Monday 12 October 2015

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.

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