One of the things that stood out when reading all about Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, was the stark explanations and validations that people with a variety of BPD's lack empathy, where as other medical journals and articles would cite that actually, people with BPD, in particularly EUPD have heightened empathy and are vastly emotional beings.
So I wondered where in the quandry, my brain chemistry lay.
My brain is a zebra, it is streaked through and through with both of the above. Lack of empathy and absolute empathy. But how and why do the two co-exist?
How can I be inherently selfish, and self-preserving, but in reality, the most giving and selfless of many I know?
Is it some sort of moral see-saw, that constantly balances itself out?
For me, it's not a case of behaviour correction, when I am at my lowest, my most vunerable and my most unstable - through lack of medication, or perception of threat, abandonment, loss, then my brain switches to chaos mode, and I lash out and start making rash decisions which some part of me knows will lead to all of my perceived predictions of danger, abandonment, loss, but I essentially become, like clockwork, a self fulfulling propechy.
It is a time where it becomes carte blanche in my mind, anything goes, nothing is off limits, hurt or be hurt, chase or be made to run. It'd childish in essence, but I suppose that is the point of this mental health disorder, it's origins, born in chaotic childhood trauma, developed in confusing and isolated adolencense and left to fester, grow, evolve into adulthood and lo'; here I am.
It's a strange concept which I find quite perplexing, the two streams of consciousness running side by side.
Stability and safety bring about positive behaviours and envoke the ability to achieve more than most, it makes me somewhat unstoppable with my ambition and desire to learn more, to do more, to be more.
On the flip side, instability takes me to the darkest of places, where I lack self worth and become the worst version of myself, I think my short stint in London playing secret diaries of a call girl proves that, the abject drug addiction that I let define me, became my only purpose. I think it says alot that you can exist as two people in one mind.
I have always known I am someone who can conquer and achieive, it's my ability to maintain and sustain that scares me, I can be the success, for as long as my mind is focused, content, that the constants in my life remain that way - the love, the home, the bills, the friends.
IF they stay constant, I do too. If they wobble, I do. I create an earthquake throughout my life and it all starts to tumble.
I digress.
I have been working, doing something that has made me a better person.
It's been some sort of accidental social experiment.
When I was younger, I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to help people.
When I got older, I wanted to be a politician, because I wanted to help people.
Through my decades on this earth, I have always had core good intentions and pure morals, despite the sketchy choices I have made.
This job, has tested every fibre of who I am.
Am I truly the caring, hard working person I believe myself to be?
Hell. YES.
Am I capable of stability and sticking with something even if it's harder than I ever dreamt it would be?
Again, I say, HELL YES.
I have got up and gone to work and hit it out of the park every single day. I have learned that empathy and caring is exactly who I am, and it is what makes me soul happy. I love to know that what I do makes a difference to someone, somehow.
I know it harks back to the childish need to please, which makes up a large part of my personality, but in reality, if I know these traits of mine are there, then why not tap into them and turn them into positives?
Believe me when I say, this joyful venture of full time employment has been no picnic, I was optimistic and naive as to what I was getting myself into and was desperately disheartened when I realised I wasn't there to be anything more than a body of the floor, an extra pair of hands for the dirty work, and by god, I mean dirty.
It wasn't exactly testing my intellectual ability, or my realms of experience with people, people like me perhaps.
If anyone knows how to navigate the world of mental health and know what will bring about positive changes - its me.
Alas, that is a story for another time, and what a story it will be.
My point is - I have let my mental health disorder define me, I have accepted all the negative connotations that come with it, and allowed them to be the defining features - and that was wrong.
Yes, I am a sandwiche short of a picnic, but maybe picnics don't need to be just about the sandwiches.
Sarah will be proud of that very loose little metaphor right there.
If you feel you are defined by your label, the question is why?
It's only you who has the power to define anything.
So make the right choice, and just be.... you?
