Thoughts about the stigmas associated with mental illness

Sorry I haven't been writing on this blog as regularly as I probably should be, but sometimes it's genuinely hard to articulate a lot of my thoughts regarding bpd and life, because there are just so many thoughts running through my head. Today, though, I stumbled across something that one of my friends posted onto her Timeline about mental illness not being real, followed by a short interjection about how mental illness is just a label created by society to keep really special people down and in line with the masses.

Now, I had to set my tablet away to avoid being an outright bitch, because the person who posted this particular piece of stupidity is really a very sweet girl, and she has nothing but kindness and love in her heart for everybody, but HOLY SHEEPSHIT that had to be the most ignorant garbage that's crossed my social media feed in a while.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time I've heard an opinion like this. Now, I might have dreadlocks, and I may enjoy wearing tie dye and living closer to nature than others, but I cannot get behind the uninformed, conspiracy theorist GARBAGE that floats around regarding some subjects. I'm fucking sorry, but are you saying that people who snap and commit mass murder are just being 'repressed by society'? That it's simple for people struggling with various forms of depression to just be HAPPY if they get away from social constructs and stop taking their medication or attending therapy sessions?

I will say, it's not just hippies who don't believe in mental illness. My dad, for one, is a pretty straightlaced fellow, and he told me to my face that he believes that "(mental illness) is just a lack of self discipline."

Let that just sink in for a second.

Now, for the record, he does recognize like, schizophrenia and whatnot as a legitimate mental health issue. But depression, bipolar disorder, bpd? All just a lack of self control. Which is why he didn't really believe me when I told him about my borderline personality disorder earlier on in the year. He thinks it's a cop out, a way for me to refrain from being responsible for my own actions. He didn't exactly say those words, mind you, but his tone as we talked about it was disbelieving, and he's pretty much glossed over any attempts to communicate about it since then. Thanks, dad, pretty sure I got the message.

I didn't have the heart to tell him about the various contributing factors of BPD, but he pressed on after a minute of awkward silence during our only conversation about it, and I finally relented, informing him that upbringing has a great deal to do with it. He automatically jumped to my mom, because of course anything wrong with me has to have been caused by my mother's abandoning me. While admittedly that was an intense emotional rollercoaster in my life, a lot of my behaviors and insecurities have to do with his presence, not her lack of one. I love my dad, I really do, but there were things that he wasn't prepared for as a single dad to a girl, that he probably should have been.

Just a not so random update.

I'm trying to write a letter to my maternal grandparents, and progress isn't really being made.
Really, though, I'm stuck on the first line. How the hell do I present myself to these people? Do I start it with 'to whom it may concern' or is that too businesslike, too formal?  If I start with 'dear [insert name here], will that sound too friendly, like I'm assuming they'll want to get to know me? And what if they don't want to get to know me? What if I bust my ass writing this letter, and it just gets sent back without even being opened? According to my mother, when she sent them my birth announcement, that's what happened. Not that my biological mother was ever a very reliable source of information, but... I've got all of these fears regarding contacting them, especially with me being me. I doubt these people ever thought they'd have some random dreadlocked and tattooed grandkid from Oregon. So maybe it would be better to not contact them?

This would be so much easier if I could locate a phone number for them, but unfortunately all I've got is an address. I hope it's the right address, that they're the right people. I hope that they're willing to give me a chance, talk to me a little bit. It's kind of weird, I never really had a grandfather before, and my paternal grandmother passed away seven years ago, so... the prospect of having grandparents is as exciting as it is terrifying.

I'm going to keep trying to write this letter, and maybe I'll eventually get up the courage to send it, and maybe, just maybe, they'll like me. I hope so, I'm really not a bad person.

Family And BPD

I've always been told by members of my family that I am too emotional. "drama queen" is perhaps my least favorite label that they have bestowed upon me in the past, with "over sensitive" being a runner up. And they won't say that I'm lazy, but I "don't like to work."

These judgments may seem miniscule to them, but goddamn do they hurt. I've had quite a few jobs that I've loved, that I've bent over backwards for. Intense periods of depression and anxiety aren't exactly a walk in the park. Every time I'm confronted with a task in the workplace, I get really nervous. I star over analyzing my performance as I go along; Am I working within the time parameters set for me? If there are no set parameters, do I feel like I'm working quickly enough? Probably not. But if I speed up, I risk not performing the task to the best of my ability. It's a constant struggle with my brain, my need to please people is overwhelming and the equally as overwhelming self doubt that constantly plagues me sometimes leaves me so frustrated that I just want to break down and cry.

Today, I logged into my facebook to find that my Aunt had liked two of my statuses and commented on them both. I was pleased, thought maybe that she was offering me some positive words of wisdom, as older folks sometimes do. Instead, what I found were two different personal attacks on me, one about my 'dreadful' hair (which I suppose was meant as a joke, since my hair is dreadlocked) and the other was about my ear gauges, which I'd recently upped a size, and about how I "keep wrecking my natural symmetry."

Now, I get that my aunt is part of the older generation, and she doesn't quite understand things like dreadlocks and piercings, but how can she not understand how hurtful her words are? I called her out on it, told her that she was being kind of mean and essentially that she needed to back off, and am still waiting for a response. I'm betting it will be something about how it was a joke and that I shouldn't be so sensitive. That's the catch, though, my borderline personality disorder makes me sensitive to things like rejection, and for her to reject my physical appearance and preferences in body modification, it feels like she's rejecting ME. It feels like, as I am, I'm never enough for my family. They're always going to want me to brush out my dreadlocks, stop getting tattoos and piercings, and lead a 'normal' life. The more they berate me over my decisions, over the things that increase my overall happiness, the worse I feel about myself. Sometimes I wonder if they think hurting me like this will make me 'fix' what I have 'ruined' about myself in their eyes.

Family isn't supposed to make you feel like this. Family is supposed to lift you up, support your decisions unless you're doing some really fucked up stuff. Family isn't supposed to help you hate yourself. I'm so disappointed in the people I share blood with right now....

Is Impulsive Behavior Really A Bad Thing?

Lately, I've been struggling severely with something that a lot of borderline folks deal with in one way or another- impulsive behavior. Ever since my diagnosis I have been doing a lot of reading about my disorder, and have been trying to recall instances in which it affected my life. That's when I realized... most of my life is built around the consequences of my impulses for self-sabotage and short-term solutions to my problems. This is not to say that my life is necessarily a bad one. I've got a roof over my head, a fairly steady source of employment, food, two cats whom I love with all of my heart, all of the things necessary to be content in life. I certainly could have made it easier for myself along the way, though, and I'm definitely nowhere near where I want to be in life.

I've made a lot of impulsive decisions in my past, though, and to this day I'm still making them. The thing is, while most things that I've read say that impulsive decision making is a TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD THING, I'm not quite convinced that broad-spectrum analysis is true. If it weren't for some of my more impulsive moments, I would have never met quite a few of my friends. I wouldn't have slept with people who I later entered into relationships with, would never have learned valuable lessons about the nature of love and friendship from any of these people. Not to say that impulses don't lead to awful things on occasion, but sometimes if you emerge stronger for the experience, it's ultimately worthwhile. 

My current foray into giving into impulse is currently helping me, it's improving my mindset, knowing that people who aren't the ex boyfriend I live with can be attracted to me. (more about him later, he doesn't want me blogging about him so I need to come up with a suitable name to use for him on here.). I've been doing some harmless flirting with a former fling of mine, who knows where it could lead? I'm just happy it's building my confidence up a bit. 

 I've got another male friend who is... interested in me... but I respect his friendship too much to start anything that could ruin the bonds we've built over the past while we've known each other. I've learned the hard way that starting things with people you really care about can lead to trouble, especially with my attachment issues and insecurities, and recognize fully that maybe I'm not emotionally stable enough at this moment in time to have a real relationship. So, a fling in the meantime might not be the worst idea in the world. 

Unfortunately, this fling comes with some slight complications, like small towns and overlapping circles of friends. Neither I nor the other party involved wants certain people knowing about anything that goes on between us, and this may be a challenge. 

All I'm saying, and I guess the main point of this blog post, is that sometimes our impulses can lead to good things, adventures, as long as you try to utilize a small amount of common sense alongside them. 

Love and light, bitches. 

XOXO

Happy Birthday

Today is my biological mother's fifty-seventh birthday.

Every year, this day holds a certain heaviness in my heart. I've been trying to let that heaviness go, but have found it extremely difficult.

I hope today is a good day for you... I don't quite know what to call you, because 'mom' doesn't seem fitting. A mom is someone who's there for their child through the good and bad times, who doesn't just turn and run when things get hard. Regardless, if you're out there somewhere, if you read this sometime down the line, I hope the start of your fifty-seventh year on this Earth is wonderful.

It's funny, despite my lack of a solid mother figure for so many years, how I gravitated towards spiritual preferences that centered around female deities. I've always found that to be particularly ironic, though I can't honestly say that I believe in much of anything deity-wise nowadays. I've more or less come to the conclusion that people hold the power to change their lives, that praying is a cop-out because the only person who's going to get you out of a bad situation is you. Maybe that stems from you- my mother- being unable to battle your demons. Sometimes I think that you were weak, so weak, and I promise myself that no matter how much I take after you, I won't let my weakness control me.

Despite that, I'm still constantly afraid. I'm terrified that anyone I get close to is going to see something in me that's broken, that they don't want to stick around to fix, and leave. Dad reiterated, for many years after you left, that it wasn't my fault. I knew that. I knew that I was too young to have been the direct cause of your alcoholism and your eventual departure. I was well aware of that. But beyond that, I'm still your daughter. I'm the product of a woman who couldn't beat her fear, and so I need to be hyper vigilant about my own fears controlling me. It's so difficult to do that, sometimes, and I occasionally wonder if this was how you must have felt. Like your world was spinning out of control, like everyone who cared didn't care about you enough.

I've allowed your legacy, this broken part of me, to affect my current relationship (or lack thereof, now). I scared a guy who really could have been 'the one' away. He's terrified of what would happen if we were to re-enter a romantic relationship, and I honestly can't blame him. I'm fucking scary. I get so afraid, so insecure, that I cling to him, I suffocate him. But then he does one thing, says one thing that upsets me so much that I push him as far away as I can. I try to make him hate me, because any critique from him comes across like a screaming LED sign that says I'm not good enough, and that hurts so much that I want to hurt him and show him what it's like to feel like this. We go around in circles, never solving anything, and really I don't hate him for it. I hate myself, sometimes. And somewhere in there, part of me wants to hate you for making me this way, or maybe for just making me in general, it's hard to discern the difference between the two feelings.

God, it's your birthday and I'm blathering on about myself. But... I've gotten a step closer to finding your family, Mom, and maybe to getting the answers I've been searching for. Your mother's address is on my phone, though I couldn't find a phone number, and I've written and re-written the same letter over and over again for the past few days, and I don't know when I'll send it to her, but I'll get there eventually. It's been an extremely difficult letter to write- asking someone 'are you my grandmother' isn't exactly something I ever imagined myself doing, much less in writing- but someday, I'll manage to send it. And maybe, if she responds, I can find out more about your roots, and by default more about mine.

It doesn't really seem appropriate to end this blog in the same way I've ended a few of the others. Suffice to say, today is probably going to be difficult, like it has been every year for the past fourteen of them. But I hope you're well, and I hope that you're reading this. I love you, mom.

Mother's Week, Part 2

So for those of you who haven't read the previous posts, this blog is essentially a journal that I'm using to record my progress dealing with my Borderline Personality Disorder, and also a way for me to obtain a deeper understanding of it. The last post, and this post, focus on my mother. This is because BPD forms roots when a child is developing, and my mother had custody of me for about the first eight years of my life. I also have a theory that she could have been or may be Borderline, as Borderline parents often pass on certain aspects of the disorder to their children. (I phrase my thoughts about her in both the past and present tense sometimes, as I have not heard from her in fourteen years and have no way to confirm that she is in fact alive or dead.)

In trying to understand my BPD, I've been trying to remember things from my childhood more clearly. I didn't necessarily have a horrible childhood- my parents never abused me or anything like that- but it wasn't exactly the easiest. My mom started drinking heavily when I was about four years old, in 1994. I don't remember a lot about that, to be honest, but there are a lot of theories that my dad's family has sort of come up with as to why she decided to search for peace at the bottom of a bottle.

Roughly around the time that she started drinking, maybe a little bit earlier, I remember my mother showing me a photograph. I don't really remember much about this photograph, other than it was a Polaroid of a man in a room, and Elmo from Sesame Street was somehow involved so I got really excited. I think the room either had a bunch of Elmo dolls in it, or the guy was holding an Elmo doll. I remember my mother telling me that the man in the photograph was a friend of hers from Korea. She told me that he'd sent the photograph to her for me, because she'd told him that I really liked Elmo.

When I was older, maybe about seventeen or eighteen, I was informed by a family member- either my dad or my aunt- that my mom had dated a Korean guy in high school, and according to whoever told me this story, she had even gone overseas for a while.

A few years after that, my aunt ran a theory by me that she'd had for a while. She thought that perhaps my mother had been having an affair with someone while my dad was away, as he'd been in the Army when I was small and hadn't been around a whole lot. She continued to theorize that perhaps the affair had fallen through somehow, and my mother had turned to alcohol for consolation.

Putting the pieces together in my head, I reasoned that, if my aunt was correct, perhaps my mother had attempted to get back together with her ex boyfriend, and when he hadn't returned her affection in the ways that she had hoped, gotten severely depressed.

Now, at first glance this is a fairly solid theory, and it also goes along nicely with my theory that perhaps my mother was Borderline. HOWEVER, I also learned from my grandmother that my mother had a nasty habit of lying about herself. She told my grandmother that she'd had a sister who died, and also told me that she'd been raised with several siblings. My grandmother informed me that she found a wedding invitation in the trash with the name of the woman my mother claimed was her dead sister. Later on, I discovered through a brief instance of contact with some of my mother's family in Elko, Nevada, that my mother had only had one brother, and had never had any sisters.

Add to that information, then, that my mother's brother had actually come to visit her when I was a baby, because he wanted to know his niece and see his sister, and my mother had turned him away. My dad spoke with him and never really understood why my mother kept him away from us. Apparently, he was just as confused.

The lying may or may not be a Borderline trait, I'm really unsure because I don't remember compulsive lying being in any descriptions of the disorder that I've read, but I could be wrong there. Either way, my mother's past is a mystery to me, and what little family I'd managed to contact in Elko told me that they hadn't heard from her or either of her parents in years. Nobody clued me in as to why, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of it somehow.

I've found random snippets of her family, and am fairly certain I've stumbled upon a business that they own. All I really know is that I've got this need to know WHY. I've got so many questions that need answers, and I don't really know where to begin.

I'm going to keep looking, though, and I'll post things here as I uncover them. Hopefully this investigation sheds some light on things, and helps me understand why my mother made the decisions that she did, and how I can keep from repeating her patterns.

Love and light, bitches,
Gwen Rose

Mother's Week, Part One

In five days time, the woman whose uterus I inhabited for six months will turn fifty-seven, though if you were to ask her personally, she would probably say fifty-five. I'd wish her a happy birthday, but since I haven't seen or heard from her in fourteen years, that would be rather difficult to do.

My therapist says it's not nearly as bizarre as I think it is to only remember chunks of the first ten years of my life. She told me, during one of our earlier appointments, that it's not unusual for a child to block out periods of their life that they aren't emotionally able to handle. Memory also isn't the most reliable tool ever, especially with Borderline Personality Disorder, but I'm going to give it a whirl and see what happens.

I remember my Dad coming to pick me up from school, I was in the third grade and attending a new school because my parents had needed to switch school districts for reasons that aren't exactly clear to me. I vaguely recall a discussion where my father confessed that he'd been lying on my school paperwork about what district we'd lived in to get me into a better school, so maybe that's what happened. But I remember being really confused because my father only picked me up from school on the weekends, and it was the middle of the week.

When I got into the truck, his newer 97 Chevy S10, he was really quiet. As we were pulling away from the school, he asked me if I knew what an alcoholic was. I said "Yeah, someone who drinks a lot." I remember that sentence spilling out of my mouth, and I remember very clearly the confusion that washed over me when my dad told me that my mother was an alcoholic, that she had been for a while, and that was why we'd had to leave our apartment the year before and move in with my aunt and uncle. He went on to explain that she'd started drinking so heavily that she'd lost her job at the shipping company she worked for (I think it was Fed Ex, I visited her office a few times and all I remember was a snow globe with the Earth in it and a ocean-themed screen saver) and had been unable to pay our rent. I remember thinking that it made sense, that I'd known that my mother had a problem but hadn't really been able to do much about it. Dad then dropped the second bombshell; that I was probably going to be staying with him more often because he was trying to get full custody of me.

The custody battle in and of itself is one huge blur. I know my mother and I lived with my aunt for about another year or so, that I spent Monday nights at my grandma's following the weekends with my dad, and I remember visiting my dad's lawyer and her asking me questions about my mom. Most of all, though, I remember feeling afraid. My family dynamic had been torn apart from the inside. I liked being around my mom, even though all she really did was lay around on her bed with a bottle off to the side of her while I did homework and watched TV. I didn't see the problem with being locked in a room with her while she drank the day away, though my family certainly did and they weren't exactly shy about letting her know it (Bless my Uncle Gary, he was maybe the most upfront about it out of everyone).

When my dad got custody of me, we lived in a few different places in the Bay Area, and Dad always talked about moving up to Oregon, but it always seemed like a far-away dream to me... until he let me know that we were actually moving to another state and the dream was going to become a reality. I was fairly excited, to be honest, mainly because I wanted that house that he'd always described, that cabin in the woods by a creek, with dogs and cats to love and take care of.  And we got that cabin, we had that creek and those animals... but we had to leave my mom behind, first.

I remember the last time that I saw her, the last time I spoke to her, and it angers me that I can't remember it as clearly as I'd like. My mom was crying, I didn't want to cry but because she was crying I couldn't help it. We were at the park, her face was red and her eyes were puffy. I think she may have been drunk but I'm honestly not sure.

I remember her hugging me, telling me over and over again "I love you, I love you." while her tears dripped down onto my face. I promised her I'd call her as soon as we got the phone set up...
but when we got to Oregon, I was so mesmerized by everything, the greenery, the blue sky, the lack of concrete and big apartment complexes I had grown so accustomed to... that for the first week or so I didn't really want to call my mom. I didn't want her to know that I was having a great time, that I loved living in Oregon and that I was happy being somewhere without her. I felt guilty for being happy, and so whenever my dad asked me if I wanted to call my mom, I said "Maybe later."

Later came, but unfortunately it came too late. When I did call the house my mom was staying at- a friend of hers had allowed her to come stay and sober up under her roof, and she'd accepted shortly before we'd moved- the woman on the other end of the line told me that she wasn't there, and asked to speak to my dad. I vaguely recall the fleeting thought of "did my mother die and is she just not telling me?" that I quickly banished to the back of my mind.

When Dad got off of the phone with the lady- whose name I can't remember for the life of me, though I do remember her face- he sat me down and told me that, shortly after we'd left for Oregon, my mother had packed her bags and left, giving no explanation as to where she was going. For the longest time I thought that maybe she'd come up to Oregon to find me, but after a few years of waiting for her to show up, I stopped hoping for that. I wrote her letters, made her mother's day cards, picked yellow roses whenever I saw them and pinned them on my wall because those were her favorite flowers....

But she left, and she never bothered to find me. I used to be so angry at her, at my dad, at myself, for everything that had transpired. Now though, instead of anger, I feel this deep, resounding sadness when I think about my biological mother. Really, I only wish her the best out of life. I hope that wherever she is, she's happy. Maybe she's overcome her alcoholism and is leading a sober life. Maybe she takes out my picture from time to time, looks at it, and thinks of me. I don't blame her for running away anymore, because I understand what it's like to feel trapped inside of your own mind, to feel like your only option to avoid hurting the people you love is to leave them. I can't imagine how much pain she felt, why she felt like alcohol was the only way to remedy it, and I still don't quite know why she did the things that she did, but that doesn't really matter too much anymore.

What matters is that, by leaving, she opened the door for me to become closer to my father. She allowed me a childhood free from her burdens, her constant need to have me around. She even opened the door for my father to meet my stepmom and for me to have a stable female role model in my life. Unfortunately, my biological mother's behaviors during my developing years continue to affect my adult life whether I want them to or not, but overall I'm thankful for both the time I spent with her and the years spent without her.

I hope that if you're reading this, Mom, you can forgive yourself for being unable to cope in the same way that I have forgiven you. I love you, I love you, I love you, and I hope that you have found peace wherever you happen to be.