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. 

Patience, please.

My world changed on Sunday. It changed in a way which I didn’t think was possible, and which I am struggling to word, and coming to terms with it seems impossible. Perhaps if I can find a few words then it might somehow become a mountain which I can take steps towards considering climbing.

It would be wrong to say that on Sunday my world fell apart, because that started happening a long time ago, but last week it crumbled even further, and by Sunday I was still the same person, but stripped bare. I had no strength. I could talk and I could just about think, but it felt like someone had taken every ounce of me away from me, and left just pain inside a shell in the shape of me. I wanted me back, and I wanted my life back, but more strongly, I wanted the pain to go away.

On Sunday I poured kitchen bleach and kitchen cleaner, both corrosive, into a bottle. I left my house, holding the bottle incredibly tightly, and I walked. I walked away from humans, through fields, away from my home. I have tried to take my own life many, many times. That is, sadly, not new for me. Though I have never drunk a corrosive substance like bleach; that part is very new.

I am an intelligent (albeit very forgetful) young woman. I was not confused, and I was not psychotic at the time. I was not hallucinating, and I was completely aware of who I was. I knew that drinking bleach caused a massive amount of pain before dying, that you are in absolute agony until your organs fail. Yet I, with full mental capacity, put the bottle to my lips, ignored the overwhelming smell of chemicals, and drank a few mouthfuls. I gulped down bleach. I couldn’t physically drink more because of how immediately my body rejected it – and by the time I had recovered enough physically to try and drink more, there was someone there to stop me.

This isn’t me trying to tell the story of what happened, it was horrendous and I hope that neither I nor the other person who soon arrived there ever have an experience like that again. Of course I feel overwhelmingly guilty that there was someone else there to experience part of it; when you care about someone the last thing you want is to have them watch you when you think you might be dying. I would trade anything I have to be able to have removed her from the situation, but honestly, I don’t think I’d have survived it without her.

This is me talking about why this has changed me, and why I don’t think I can be the same again. I am not sure anyone could be the same again after that. Not because of the pain or the inability to breathe or speak properly at times, but because I have to spend forever with the knowledge that no matter how hard I tried, because I really did try and stop this attempt, I have the capacity to drink bleach, and I don’t have the capacity to stop myself. I can spend years ‘recovering’ from the personality disorder, but when I close my eyes, I will always be a girl who couldn’t stop herself from drinking bleach. I will always remember the moment where I was first asked what I’d done, knowing the expected answer was that I took too many painkillers, and I had to try incredibly hard just to have the ability to reply ‘I drank bleach’. I drank bleach.

 When taking an overdose, you take one pill at a time; one pill that wouldn’t kill you on its own. With bleach, it’s just one hit. There is a second where I thought ‘I can’t get through another second, it has to be now’. There’s a certain romance surrounding suicide. A Romeo and Juliet style ideal of dying, of being at peace. I wish I could show people the reality of being in so much physical pain that you want to die so that it ends, of feeling like all of your organs are on fire, feeling like your throat is melting. It is no longer about whether or not you want to die, because I didn’t think surviving was an option any more, I just needed my death to be quick. I clearly didn’t die, I went to hospital, and once my heart had stabilised and I had stopped throwing up cleaning foam, once my organs seemed to have got rid of most of the toxic liquid, I had to go home. I had to lie in my bed at night, still in pain, knowing that the next day I had to stand up and face another day, still with all the pain of the day before, yet now with the memory of what had happened.

This is not something I can see a way to be capable of dealing with. I know that time supposedly heals all wounds, and I trust my pain will fade one day, but that doesn’t give me a way to tell the people I love most that this has changed me, and it isn’t for the better. When I took a breath and drank from that bottle, a part of me was left behind. A part of me that still naively believed that I was allowed to hope, that I was allowed to believe it couldn’t get worse, was killed by the bleach. It got worse.

I don’t know how to tell people that every morning when I wake up I feel empty, not in a sad way, but with a sense of overwhelming exhaustion that I am stuck being a suicidal adult for the foreseeable future. Since Sunday, I haven’t actually felt happiness properly, in any way. I haven’t felt safe, and I am never actually sure how to get from morning to night. I feel like I am sharing my body and mind with a murderer. I am terrified of how soon I might be in that much pain again, and I am terrified of how I will end up if I keep doing this much harm to my body. There’s a person in me who wants to kill me. I don’t know how to live with that.

I think that this might be the time in my life where I have been least deserving of any care, any affection, or any sign of love. I have taken too much from other people, and I am aware of all the things I have failed at. If you know me, if you spend any time with me, please be aware, that I have not dealt with this. I am so sorry that it might take even more patience until I can cope, and if you want to turn away, then do. I understand. If you don’t turn away, then be prepared that I might cry randomly. I might stop talking and stay quiet for long periods of time, and my replies to you might not always make sense. Ultimately, the answer to whether I am okay, is no. I am not going to be okay for a long time, because a week ago I drank bleach, and I cannot cope with that. I cannot cope with the shell of a person who survived, and no, I don’t see any sort of light at the end of the tunnel. If you have a bit of extra hope you can lend me, it would be much appreciated, and if you can find a way to make me feel even slightly like I deserve to be loved, then you’ve managed something I failed to do. But feel free to still ask how I am, because I appreciate that, and it reminds me that one day I might reply that I am doing a bit better, and that is a sentence that would fill me with a lot of pride. Until that day might come, I am still here, and I am still trying so, so hard. 

World Suicide Prevention Day

Today is World Suicide Prevention day. Suicide is something which everyone ignores unless it is directly in their face - but if people can just spend one day considering how they'd like the world to act if it were them or someone they love who is affected by this awful act, then maybe that will be one step towards living in a world where people taking their own lives isn't a leading cause of death.

Suicide is surrounded by connotations of selfishness, shame and secrecy. It is seen as a choice for the weak, or only an option for those who have no hope in their lives. But that's not true; suicide could affect any of us, and any seemingly successful and happy person could be hiding a level of pain which means they genuinely find it hard to get from morning to night, every day.
Seeing as we don't know who that person is, take this time to remember that when you next casually refer to suicide as a joke, you don't know how much pain you might be putting someone in.

People often say of those who have passed away that if love could have saved them they would never have died. Well here we have a chance to make that come true; because if you show love to someone suicidal, it might stop them from dying. Doing be afraid to bring up the topic, don't be afraid to tell someone how much you love them, and please let us talk about suicide without being ashamed. Don't be scared to save someone's life.

World suicide prevention day shouldn't just be today, it should be every day.