don’t care about the name BPD. It doesn’t bother me. It’s the opinions underneath it that bother me. They are what need to be challenged.

I don’t have the official diagnosis of BPD, but I was told it was what I was treated for, and it explains so much of my life. Some would choose not to have a diagnosis – like I did several years ago… I didn’t want the stigma I was told about. But for some it’s a moment where everything clicks and makes sense. Having something to treat can give people more hope. Opinions will vary on this and that’s fine. But to try and do away with diagnosis is dangerous for those who need to feel they can recover.

To imply that it’s simply ‘the human condition’ rather than mental illness, is unhelpful. Yes, the emotions I struggle with because of BPD are human emotions, that we all feel. But if you don’t have BPD then you don’t experience those emotions to the same degree as someone with BPD. You don’t feel emotional pain at the same intensity… if you did you’d also be cutting your skin open. You may say you feel lonely or isolated – I don’t doubt that for a minute…. but you don’t feel it on the same level as someone with BPD. This isn’t a competition… this isn’t making it sound like we’re superior in the knowledge of pain and emotions… it’s a reality, that unless you have BPD you can’t imagine the intensity and the suffering. You can try, but you’ll never picture it. And anyone who says they know how I feel, just piss me off, because they don’t. Whenever I hear this it makes me feel MORE isolated, because they’re claiming to understand a level of emotional pain and loneliness, that they’re not capable of understanding. So in my head I think they’re lying. They’re pretending to understand. Or they honestly think they know how I feel. And it’s so frustrating… because they never will truly comprehend the turmoil inside my mind.

 

 

It’s difficult, because we want to be accepted. We want to fit in. We want to be validated. I want all these things… but I don’t want my feelings, thoughts and behaviours passed off as ‘normal’. If I was just a human being with human emotions and no mental illness, I wouldn’t be on a cocktail of medications, and I wouldn’t need therapy. I wouldn’t sometimes end up at the hospital. Splitting on everyone isn’t ‘normal’… if it was then nobody would speak to anyone for long periods of time. Pre-occupation with suicide isn’t ‘normal’ – it’s not a human instinct to kill yourself… the human instinct is survival. Depression so bad you don’t take care of yourself or get out of bed… or anxiety so bad you can’t go out the front door… it’s not ‘normal’. If it was normal then nobody would leave the house, go to work… we’d all sit at home in our pyjamas, with scruffy hair, dirty teeth, starved or dehydrated, watching daytime TV or staring into thin air.

Mental illness isn’t ‘normal’. This does not make us abnormal. It doesn’t meant we shouldn’t be included and accepted as normal human beings. Mental illness isn’t normal, but the people who experience it are normal people. We just have something to contend with, that other normal people don’t have to face in life. Yes we may all experience a bout of mental illness at some point in our lives. But to compare the emotions of anxiety and depression, with the mental illnesses of anxiety and depression, in order to ‘normalise’ mental health issues, only alienates us further. It has the opposite effect to what is intended.

If we trust you enough to open up about our mental health, what we need is validation. We need to have our suffering recognised, without a rendition of ‘Me too!’… ‘We all feel that way sometimes’… ‘I know someone who has that’. We are not all the same. We don’t all have mental illness – if we did then it wouldn’t be called an ‘illness’! We all have emotions, but we don’t all have a diagnosed / diagnosable mental illness. And even those who have a diagnosis are not all the same. Just because you know someone who has BPD it doesn’t mean you understand my BPD. Recognise my suffering if I choose to share it with you. See me as an individual. See me as a normal human being with a mental illness. Don’t see me as the same as you, and don’t see me as my mental illness. Validate my feelings and my experience, without competing. Yes we all have times we struggle. Yes we may both know about an aspect of mental health, but in those moments I choose to open up to you about how I’m feeling, I’m not looking to be comforted that ‘we all feel that way sometimes’ – it brings me no comfort… I’m looking for validation. I’m looking for sympathy / empathy / understanding about my situation…. not yours. I will be writing a post purely about validation soon, for those who don’t know what it is or how to give it.

I do admire those who want to improve life for those with mental illness. I know people sometimes think they’re doing the best by others, but if you stopped and listened to those with these illnesses, or rather listened to the other opinion, you’d see that attempts to identify with our suffering, often alienates us further, invalidates our suffering and robs us of hope that things can get better.

I do appreciate that if you’ve not had a full-blown mental illness it can be hard to know what to say. So these sentiments of ‘We all feel that way sometimes’, ‘I feel like that too’, and ‘It’s just part of life’ come out of your mouth before you stop and think. And actually, fair enough, some people will be comforted by such platitudes – this is just my take on it. But I know I’m not the only one to feel this way – far from it.

If everyone suddenly decided they have the same problems as me, because it’s not ‘mental illness’, it’s ‘the human condition’, therefore we all have mental health problems, then services would be flooded by people with the slightest bout of anxiety or feeling blue. The purpose of mental health services would lose all meaning, and those who are severely affected by mental illness and in desperate need of support won’t get the help they need, as the services are taken up by those with more easily managed issues. It’s hard enough to get much-needed support. You either get help from IAPT for mild to moderate anxiety and depression, or you have to be so severe that CMHT will see you. If you’re somewhere in between you’re screwed… lost in the system. And unfortunately people in this category when left to their own devices will tend to stray further towards the extreme, rather than recover by themselves. Mental health services are stretched as it is. To imply that we’re all the same, will make some people think they need therapy for just experiencing a human emotion of anxiety, rather than for the chronic illness of anxiety.

 

 

It also says that we’re all ‘normal’ therefore people don’t require therapy or treatment, because it’s just part of being human. I remember a time when I was mentally ill and mental health services were there to support you. It was their job to assist you in getting better. Nowadays it seems that their ‘job’ is simply to give you a toolbox to help yourself. A few sessions just to tell you what you need to do, and then it’s up to you whether you sink or swim. I understand this is because of increased pressure on services. They can’t give you the time and support you need. They’re doing their best. But in the meantime people who need more persistent care and support are being let down. We’re being left to fend for ourselves. As much as it might frustrate professionals that they can’t do more, and that people like me won’t do more to help ourselves, what they have to realise is if I could, I would. Unfortunately my mental health has deteriorated past the point where I can do this on my own. They also have to realise that as much as they’re frustrated with the state of mental health services, they’re not the ones suffering for it. We are the casualties. It’s much worse for patients who are left feeling like a lost cause after four CBT sessions, for example. It shouldn’t be this way. It never used to be this way. You used to get the help you needed for your illness. Now they tell you we all feel that way, and these are the tools to use to cope with it like everyone else. For some people it will work. For others, not so much. Just like some people will like seeing their illness as a part of being human, nothing more. But others prefer to see it as an illness that can be treated.

My view is that if you yourself do not know the complexities of actual mental illness, then please try not to identify with our struggles on a basic human level. Don’t try to make us all equal when we know full well that we operate differently to you! It will make us feel like we’re failing in life, if you can cope with the ‘exact same feelings’ as us, and not feel the need to cut yourself, hide in your bed, or starve yourself. Those who have / have had mental illness can choose to feel how they like about this, but if you don’t know first-hand the feelings and thoughts a mentally ill person experiences, then treat them as normal people, with respect, dignity, kindness, caring and concern. But do not try to make them feel what they are experiencing is ‘normal’. It’s not and whether you mean it or not, there can be catastrophic consequences of diminishing our pain.

The times I’ve felt most alone were times where people told me they understand, when I know full well they haven’t a clue what I’m feeling. In the end it makes me shut down and not bother telling people I’m struggling, as I know it will become a competition, or they’ll give me advice that works for milder mental illness, but not for something such as BPD. I would take a guess that a fair few lives have been lost because people claimed to understand the suffering of others, as they feel that way too…. they didn’t validate the feelings of the person in front of them… they threw in ideas like ‘It’s part and parcel of life unfortunately’, and carried on with life – only to be shocked when the person ended their life, feeling isolated and misunderstood. Hopeless. They’d claim they never saw it coming. But the signs were there. They tried reaching out for help, but nobody would listen.

What it boils down to is the need for us to be heard. To not be given advice unless we ask for it. To have someone sit and actually listen to how hard life is for us and why. Listening – it’s the one thing so desperately needed in life… the one thing that gets forgotten. We often say to people to speak out if they’re struggling – tell someone… reach out….. but if there’s nobody there prepared to truly listen it only compounds the problem and will drive it underground until it’s too late. 

These are just some of my thoughts, I appreciate people will have their own views on all this. That’s one of the good things about life – variety. Thanks for reading.

 

xxxx

The ‘Self’.

 

 

I’m unsure about the purpose of this post, but I’ll see where it goes. I wanted to explore my thinking on ‘perspective of life’. The fact that we experience life through our own eyes, with our own emotions and our own priorities. I wonder if it’s the same for everyone, or if I should feel guilty for being selfish… that’s what this piece is about, trying to work that out.

 

I am the centre of my universe. In saying that, I assume some would say I’m selfish, self-centred or a narcissist. I don’t mean that I think a lot of myself. I mean I see through my eyes, feel my feelings and my life is shaped by my memories. I do what I want to do, and sometimes feel I neglect others in fulfilling their wants. I guess I just assume they’ll take care of their side of things, like I do mine. I feel if I want to spend time on my own I tend to do it. But I have moments where I wonder what my loved ones’ inner experiences are… do they wish I wouldn’t spend time on my own? Do they wish I’d spend time with them? Are they lonely? Are they happy? Are their needs being met? And even at this point, writing this, it’s set me off crying.

 

Because I just want them to be happy. I think about my inner experience… it’s MY story. I know my story… I know I get lonely. I know I feel sad and rejected. I know I feel depressed and like I don’t matter to people. I experience other people as playing a part in my life. I don’t tend to think of myself externally. I don’t think of me playing a part in someone else’s life. I mean I have done that – that’s what tends to stop me from taking my own life, because I think about the pain it would cause my loved ones.

 

It’s not that I’m incapable of putting myself in the shoes of someone else. But I can’t put myself behind the eyes of someone else – I can’t see the world through their lens. I can’t feel the pain in their heart, because I haven’t got their memories. So I don’t know what their hearts desire. I don’t know if they’re happy doing their own thing, or if I should be doing more to make their lives better. And I feel so painfully guilty about this. I want them to feel happy and loved. I want to be to them, what they are to me. I don’t feel I am.

 

I feel so selfish at the moment. But then I start to think I’ve always been selfish. I don’t mean to be… I just see life through my lens. And I am the centre of my universe. I always figured we are all the centre of our own universe… because the things we experience happen to us. If I look at something that happens to my friend, it hasn’t happened to me. It may have some small impact – a ripple effect on my own existence, but it hasn’t happened to me – it’s in her universe, so would have a massive impact on her, as she is the centre of her universe. And if something happens to me, it may cause ripples in other people’s lives, but I take the impact, as I’m the centre of my universe. I’m the one who feels the painful emotions. I’m the one scarred by memories. I’m the one who has emotional needs – unmet needs… and my aim is to get them met. I’m not someone who is detached from the feelings of others, or uses people to meet my own needs. That’s what I mean – I feel extreme pain when I think about the role I play in the lives of those I love. I don’t use them, but they are like the planets in my solar system…. just as I must be a planet in theirs. I’m aware it might sound like I think the world revolves around me, if I view myself as the sun. But I’m talking about perspective here, not importance. I am the constant in my life. Anyone in my life could come and go – they move, like they’re revolving around the sun…. so in a sense I am a planet and the sun at the same time. In my own experience I am the sun. But to anyone else, they are the sun and I am a planet.

 

I don’t want to be the centre of attention… but I am central to my existence, if that makes sense. I find it hard to imagine what people see of me, externally – how I look, how I sound, how I act… my moods… my actions and how they might affect someone else. I’m not talking ’empathy’ here… because I have bucket-loads of the stuff. Too much. It’s more a sense of consciousness I think…. I’m on the inside, looking out. I can’t imagine being on the outside looking in. And that means I struggle to see other people as doing the same – being inside looking out… I see them from the outside. But they are no different to me. They are people too, with painful human emotions. They are trapped inside themselves, looking out, at people who are also doing the same. And what if I’m not looking in at them enough? What if I’m neglecting their needs? What if my being trapped inside my own experience means I’m not a good daughter / granddaughter / sister / friend? What if I’m hurting people by being unable to see through their eyes and feel through their hearts? This hurts me so much.

 

I love my family. They’re always there. They’ve done so much for me, I could never repay them. I sometimes stop and think of how their existence is. They have memories I don’t have. They have pain and sadness. They have regrets. They have fears. I sometimes don’t spend time with them, because I put my own needs first… I like to spend time on my own… or my depression does at least… I think about what my body needs and what my soul needs. I know they have the responsibility of doing that for themselves. But what if they don’t match… what if my needs don’t match theirs? What if they need more from me than I’m giving? What if the things they want most in life, they can’t have, because of me? It breaks my heart…

 

It can be as simple as thinking about what I’ve done in a day, and wondering what a loved one did in their day – did they do the things they wanted to do? The things their soul craved? Did they do things they felt they had to do, and didn’t make time for the things they wanted to do? Should I have been there to make them feel less alone? Should I have done more that I ‘had to do’ and didn’t want to, rather than just doing what my soul wanted? Are my loved ones happy with their place in life? Are they content day to day? Are they sad and lonely? Is it my fault?

 

If you think about when someone puts you down or upsets you, you feel it in your chest, but it’s essentially a knock to your ego. ‘Ego’ is often used in a negative way, as if you’re self-absorbed and think you’re something wonderful, and you’re getting knocked down a peg or two… but to me when I’m thinking of the ego in this sense, I mean a person’s sense of self. I really mean their ‘spirit’. But when this happens we do tend to see things as all about us… we question ourselves and our place in the world. We feel attacked by people. We look after ourselves. It’s all about us. Surely that’s something we all experience, is it not?

 

Do other people view themselves as the centre of their universe? It doesn’t mean they don’t care entirely about someone besides themselves. I don’t mean that. I’m talking about perspective. I’m talking about other people’s ‘stories’ told in the first-person. Am I a character in their story? Are they central to it all? Or am I just being too self-centred?

 

I care a lot about people. The people I love… I can’t begin to express how much I love them. I just burst into tears whenever I think about it. If I care about someone it’s the strongest emotion I’ve ever felt. I would die for them. I would live for them. I would do anything. So this isn’t about me not caring about others… or caring about myself more than others. Because honestly I don’t. When my granddad passed away, I didn’t care about how I would feel. I cared about how my mum and my nan would feel. I thought of their grief. I wanted them to be alright. I didn’t care about me. I still don’t care about me.

 

I detest myself at the moment. So it’s not self-love. I guess it might be ‘having my own back’, as nobody else does (other than family of course). But am I wrong to focus on how outside circumstances influence my inner world? Is it wrong to be the centre of my existence? I feel immense love for those in my life… is that enough? Should I make them the centre of my existence? And if so, how do I do that? How do I take myself out from behind my eyes, and my emotions, to see myself externally – to see me as a tiny speck in the universe… as irrelevant as I am? How do I see myself as others see me, not as my inner world sees me? How do I see other people as more than a part of my story? How do I see them as their own story…. without feeling intense guilt, pain and sorrow? How do I do it? Because I don’t want to be self-centred. I want to be a giving, loving person, who improves the lives of those I love. But thinking about my loved ones and their own inner experiences, rips me apart…. which leads me to focus on my own feelings again…. is it normal to be so focused on yourself? Trapped in your own body, viewing the world from inside? Does it make me a bad person? Or are we all doing the same?

 

Do people look at me, and feel as frustrated that they can’t feel how I feel? Do they ever question if I’m happy, and if it’s their fault I’m not? Do they feel they’re not giving me enough either? Do they feel like they’re self-centred… only thinking about how they feel, how they see things, how things affect them? Is it perfectly normal human behaviour? I really can put myself in the shoes of someone else. I can see why they’d feel a certain way. I have no problem with that. It’s imagining their experience of life and the part I play in that, that’s what causes me pain.

 

In my universe, as much as I hate myself, I have a part of me that still believes that I matter. It hasn’t quite died yet. It’s the part of me that says ‘Hey, that’s not on – what you did to me was lousy… I deserve better…. how dare you treat me like that!?’ It’s like the adult part of me protecting the child in me. And I guess that we all have that. That we all defend our inner child, and try to give them what they need to live in this world. I’m just so scared that I’m hurting or neglecting the inner child of other people in trying to look after my own. I’m worried life isn’t enough for them… because of me. I think of the role others play in my life, and the pain and sadness from that. I must be that character to other people. And I hate that. I don’t ever want to cause them pain or make them sad… either through things I do or I don’t do. If my ‘ego’ / ‘spirit’ is damaged by external factors – namely other people… either I’m egocentric, or we all feel this way, and I must damage theirs too. Either option is difficult to accept…. especially when you love people as much as I love my family.

 

The idea that I am me, and those in my life are planets in my solar system, and vice versa, it makes me really sad, as it makes me realise how utterly alone we all must be in life. I know that should comfort me, knowing I’m not alone in being alone, but the thought of my loved ones feeling as alone as I feel, I can’t bear it. I wish I could take that feeling away from them.

 

Sorry, this has become a bit of a heavy topic, and I’ve succeeded in upsetting and depressing myself more than usual. Feeling a bit reflective at the moment. I’d love to hear any thoughts you have about this concept of self and perspective of life – in you or in other people. Thanks for reading.

 

xxxx

The Unwritten.

 

 

 

“Hi, I hope you’re okay. I’m really sorry it’s taken me so long to get in touch. I wasn’t sure what to say. The longer I left it the harder it got. There’s been a lot going on at this end, and I’m finding it hard to juggle everything. I should have said something earlier, to let you know what was happening, and I’m sorry that I didn’t. I didn’t mean to hurt you or make you feel you were alone.

I know you’ve been having a really tough time, and I’m so sorry I haven’t been there for you. I know anniversary dates can be difficult, especially as this was your first experience of it… the first one. And I’m sorry nobody was there for you, that must have been hard. But I do care about you, and of course you were in my thoughts. I hadn’t forgotten, I’m just rubbish at communicating at the moment. I know he meant a lot to you, and he’s still with you.

I haven’t been avoiding you… I know it seems that way, but I promise I haven’t. There’s just been so much to think about, that it all got too much for me, and I had to have some time on my own, to be able to cope with it all. I didn’t mean to make you feel so alone though. I promise I’m not abandoning you, I just have to get my head around everything that’s going on in my life.

I’m still here, and I still care about you very much. And I miss you. The kids do too, they keep asking about you. You’re a special friend to me, and I’d hate to lose you from my life. I wish I could take away all the pain you’re feeling right now, or at least help you carry it. I want to see you be happy. I hate to see you so upset. I’m worried about you… please don’t do anything to yourself, I need you… the kids need you. It would break my heart to lose you.

Even when I can’t be there for you I want you to know you’re in my thoughts, and don’t ever doubt my care for you. It’s unconditional. You’re my best friend, and I’m so thankful to know you. Things will get better I promise. Please look after yourself.

xxxx”

 

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14/05/18

 

This is what I would’ve written to me if I was my friend. This is the message I needed to hear at this time. It acknowledges and validates my pain, it explains the absence, but doesn’t guilt-trip me for being upset. It shows care and concern for me. It leaves a good feeling. It’s reassuring and compassionate.

 

Sadly this is not the message I received. It was quite different to the above. I shall take more time to reflect on it, but so far it’s left me with a sense that I am a burden, I’m selfish – only thinking about myself, and not my friend. Lack of apologies. No mention of caring about me. No compassion for my first anniversary date, just telling me they don’t get any easier – doesn’t inspire me to continue… and making it sound like ‘we all go through it’ – which is what I figured my friends thought anyway. Sorry for being a ‘newbie’ to the club….  Cold. Bitter. Withholding of care. These are the immediate senses I get from what I’ve read.

 

I feel like I’m a bad person for not being there for her, but she could have told me much sooner, what was going on, and that I hadn’t lost her. It’s far too late, and the message hasn’t actually reassured me, because there’s no heart in it. I feel she’s angry with me, and I’m meant to feel guilty and ashamed, and selfish… which I slightly do right now. But I am also angry as a result… as I am done being made to feel guilty for being abandoned and hurt by people. I’ve had way too much of it in my life. It’s time people owned their behaviour and stopped trying to spin it round on me. I deserved an apology or care, one or the other at least, and I feel I received neither. Those closest to me are going to have to start trying to understand my illness. Our friendships won’t work otherwise. They have to acknowledge and accept my triggers and avoid them. And they have to start thinking about ‘tone’, and showing more care, concern and compassion. I will be writing a blog about this soon.

 

I understand she’s been busy, and she’s had to focus on other people – I totally get that, in fact I’ve written about it before … that I don’t expect to be the priority … that family is much more important, as it should be. I’m not saying she should’ve taken her focus off of them and focused on me. What I’m saying, and what I’m upset about, is that she could SEE I was in pain and heading to a very dangerous and lonely place. I was crying out for help! She could SEE it, and she couldn’t take sixty seconds out of her day to send me one caring message, to say she was thinking of me. I wasn’t worthy of sixty seconds. THAT’S why I’m upset. I’m sure I’ll get over it. This is just a tough time, for everyone. But I am allowed to be hurt by that, and to take my time to recover from the whole ordeal of the past couple of months.

 

One good thing I suppose, is when I began reading the message, I thought ‘Uh-oh, this has that tone to it, where it’s going to upset me and trigger me…’ I actually got supplies ready to harm myself. But then I picked up a stress ball and tried breathing slowly whilst I read the message. While the message did upset me, I haven’t yet harmed myself because of it. I know there’s still time, but at least I was able to put it off initially.

 

One thing I’ve done is closed my account, and removed everyone from my old one. I’ve turned my phone off. I don’t want to talk to anyone right now. I will ‘talk to’ my blog, and people on Twitter, as they’re the only things that have got me through the last couple of months. People might not like what I say on this blog, but they have no clue what it’s like to have my voice silenced, and to be made to put up with being mistreated. None of them know the level of despair and emotional pain I’m carrying. They’re not capable of knowing. Unless you have BPD you cannot even imagine the intensity of the feelings. I will keep talking here, as I’ve been advised to by people who understand the dangers of me not talking. Those who can see how close to the edge I am, and who understand mental illness, particularly the one I have, say it’s important to just keep talking. I know I saw it as a mistake to talk about these things here. But only I know where I’m at right now. Only I know the consequences of shutting down entirely. I know how close I am to jumping in front of a train, or off a bridge, or doing something else. I can’t let those thoughts win. I can’t let these people win. I have to keep fighting, for my family. They’ve always been there, and I know they always will. That has to be enough for me for now.

 

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15/05/18

 

Having slept on it… I’m less upset. I’m able to look at potential reasons behind the message I did receive. Of course it would have been nice to get one like the one I wrote at the start – that’s what I needed. But some people have the knack, others don’t. I have to accept people as they are. In time I will respond, and it will actually be with compassion and concern, just as I needed. But at this point in time I have to protect myself, and that means keeping away from everyone. I’m sorry. It’s better that I distance myself, work out how I feel, think of a response and take my time to write it… otherwise I might say something I can’t take back. I actually feel quite proud of how I’ve coped with this so far. I’m doing what’s right for me. I avoided harming myself yesterday. And I’ll let the answer come to me in its time.

 

In the meantime I’m going to be writing posts about what we as people with BPD need from others. In therapy I’ve often been told to treat myself how I would treat a friend, or how a friend would treat me. The letter I wrote at the start is how I wish my friend had treated me… and it’s what I would say to her if she was going through what I’m going through. It’s what friends are meant to be there for… so knowing what I’d have said to her, means I’m closer to knowing how to speak to myself… it’s progress… it’s knowing how I deserve to be treated and spoken to. It’s been a way of telling myself what I need to hear. I’m thinking of doing a collection of letters like this to myself, from all the people who hurt me in my past… the things I wish they’d said, which they never did. It might build my self-worth up a little, and who knows, it might even fool my mind into thinking they were sorry for what they did!! If nothing else it’ll get all the pain out of me.

The next post will be based on this experience, putting it to good use and hopefully it’ll be helpful to others, whilst expressing my needs. Best get working on it!

 

xxxx