Exhaustion.

I’m on a sinking raft in the middle of an angry sea.  There is no land in sight and my safety is falling quickly beneath the fury.  I cannot swim, I’m destined to drown.  The freezing water stings as it’s covering my legs, inching it’s way up my thighs the way so many hands have in my past. Claiming my body with greedy intentions as if gentle touches would soften the destruction that is inevitable.  I learned long ago not to fight, to be as still as possible.  Pretend to be as dead on the outside as I am on the inside.  Eventually he would have his fill and it would be over. This is no different than the last time – or the times before that. The rising water surrounds my chest and captures my breath.  With a trembling voice I remind myself that these lungs have been faithful and they wouldn’t give up on me now, no matter how much I begged them to. Up my body it crawls, reminding me of them. Deaths grips around my throat and I taste the salty memories of my past.  So many men.  So many times. My innocence was traded, my childhood stolen. For some of them it was only one moment but I’ve lived it every day. The ocean hugs me as I look around, amazed at how it feels to be free at last.  I’m floating, almost flying, at its mercy but I feel safe in its embrace.  My lungs haven’t given up, they’re aching and burning.  I’m begging them to let me go.  Let me have this peace I’ve been searching for all my life. Please, let me die. My eyes close and I smile one last time. This is it, finally.

My eyes jerk open and I’m gasping for breath.  I am soaked and for a second I wonder who pulled me from the water. I hear a voice telling me that it’s okay, it was only a dream.  I was just having a bad dream.  I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that it was the best dream I can remember ever having but she wouldn’t understand.  She wraps me in her arms and pulls me close.  This is as close to drowning as I’ll ever get. She feels like the ocean against my back.  Safe and accepting and for a moment I forget how painful existing is.  I feel loved for the first time in my life.

I wish I had that moment again right now instead of sitting at this desk alone in my office.  My life is crumbling around me and it’s all my fault. I want her to chase me around the bed in her sleep only to catch me and hold me tight. I want my ocean.  I can look back at the decisions I’ve made in the last month and see exactly how I ended up in the spot I’m in now. I’ve been stressing over the questions I have to answer in my packet to see my new therapist Tuesday.  I don’t want to answer them. I also don’t want to renew a lease on an apartment I hate, but I have to do that Monday.  And tonight my car got repossessed because I defaulted on a loan.  Not because I couldn’t pay the payment but because I didn’t want to go into their office and have to deal with a person.

I don’t fucking feel good. 

I don’t want to deal with anything after I get off work in the morning.  I want to go home and climb into bed with my pups and the cats and sleep away this feeling. The last two days have been so amazing and now I feel like falling off the earth.  I wish there was a mute button for my thoughts, a way to shut them off just for a while.

I don’t want to fucking exist. 

 

Blue screens.

Flames take over my organs as the static makes love to a spark.  These thoughts act like waves of gasoline, touching the shore of my mind and refusing to let the fire die.  My heart attempts to climb out of my chest, my faithful lungs desperately trying to keep up. White noise behind my voice, static. My eyes wide open but seeing nothing.  This is it, this is how I’m going to die. Everything hurts, I didn’t even notice how hard my jaw was clenched until I tried to open my mouth to scream. Let it go. Breathe, just keep breathing. 

My conscious drifts off to sleep, defeated by the attack.  During my rest I am free though.  The thoughts are muted, the pain in my chest has dulled, and I can breathe. Oh sweet slumber, wrap me in your protecting arms and keep me safe for a few more hours. The release only lasts a few minutes and I’m at war again.  Coaching myself to keep breathing.  Reminding myself that these thoughts are not being honest and I know the truth. Damn these lungs! Just give up already. The cycle starts again, hello sleep.

I am fucking exhausted.

I have a confession: Today I hated my girlfriend. I found a ledge and I had to talk myself down from it all day.  My only moments of peace came when I fell asleep and they barely lasted half an hour each time.  I had every right to hate her, to not trust her. In my head. Who did she think she was? Telling me everything would be okay and not to worry.  She has never been homeless.  She had a place to live at the end of next month.  She was supposed to tell the realtor that we wanted to put an offer on a house.  But she didn’t.  She said she did.  But she didn’t. Instead she looked at another house without me. I hated her.  Every inch of her pretty lying ass. Of course she looked at a house without me, she doesn’t even want to be with me.  She’s only with me because she’s afraid of what I’ll do if she leaves.  She’s only waiting until my medicine is working and she’s going to leave. Fucking bitch. 

The truth, though, is similar but not the same. I do resent her for telling me not to worry because she has never been homeless, she doesn’t know what it’s like.  I do resent her for not putting an offer on the house I thought we wanted.  It turns out though that she, even though she said she did, did not want to live there.  I do resent her for looking at another house, that we apparently are putting an offer on if it’s not a foreclosure, without me. But I do not believe she’s only with me because she’s afraid of what I’ll do if she leaves.  I do not believe she’s only waiting for an opportune time to leave. I do not hate her. I do believe that everything will be okay despite my intense worry about becoming homeless again.  There are too many tiny lives that depend on me to keep them safe to allow myself to be in that situation again. Things will be okay though, I know that.

As I laid there, in the midst of my battle, I wished I could write.  If I had moved, if I had dared to sit up and try to document the chaos of my episode I would have fought with her.  I knew I didn’t want to do that.  Winning that battle, if one could even say there is a winner, had to be done as a solo act. But I wished I could write and share my thoughts and emotions as I was having them instead of recounting them and dressing myself in guilt for even have experienced them. Not that I feel as though I censor my memories but perhaps I would to save her from being hurt by what I write, by what I thought.

Fact is, even though there may not be much, I love her with every untainted ounce of me.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS CONTAIN TRIGGERS FOR SELF-HARM AND EATING DISORDERS.  PLEASE STOP READING IF YOU ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF EITHER OF THESE ADDICTIONS. 

 

 

Last Wednesday I relapsed.  Technically.  

I do not prefer to cut with a knife.  Maybe I’m lazy or just haven’t found the right one but I have never liked working with a knife.  But because I hadn’t eaten in a couple of days and I was way out of control with my emotions I couldn’t manage to break apart a razor to take the blades to use.  Also not a favorite but it’s close enough in a squeeze. I found a knife in the kitchen and took it to the bathroom.  It served its purpose and I immediately calmed down enough to climb in bed and fall to sleep quickly. The only part of it I enjoyed was the color of my blood against my almost too-white skin, it was beautiful.  They weren’t deep enough, I barely seen the fatty white.  Bitch ass scratches. I’m so worthless I can’t even do this right any more. The next couple of days I found the pinky-red swollen scratches very attractive on my fat thigh.  I wanted to take a picture of how pretty it was. The way it burned and hurt was almost enough to make up for the fact that it was the weakest cut I’ve ever done.

That road isn’t a place I’m willing to travel down again.  It had been four years since I had done anything. The last one was nine stitches and left a fat, flat tuna colored scar. I know exactly how hard it is to overcome the need to cut.  The thing that made me realize I needed to stop before was how no matter how deep I went it was never enough any more.  I was going to end up dead.  That is still a possibility if I start again.  But I want to, so bad. Getting away with it wouldn’t be hard.  It would stop a lot of fights. I know what I’m doing. I will not allow myself to go there again but there’s still a little voice echoing inside reminding me how fucking great it feels.  My voice right behind it reminding me how guilty I would feel.

My tiny white pills have seemed to take away my appetite.  At first I thought I wasn’t hungry because I was upset but even in my moments of okay when I can laugh and don’t feel like dying, I’m not hungry.  This has given birth to the urge to lose weight. A lot of weight.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’m a little chubby at one hundred and thirty five pounds at my heaviest time of day and standing only five feet three inches.  A little weight off wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.  I love laying in bed and running my hand over my stomach and not feeling so much of it. Giving my ribs little pep talks, telling them it’s okay if they want to come out and show themselves.  Running my fingers over my collar bone that has began to protrude a bit. These are unhealthy thoughts.  This is an unhealthy thing. And I know it.  It’ll be impossible for me to dive head first into an eating disorder right now.  My girlfriend is already constantly on me about eating. I just had to date a fit chick. 

These are unwell thoughts and I’m aware of that.  I have been completely honest with my girlfriend about them.  I will not act on them.  I am not in danger.  I am safe. Recovery is still my main goal and the determination is still strong.  I know that acting on these thoughts will only make recovering that much harder.  I have already beaten both of these issues before, I will not allow myself to become a victim to them again.

We will be okay, one day. 

There’s hail mixed in the rain.

What day is it now? I have to look at the date on the computer and the tiny number on my prescription bottle. 02/09/2016. Add a day because it took me that long to work up the nerve to go to the pharmacy. So, day six.  Day six.  And I’m still a lunatic. Day six.  I can repeat it as many times as I want and nothing will change. I’m no better, just a little more medicated.  I’m still me. Still unwell.  Six days is nothing.  Six days on these tiny white pills. Please God, let these damned things be a miracle drug. 

Is Borderline Personality Disorder a real illness?  Of course this is my question during moments of bitterness.   It seems that the key to controlling this demon is to CONTROL MYSELF.  To have some discipline when it comes to acting on thoughts or negative emotions. Well, holy fuck. I NEVER thought to just CONTROL them. As if it’s really that easy.  That’s all? Just control it?  To me, that’s saying that there’s nothing actually wrong with me, with us, that I just want to act like a person possessed by the meanest demon Satan ever heard of.  Hopelessness. Helplessness. Bitterness. Am I really sick? Or just emotionally lazy? This is who I am?

There’s a whirlwind of emotion inside my chest and head right now.  A battle of words I don’t know nor do I care to try to translate.  Am I sick or not? Does it matter? I cannot for the life of me pinpoint the type of person that would be okay with living like this. Being a monster. I try to look back at my past and remind myself of who I really am but I don’t remember ever feeling okay.  I never felt safe, normal, or in control.  I always felt like there was something different about me. I always felt like I would die at a young age. By suicide.  I am sick. THIS is not who I am. Again, repeating that phrase won’t change anything.  Whether I’m sick or not won’t change anything.  There is still this fatal malfunction in my head telling me every day that only death will ease the pain.

And I believe it.

I debated on deleting that last sentence, knowing that it’s not entirely true.  Staring at it and taking an inventory of myself, these thoughts, my feelings, the static I feel.  I am on the verge of an episode.

I knew this when I woke up this morning.  The static was right on the surface of my skin and there was a tiny voice in the back of my head trying to convince me that my girlfriend didn’t love me and the moment she thought my medicine was working well enough she was going to leave me.  Like clockwork her phone went off just as that thought ended and another thought laughed at me, telling me that she was cheating on me with that person. The thoughts were outsmarted though because I knew she had plans to take her grandmother to the doctor this morning and that more likely than not it was Gran or her mom trying to make sure she was still going to be there for them.

Fuck you, self.  I win.   Episode avoided but the static remains. Negative thoughts want to come and torment me.  Some I let linger because maybe there is some truth to them.  Others I refuse to listen to because I know better. 

I can’t wait to start therapy. That’s a lie.  Okay, a half truth.   I want to start therapy.  I’m terrified though.  A lot of what-if‘s are bouncing in my head.  What if it doesn’t work? What if it just messes me up worse? What if she wants to talk about my childhood? I will not talk about my childhood.  What if she tries to blame everything on my parents? What if I hate it? But what if I love it? What if I start feeling like I need it? Ah the static.  

I want to tell everybody that even though I am chin deep in feelings of hopelessness and bitterness I am still just as determined as ever to get better. I have to.  My life depends on it.

Am I better yet?

Hello, day four.  I have managed to take these pills for three days in a row now.  This afternoon will make it four.  Am I better yet? Am I cured? I want to say that I feel better, that YES! the medicine is working this time.  But there are always days of sanity between episodes, this is no different than any other time.  To be truthful I haven’t been participating in life for the last three days so the amount of triggers I’ve encountered is less than usual.  I want so much to be better, the quiet thoughts I have in the back of my mind give away the fact that I’m still unwell.

On day two I fucked up.  I beat my girlfriend. I hit her.  I grabbed her by the hair and slammed her down on the floor.  I don’t remember what it was about.  I don’t remember the whole thing.  I see flashes of it and I hear her screaming telling me to stop.  I hear her crying.  But I don’t stop.  I keep going until she finally escapes.  Who the fuck was that?! I am ashamed of myself.  No part of that was, or is, okay.  My hands should never touch her unless it is in a loving manner.  But they did.  I came to crying in my dad’s truck.  Shaking and nauseous. I am a fucking monster. What had I done? I decided that it was best for me to go to the emergency room and tell them that I am not safe and nobody around me is safe.  That’s what I needed to do.  I needed to be locked away for a while.

My car was broken and my only way of transportation was my dad.  I was too afraid, too ashamed, to tell him what I had done and what I needed to do.  He has always been uncomfortable with displays of emotion. Fucking rich, seeing as that’s all I’m made of.  Raw, uncontrollable emotion.   Dad told me I just needed to sleep.  That’s what I needed to do.  I needed to leave that girl alone and just sleep.  I felt like I needed to die.  Like somebody should beat me.  I will never forgive myself for this. 

I took four gel caps of sleep aid and laid down on my bed.  I would sleep until my car was fixed and Dad left.  Then I would drive myself to the hospital.  Or to my friend’s workplace and she would drive me to the hospital.  That’s what I would do.  I just needed to sleep until he left.  I slept until that night when I was woken by pounding on my front door.  I was ignoring everybody’s phone calls and text messages.  I had removed myself from all social media.  Somebody was here to check on me.  Reluctantly I found my way down the stairs and opened the door.  It was my friend.  Other than my girlfriend she’s the closest thing to a best friend I have.

My apartment is my safe place.  It’s where I can go and just be by myself.  Where nobody can walk in and determine how I spend my time.  It’s my place.  My girlfriend doesn’t even come into my apartment.  So when I opened my door to see my friend I stepped out of my apartment and shut the door.  My body in the way of the handle to prevent her from invading my place.  Naturally, this alarmed her.  She was insistent on coming in and checking for tools.  I would not allow that.  Flashbacks of being called to the principal’s office every morning in high school for arm checks came crashing into my head.  No! No.  I am twenty-nine years old.  I will not be treated like this. I messed up! I cut myself! But it wasn’t even deep! It was scratches! I know how hard it is to beat that addiction, I won’t let myself go there again. Before that night I hadn’t done it in four years. I demanded to be trusted.

Finally I convinced her to trust me and she left.  I had an hour left to sleep off my sleep aid before I had to go to work.  I felt nothing. 

I had expected my girlfriend to leave me.  She should have.  Nobody should ever be subject to abuse, no matter the excuse the abuser has.  My BPD is not a valid reason to have hit her.  She stayed though.  She told me she knew it wasn’t me that did that and that I wasn’t going to have to face this alone.  Although she couldn’t be there physically she was with me.  I don’t deserve somebody like her but because she loves me and believes in me I will continue to do all I can do to get better. I know I may never be completely recovered from BPD but I refuse to stop trying.

The morning after the incident I decided I would stay awake until I found a doctor to see me.  I have insurance now, good insurance, somebody has to be willing to take me on.  I only called three numbers before I found somebody who was accepting new patients, my insurance, and my diagnoses. At the first of the month I have my first appointment with a therapist.  Fifteen days later I see a psychiatrist.  I’m honestly terrified but the fact that I don’t have to do this alone helps me.  I’m not sure what to expect.  I know my goals though: Get on a medicine or medicines that help me and learn how to control my emotions and my thoughts. 

I’m reading a book right now, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder by Rachel Reiland, and it makes me see that not every case of BPD is the same.  I can’t say that this book has given me hope or courage because it hasn’t.  But it has made me see that I am not just fucked up. There are other people in the world that feel in ways that I feel.  That suffer in similar ways that I do.  This book helps me not feel so horribly alone in my disease. While I know my girlfriend and my friend will support me however I need them to, they don’t know what it feels like.  Knowing that somebody else out there does, though, is some how comforting.  My story isn’t the same as Rachel’s, but I don’t think any BPD story is, but as she describes her emotional outbursts followed by extreme remorse, I get that.

So it’s day four and my journey is still ongoing.

Tiny White Pills.

Day one of the tiny white pills.  Small and chalky.  Bitterness explodes in my mouth– I can’t swallow it fast enough. This is going to save my life? Dr. Walker informed me, like he has countless times before, that they will take four weeks to build up in my system but the people around me will notice a decrease in my symptoms in a week or two.  I’ll notice a difference in a month or so.  A month is a long time to me.  Sometimes a day is too long.  I suppose I have lived with this for as long as I have already, what is a month longer? Okay self, stay alive for a month longer. 

Not a lot of people in my life know I’m sick unwell.  Perhaps my parents don’t even know that I live with this potentially fatal malfunction. I don’t speak to my friends every day.  Some of them I go months between conversations.  I like it that way.  Not having friends that I talk to daily means nobody starts to wonder when they haven’t heard from me in a week or two or a month.  My girlfriend is the only person that has almost seen how bad it gets and even she has only seen the tip of the iceberg.  The thing that I love most about her is the patience she has with me and this baggage I’ve carried around for as long as I can remember.

How do I get away with keeping my illness such a greatly hid secret? How can I walk into a crowded room where everybody stares at me and not one person can tell I’m sick? Post pictures of myself all over the internet and be seen as just a regular person?  It’s simple.  Most people don’t consider what I battle a real illness (and I wear long sleeves).  Maybe they see it as a weakness, something I can control if I wanted to.  But not a real illness. There is such a taboo about mental illnesses and it makes it hard for much of society to look at somebody who is struggling as a person who needs help.  I have been told my whole life to JUST STOP! just stop JUST stop stop with the negative thoughts, stop crying, stop getting so mad, stop stop stop just stop like I wake up every day and choose to feel this way.  A person with mental illness commits crime and parents tell their children that the person is a bad person when in reality that person is not well.  They may be a good person when they’re not in the middle of an episode or when they’re on the correct medicine. These people are not their illness, they may do bad things, but that doesn’t mean they are a bad person.

Hi, my name is Pacie and I live with Borderline Personality Disorder.  I am, technically, mentally ill.  I’m sure I’ve lost a few readers with that sentence because if a person does consider mental illnesses real illnesses BPD isn’t usually in that cluster.  Depression and anxiety would also be excluded from their group of what they consider to be real.  Trust me when I tell you, Borderline Personality Disorder is real and it is deadly.  There is a constant fight within myself every day.  Some days are admittedly better than others but there are some days I wish and pray that God doesn’t stop me from ending it all.

I have no control of my emotions.  There are thoughts in my head and I have no idea who thought them, but it wasn’t me.  When I’m having an episode things come from my throat that I don’t want to say and it’s like I’m on the outside of my head screaming, begging myself to stop saying those things.  Stop throwing those things. Stop hitting that person. Just. Stop. but that voice doesn’t stop.  My hands don’t stop. I don’t stop. I can’t stop.  Afterward, when I’m allowed back in my head and in my body, I drown in remorse.  All I want, I need, is for somebody to tell me they still love me despite the awful monster I am.  When I don’t have that option, when the person on the receiving end has had enough of the abuse and they leave, the urge to self harm comes.  It feels good, it reminds me.  Until recently I have been able to suppress the urge until it eventually goes away.  It’s been years since I decided to take the easy way out of the moment.  But I did.  I relapsed.  And then I was able to go to sleep.  Now I have to start over with overcoming that addiction.

I was diagnosed by the military in 2010 after I nearly cut my arm off due to my habit of self mutilation while stationed in Germany.  Every week for months before that incident I went to therapy.  I was reassigned three different times to different doctors because they felt they couldn’t treat me efficiently, my depression and anxiety were “extreme”.  I was on multiple medications for my depression, anxiety, and insomnia.  I tried to get better.  There was nothing I wanted more than to be normal like my friends.    Normalcy never came.  The medicine never helped.  There was minor relief when they finally put a name to my lifelong enemy, Borderline Personality Disorder, but it soon vanished when I realized it wasn’t something that would just go away.  After I was finished with the military and I came home there was even more disappointment and hopelessness.

I couldn’t find a therapist.  I was out of medicine.  I needed help.

Five years later and I have still not been to a therapist, but I have recently started trying again to find somebody that will take me and my BPD on.  My family doctor prescribes me anti-depressants and I turn down anti-anxiety medicine or anything else I may become too friendly with.  (Not so deep inside I know there’s a little drug addict in me, itching to find something to numb it all.) Today I started on a new medicine and I am determined to beat this. I will stay on these tiny white pills even after they rob me of my ability to write.  I will recover.

I am going to share my journey, struggles, and accomplishments with the entire internet.  With people I don’t know, people that know me from my online presence, and my friends that maybe didn’t know.  It’s not going to be easy, it’s not going to be fun.  I’m not doing this to gain sympathy or pity.  Maybe a prayer or two though. I know there is somebody out there that struggles the way I do.  Maybe they feel like they are the only person in the whole world that feels out of control.  But we don’t have to do this alone.  We don’t have to struggle by ourselves.  We don’t have to hate who we are because of BPD.  We’re not monsters. We can overcome.  We’ll have to fight for the rest of our lives but it’s going to get better if we put in work and make it happen.

My whole life I felt like I was born to be a writer.  It has always been that one thing I did slightly better than the masses.  Medication takes that away from me.  This medicine is going to take that away from me.  It’s going to be hard.  It’s not going to stop me though.  There is a beautiful, sweet, smart, and funny blonde sleeping on the right side of a bed across town that I would do anything for.  Including giving up my passion.  If I can’t do this for myself, I can do this for her.