Don't tell me its good that I survive.

When people tell me that I don’t really want to die because I haven’t yet been successful, and that is a really positive thing, I want to strangle them. On the spot. I understand where you are coming from; I am still alive, I can see that, I know, I keep surviving, and I can’t seem to die.

I need you to also understand where I am coming from now. Because every time someone says that to me, it hurts in a few ways.
The first way is that it’s a reminder of my failure; I understand that it’s a positive thing that I am still alive but you have to remember that I am someone who wants to take my own life and who finds it very upsetting that I have not yet been a violent enough person to manage that. I know you see it as a good thing that I have not yet been successful, but I don’t. It being pointed out that I have repeatedly failed at taking my own life doesn’t make me feel proud, it makes me want to go and do the job properly.

The next way it hurts is because it’s focusing on the end point. When someone is physically ill, they are given medication to combat the illness itself. When you focus on the fact that I walked to the edge of a cliff and spent hours there then walked away, and see that as a positive thing, you are ignoring that in the weeks running up to that I have been desperately struggling to survive every day. Yes, that day I managed to walk away. Great news. But it’s not because I want to live, it’s because I am stuck in a horribly painful limbo between living and dying. I am not coping and haven’t been for a long time and you judge how well I am doing by whether I make it a month without taking steps towards ending my own life.
I will be recovering when I can get through longer than 12 hours without having a substantial feeling of how desperately I want to kill myself. Whether or not I die isn’t the most important part for me, because that is not the same as finding a way to survive and be better. I understand that you think I’m going to survive because I have a string of failed attempts, but that isn’t my reality. It tears me apart every time something like that happens and no, I don’t see it as positive that I walked away. I am desperate for this to be over, I am totally desperate. If that’s through death then that is something I am ready for, but the possibility of living like this for another 60 years is not something I am willing to do.

Don’t praise my lack of ability to kill myself. Praise every day where I manage to act like a functioning human, and respect the fact that suicide attempts are not the issue for me, it’s the hours in between that are the real problem and the worst pain.  

Mental Pride

Pride. It’s not a word I associate with Mental Health, personally, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. It is a difficult situation because I am not proud when I get to the end of each day, all I’ve done is survive, but some days that actually is an incredible achievement.

I sometimes have problems with reality distortions and hallucinations; I hear things that aren’t there (voices, animals, instruments), I believe paranoia that is wildly untrue and impossible (that I am not actually human), and I listen to daily distortions about how the people close to me feel about me (that they hate me, they all deeply hate me). These vary in intensity and how they show themselves, but with one thing in common that they are scary, deeply unnerving and make it near impossible to fulfill daily tasks.

There is no point in me being ashamed that I am living with a mental illness, instead I wish there is a way I could be proud. I would be proud of someone if there was literally a voice in their head telling them to jump off a building, alongside suicidal thoughts and mood problems, and they manage to stay alive. I would be proud of someone for being in public when they slip into the belief that they must not be real, and they still eventually get home unharmed. I would be proud of someone if they survived these problems every day and managed to hold down friendships, hobbies, and studies.

Yet I am not proud. I don’t know why I am not proud. Perhaps it is the constant knowledge that I am only just surviving these things and any day could be the day I fail, perhaps it is the knowledge that if I don’t survive it will be seen as a misjudged action, something that didn’t need to happen. Perhaps it is because I live in a culture where Mental Illness is accepted behind closed doors, but if I’m too open with it, I’m judged.

I want to survive this so that I can look back one day, and be proud. 

Why mental health is like building

It hurts so much because it lets me build a wall between me and the worst of my pain; it watches me lay it brick by brick, with no instructions, working out how to hold it together, how to keep it upright, how to make it strong and proper. It watches me cry as I drop bricks and they break, and it watches my pain when the rough surface scratches my skin away.

Then when my wall is getting high enough that it looks like the pain might stay behind it, it knocks it down. The bricks break, the cement crumbles away, until I am left with nothing but dust on the ground around me. Knowing that I not only have to sweep away the dust, I then have to start again. Find more bricks. Build from the ground up.

It’s no surprise I want to stop trying to build the wall and let it drown me.  Yet I haven’t stopped. I am not sure I will ever stop trying to build this wall. I am aware one day it might crush me, but until that day, I am still building. 

Because I mattered.

Reasons to make sure you have full consent before making any kind of sexual move:

Because saying no is hard
Because sometimes people freeze when they’re scared
Because people are humans not sex toys
Because we are just as important as you are
Because people who have been sexually abused will never forget it
Because life is hard enough already
Because there is a high correlation between abuse sufferers and those who develop mental illnesses
Because it is not your right to be pleasured, especially if it puts someone else in pain
Because someone being quiet doesn’t mean they should become your easy target
Because being drunk is no excuse for abusing someone’s body

Because humans are strong, but also breakable. You might not think it looks like rape, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t abusing someone.

Because to you I may have been an easy ejaculation, but I am also a daughter, a sister, a friend, a loved one, and a human.

Because  I deserved better. 

Let me be a coward.

Seconds. It always amazes me how it takes seconds for everything to drop. It doesn’t matter what has happened or how happy I have been for how long, it just goes. I lose it all and revert into a broken, barely human body which is so empty and so desperate that I can barely fake a smile and hold my head on my shoulders. I have to go on living a life that could be completely lost at any moment. I know that everyone has this, but I don’t believe it is in the forefront of most people’s heads at all times.

Suicide is seen as the cowards way out. Its seen as selfish.
“I know I’m not capable of that because I know it would hurt people I left behind”
“Just push through a few more days, you’ll see, it’ll get better”
“Don’t be an idiot”

I am not a coward, I am not selfish, and I am not an idiot. I have a problem which means that suicide is on my mind almost all day, all night. I sometimes wonder how long someone else would last with my brain. Honestly, I don’t think it would be long.

I am just a girl who doesn’t want to exist anymore. I want to delete myself. Remove the error. Rub out the mistake.

I am just a girl who thinks about dying all the time and doesn’t know how to live. It really isn’t selfish that I am incapable of living. I bet you’d be a ‘coward’ too if your brain didn’t work properly.

Grief is hell, I understand that. But when I lose this fight, I lose it all. At least grief means you still have a beating heart. 

This is my dream

Right now I feel like I am on top of the world. Not because I am the happiest person, not because I’m no longer ill, and not because I have achieved any incredible feats. No, right now I am happy because I truly believe with every bone in my body that I am going to be allowed to try and live until I am old and wrinkly! In this moment in time, I believe I am someone worth fighting for. I believe I matter, I believe I can help remind other people that they matter, and I believe that I actually have the power to put my experiences to good use and make a tiny bit of difference to someone’s world.

The thing about having a disorder like BPD is that is fogs your mental vision, constantly. It is always there, twisting things and taking away hope, trust and belief. Yet when things are a little bit better for me, like now, I am honestly so appreciative. A lot of people talk about living their dreams, but for me, honestly, my dream is to live. This is my dream. For me, this mood is an achievement, and looking past the pain, fear, mistrust and disillusion can be hard.

This mood won’t last, that is the nature of my disorder, and at any moment in the next 24 hours I could be reduced to a shattered human, curled up in the corner of my room unable to do anything apart from sob, or do myself damage. I am aware of that. Yet I can look past it, because I truly feel like I can get through that. I can shatter, I can go through pain, and I can put myself back together and wait for the pain to pass, because being a borderline hasn’t just made me weak; it has made me unbelievably determined as well.

Watch this space, because I have only lived ¼ of what could be my life, and I have a lot of things to do in the next 60 years and a lot of people I love to do them with. If you’re reading this as someone who is currently struggling, keep pushing through, because mental illness should never win. You are better than that and you deserve so, so much more than that. I will always believe in you. 

Dear Borderline Personality Disorder

Dear Borderline Personality Disorder,

These could have been the best years of my life if they weren’t littered with so much pain that I look back in shame, hut and anger. These are the years where I become an adult, and you have made me take those steps with a burden so much heavier than I am capable of carrying.
You have made me into a person I hate by slowly chipping away at every part of me that I could be proud of it and leaving me with nothing but shame and hatred. To say I don’t deserve love is an understatement, because you have shown me that I don’t deserve to exist because of what you’ve done to me.  You don’t deserve to exist. You don’t deserve the space you take up in my mind and body, and you don’t deserve the words you make me speak and actions you make me fulfill.
You make me believe that the world would be a better place if I die by my own hand. You make me believe that the best I can do for the people I love is remove myself from their life. You make me believe that when I’m gone, the space my life took up will give the people I love space to breathe rather than being stuck with the suffocation you bring.

You seem to love letting me believe I have the chance to survive this life, then turning out the lights to hear me fall down in the dark. To give me people to love then wait until I am alone to hit me with so much pain that I don’t know how to bear each minute. You give me the thought of relief, only for it to be the idea of death rather than the hope of life.

I hate you with every cell of my body and mind, and I feel like I will have succeeded in this word if I can eradicate a bit of your existence from the world. Yet even this thought is you not me, because we both know that the only way I can remove you, is to remove me as well.

There is one thing you can do to make me hate you more though; taking my life. Please don’t make me die, because if I am left as a memory of pain then I will have been a wasted life. Because if I have to look down and see the people I love wish I was there, yet knowing I can never see them again, never try to heal the pain I caused, then I really will be broken. I don’t believe in heaven, mainly because for me an afterlife would be nothing but painful regret; nothing but hell. Don’t let the people I love’s memory of me be a scar rather than a smile.

I am not nothing. I am not poison and I am do not deserve to die. I am so much more than you make me, and I am worth fighting for, because I matter. I don’t believe any of those things, but I so desperately want to remove the hands you hold over my eyes to let me see the world through the eyes of someone who doesn’t have a mental disorder, to see if, perhaps, I am worth fighting for.

You’ve taken years from me, taken memories, given me pain and left me scarred, bruised and burnt. Please leave me with my life.

Yours truly,
Someone who never quite gives up. 

Is that hope?

I’m in a really, really strange place at the moment. It isn’t somewhere I feel like I’ve been before, I may have been, but I don’t remember. And no, I don’t mean physical place; I mean the position of my mental wellbeing.
See, I have hope. It isn’t manic hope where I feel like I can take on the world, and it isn’t me being unrealistic about my situation. It’s a very small, very quiet hope. It isn’t saying ‘I can live forever and am going to be totally recovered very soon’, no. It’s more sensible than that. It is quietly whispering ‘This is hard, this is really hard, and you’re going to fall down again, and you’re going to be in pain a lot more. But if you keep looking forward and keep accepting help and working on yourself, then there is another side that you can come out of. One day, there is some kind of relief which you can access, which isn’t death. It’s a life where you can remember the worst pain, and respect that it happened, and you can grow and become a slightly different, slightly stronger person’.

It isn’t shouting this, because it isn’t sure if it’s possible. I am not sure if I can do those things, and I still wouldn’t put money on my ability to survive this. But I also wouldn’t put money on me passing away by my own hand. That might sound like a small thing but for me it really, really isn’t small at all. I am not saying something huge has changed, because it hasn’t, but something absolutely tiny has shifted slightly. I don’t know if it is going to last very long, and I don’t know if it’s the first step in a bigger shift, or if it’s just a temporary re-shuffle. It isn’t strong enough to get me past my feelings of self-doubt and self-destruction, but it is enough that it might make me stop for an extra second, and consider the possibility of allowing myself to live for an extra day.

I am very aware of how fragile the situation feels. I am still not used to the fear of how easily I can fall apart, and I still feel like I might lose it all tomorrow. But I am going to celebrate tiny victories even if they might not really be victories at all, and tonight, despite still feeling incredibly sad, I also feel hope. BPD is a horrible reality; but my god it makes you appreciate the tiny, tiny flecks of hope when they come.

Recovery is no mountain

Recovery from Mental Illness is something which is often compared to climbing a mountain, or scaling a high wall. A huge task, looming over us; a task which if we accomplish, we will be the person who managed to climb that mountain. Those things are true and fair, but from where I am standing, recovery doesn’t look like climbing a huge mountain. When you climb a mountain, you train, then you have a handful of incredibly intense days where you scale this huge height, then you get to come back down again. This is no mountain.

Recovery, to me, seems to be more like walking alone across the world. I wasn’t born this way; I was once a relatively normally functioning young girl who was ready to see what life had to throw at me just like any other teenager. Yet slowly, across time, I found myself very far away from home. For whatever reasons, I was no longer in the country where I was born and raised; I was alone in a foreign place where I didn’t recognise anyone or know my way around. I know I want to come home, I can sort of remember what my home country feels like, and the bits I can’t remember I can still imagine. But to get there I have to walk, step by step, through a lot of countries which feel alien to me. I have to find a way to trek jungles, swim through seas, and scale a few mountains along the way too. Walking across the world like this may take years: it is such a long way that I don’t know when I will make it back. There are days when I might find myself in a beautiful garden, walking in the sunshine through rose beds, but I never get to stay there I have to keep walking. Some days I am in a jungle so deep that I never get to see the sun rise, and I meet a lot of creatures in the dark. Sometimes these creatures rustle in nearly trees and scare me, and sometimes I need to fight them off just to be able to keep walking. Some days I find myself in the desert with no clue which direction to go, no sign of water, and no shade from the heat. Occasionally I will feel someone hold my hand as I walk, it never feels like they are walking with me, but I can still feel the comfort of their hand in mine, and I know that they for a little bit of time, I am slightly less alone.

Every day feels a bit different, but with a few things in common: I rarely recognise my surroundings, I almost never feel at home, and I never feel like my destination is in sight. One of the things which hurts the most about recovery being like this is that when I finally get to the place I want to be, I won’t have gone on the sort of journey which has an exciting destination, I will just be in the place where everyone else starts off. My goal is to reach the destination that other people see as base camp. Yes, I will have picked up experiences along the way which will give me a unique outlook, but it also carries the chance that I will never make it home. There are so many days that I want to lie on the ground and give up, because I feel so far from home, and to keep walking is exhausting and painful. I didn’t ask to be here, and there’s not option catch a flight home.

I suppose the important thing here is to remember that if you can be the person who holds our hands for a bit, it is appreciated. If you are the person doing the journey, then don’t give up, because home might be closer than you think. If you have played a part in my journey, then thank you and as always I apologise that it still might take a bit of time to get somewhere that I can call home, and it may also take me time to accept that for many people, recovery doesn't mean getting home. For many people with BPD recovery is learning to live out here alone.