Wednesday 26 June 2019

Things that are currently pissing me off




One of the things I don't think there's much chance of me modifying during this oh-so-cliche journey to not letting myself get treated like shit again is my temper. People with BPD are known to have pretty short fuses and mine is no exception. I once shouted "I don't have temper" at someone who suggested that I can be a little, hot-headed, at times but, if I'm quite honest, I really don't mind.

Aside from my all-consuming hatred of Cat Dealey and Jameela mother-cunting-fuck-face Jamil, here's what's pissing me off at the moment.

PEOPLE WHO DON'T RESPOND TO THEIR EMAILS

This one is quite specific to job hunting but, even so, it makes me mad. It's 2019, people use their phones while they're taking a shit, stop being so god damn lazy and respond to what I've sent you. Even if it's with an "I'm a bit busy at the moment but I'll get back to you shortly", I need to at least know my message has been received. Don't be rude, don't be a douche and send me a mother cunting email back.

RUDENESS

In a similar vein to the above rant, the root of this one stems from my favourite of all activities, job hunting. About two weeks ago, I went for an interview at a coffee shop about 20-25 minutes from my house. Baring in mind that I not only took about an hour and a half out of my day to travel down there, as well as the $7 I spent on public transport, you would think that the person who interviewed me would feel obligated to show some basic professionalism right? Wrong. Towards the end of the interview, I was met with an "I'll let you know by the end of the week and if you don't hear from me, that's your answer." I'm sorry, are you in the middle of curing cancer? Are you busy running the country whilst simultaneously finding a solution to world hunger? No. You run a mother fucking coffee shop, so don't be a douche, show some manners and actually send an email when you don't want to employ someone. You run a business, surely politeness should have been part of your training?

CANADIAN POST

My Dad is a postman, ironically as my name is Jess and he once had a black and white cat. Obviously, given that he still lives in Basildon, he does not deliver mail in Canada, but I'm guessing that the process is roughly the same.

Assuming this is the case, why the fuck does my post keep getting lost? At the moment I'm on about 6 for 6 in terms of things getting lost, including a birthday card from my best friend and a shit-tonne of planner supplies that I, unsurprisingly, actually kind of wanted. A package my mum sent in January took 4 fucking months to arrive making it's contents, gloves, tights and fuzzy socks, really quite redundant. In the majority of cases I've managed to get a refund on what I've ordered, but this really isn't the point and I shouldn't find myself reluctant to order things because the Canadian post doesn't seem to want me to receive them. It's not a difficult concept, just send me what I've ordered, that's really all it takes.

But, as The King Blues say I'd rather be pissed off than be pissed on.

xXx 

Wednesday 19 June 2019

Caring



I was in bed last night, casually rolling my past romantic failures around in my head as a single woman in her twenties is want to do every now and again, and I realised that I have a pattern within my dating life that I didn't know about. I care.

Part of the reasoning for my not wanting to let go of my most recent romantic endeavour was an innate need to care for the person in question. Other people's life stories are not mine to tell but suffice to say a part of me wanted to make them feel safe and secure even if I didn't.

Taking hold of this, I looked back and realise that I've done this time and time again. There were boyfriends with eating disorders, boyfriends with dead parents, boyfriends with depression and boyfriends who's lives were just different from mine. Whether they wanted me to or not, and whether I wanted to or not, I felt the need to, metaphorically, take them in my arms and do anything I could to make them feel secure regardless of the effect it had on my own wellbeing. Without realising it, I liked that these people felt able to turn to me for support, even when I was scared to trust them with details of my own condition for fear of them leaving.

Freud could have a wet dream analysing why this thought process is so deeply ingrained in my psyche, and this is coming from someone who was even sent to a psychoanalyst at one point. Growing up both my mum and I suffered from eating disorders and, regardless of my own struggles, my mum's health was always 'worse'. She was thinner, she was able to eat less and she became the illest towards the end of her experience whereas my body flipped a switch and decided, after years of starvation, that it couldn't hack being malnourished anymore and so I developed binge eating disorder. She was 'better' at having an eating disorder than me, and the fact that I couldn't help her get better destroyed me.

Sat at my desk writing this, I'm asking myself if I want her to recover just for her own health or to make myself feel like the more successful sufferer? And, if I'm honest, I don't know the answer to that right now, all I do know is that for a part of my life my soul focus was placed on my mum's eating habits. I couldn't keep her safe from the thing that told her not to eat, and even now I can't quite process how that made me feel.

It would seem however that this desire to help people even if they don't tell me outright that they want or need help is ingrained within me, and I've been putting this above my needs. Part of me thinks that it's my refusal to let people get close enough to have an in-depth knowledge of my condition that makes me take this position. If I'm looking after and being there for someone else, it stands to reason that I can't possibly need someone to take care of me, right?

As with my posts on self-sabotage, I can tell this one is going to take a long time for me to crack and I'm definitely going to have to revisit it in the near future. I know I care, I just don't know to what expense.

xXx

Tuesday 18 June 2019

Don't look back in hunger



Ah, don't you just love that one song that reminds you of your ex? :p

As you can probably tell, I'm spending a lot of my time reflecting on my past relationships at the moment. Not so much in a "woe is me" kind of way, but more in a "what the fuck was I thinking kind of way."

One of the symptoms of my BPD I've touched upon in the past is the amount of guilt I feel. An all-consuming pain that chokes and envelops me on a daily basis, I've discussed in therapy and chipped away at some of it, but the feeling's never really gone away. Of all the symptoms I live with, this is one of my least favourites.

Usually, I can't tell why I feel guilty, I wake up searching for reasons to feel guilty even when there aren't any there, simply because it's how I'm used to feeling. Yesterday it was because I hadn't re-potted my plant Hugh, once I did that it moved onto having spent money on the supplies I needed to do so. It's unrelenting and exhausting and also something I find really hard to explain.

One of the things I felt guilty for a long time for was cheating on my first boyfriend. I was 18 at the time and I contributed it to our breakup even though, to my knowledge, he was unaware of it at the time he broke up with me. Linking back to my previous post about self-sabotage as a form of self-harm, I knew he'd leave me when he found out. As a result of this, I believed I would receive the treatment I deserved and feel the pain I thought I was meant to feel once my actions came to light. I believed that I was cheating on him as a way of hurting myself. It was a ridiculous thought process to have at the time and, even now, I still can't make much sense of it.

The guilt I felt because of cheating on my first boyfriend lasted with me for a long, long time. For years, and even now as I type this, I feel like the reason I have bad luck in relationships is because of how I behaved when I was with him. I believe I deserve to be treated badly.

This random reflection into my first relationship comes as a result of him popping up as someone I might know on my Instagram. I'm not usually one to cyber stalk, but given that he looks exactly the same as he did the last time I saw him I thought I'd have a bit of a nose to see what had changed.  He's moved, he has a new Mrs and that's about as far as I got. I'm a masochist but I'm not stupid, I know going any further wasn't going to do me any good.

I considered following him on Instagram to say hi, but what would be the point. It sounds cliche but I almost don't even recognise pictures of who I was back when I was with him. Although I was still dealing with a lot of the same shit, this was pre-diagnosis, pre-rape, pre-everything. I can honestly say I was a completely different person then to who I am now, and from looking at his picture it seemed as if our relationship hadn't really happened. It was so long ago, and things were so different back then. There are some things I'm going to have to re-visit whilst I work on my relationship with my self, but old boyfriends certainly aren't one of them.

xXx

Self-sabotage



I've been talking to a friend today, one of the only other people I know with BPD, and we've been discussing the idea of self-harm. Not in the traditional way, we're not gabbing about my enjoyment of slashing an arm or two every now and again, but the type of self-harm that doesn't shed any blood. The type that could also be described as self-sabotage.

As I go along the (cliche alert) journey I'm currently working through, I'm realising just how often I've acted in a self-sabotaging way when it comes to my relationships. It seems that all I ever do is get involved with people that I can never 'have', not that you really ever have anyone, but the term works for the sake of argument, which inevitably results in my getting hurt.

Amongst many others, there was Elliot, who once told me mid-way through having sex in the back of my Ford Fiesta that I wasn't allowed to tell my friend we'd hooked up. James who I was in love with for over 6 years, who would pop in and out of my life whenever he wanted, telling me he loved me before getting yet another girlfriend. Dan, who was a shit show from start to finish and Alex.

AKA period blood guy, we all know how that ended.

My point is that, for the most part, all of the relationships I've ever been involved with have been with people that didn't want me. Being a commitmentphobe of epic proportions who refused to get close to someone for fear of them leaving, I always assumed this was a good idea. I thought that their behaviour and actions perfectly suited what I wanted, when in fact anyone they should be shouting from the rooftops that they have me in their lives.

I'm realising more and more that it's not just my razor blades that cause me harm, but my thoughts and actions towards myself as well. By allowing myself to get close to these people, those who don't even have the slightest intention of caring for me, I'm in turn hurting myself because I know I will get hurt in the long run. I know these situations can't last and, if I'm honest, I don't really know how many of them I wanted to work out. Take James for instance, we could never have been together, we just weren't compatible in that way, but that doesn't mean I didn't love him, that I couldn't stand the idea of him not being in my life. Letting go of him was hard, and even now I have days where I miss him, but I know that he wasn't good for me, know that moving on was the right thing to do.

Plus I think Hannah would have bitch slapped me if I left her any more voice notes telling her how much I loved and missed him. She even pulled the best friend card on that one and you know it's serious when that bad boy comes out.

There's so much more I need to work on with this and I know I can't work on everything at one time. But if there's ever something that needs to be dealt with before I even think of being with another person, it's this.

xXx

Fucking Pussy





This is my cat Poppy, ain't she cute?

Before we begin, I have to make you aware that the title of this post involves me calling someone a fucking pussy. I'm not talking about fucking pussy.

Not in this post anyway :P

I'm not usually a fan of those cliched "You deserve more girl" memes. Mostly because I find them incredibly patronising but also because they fill up my news/Instagram feed and prevent me from ogling the delicious men on the Men and Coffee Instagram account. We get it, you have a 'Live Life Love' sign in your living room, take a seat.

However, recently my friend has been posting a lot of them and I'm actually finding myself relating. Unsurprisingly, posts talking about loving yourself (in the non-masturbatory sense) are quite poignant to me at the moment, and so I'm not as irritated by them as I usually would be.

Anyway, I saw one this morning that really hit home, mostly because it's incredibly relevant to a situation I found myself in recently where a fucking pussy (see, there's the link) told me that they can't handle how I react to things and that I make them uncomfortable.

He also told me that he can't be relied on for a social life/mental health support, completely ignored me and blocked me on Instagram and text and did the exact thing he told me he wouldn't do. Boy's a cunt, and not in a good way.



                               

What made this post really hit home was that, for as long as I can remember, I've blamed myself for how people react to me. Someone calls me scary? My fault. Someone feels uncomfortable being around me because of my BPD? All on me. It seems that all I've ever believed is that, in order for certain people to be in my life, I should do my best to hide my symptoms to make them happy, which, if we think about it, is total bullshit.

Sure, if I were to go around licking people's faces then I could totally understand them being uncomfortable, but that's not something I would ever do. All I do is feel things, and last time I checked that was pretty standard for the majority of living beings. It's not my fault you don't like my condition, and I'm so done with thinking it is.

I'm not saying that my thoughts are going to change overnight, this mindset is not going to disappear straight away and I know that. What I am saying though is that if you, or anyone else you know, find my BPD strange, scary or intimidating in any way, that's on you, not me. And if you're expecting me to hide a part of me away in order to make you feel better in my presence, you know where the door is.



Fuck tard.

xXx 

Sunday 16 June 2019

Not gonna lie



I'd considered not writing this post for fear of upsetting people, but there's not a part of me that can be bothered to lie.

About a month or so ago, I started self-harming again. I was in an inexplicable amount of pain and all I wanted to do was cut my arms, so I did. I could say that I'm ashamed of it, embarrassed by the fact that I'd broken my 4-year streak of being cut free, but I'm just not. I wanted to do it and so I did, and it did exactly what I needed it to do. It made me feel better.

I'm not overly sure how many times I've done it since then but I made a pretty deep cut this morning. I'm fine, it's fine and I have plaster of it so there's no chance of me bleeding everywhere. I know my body and so know the worst of it will be healed in a couple of days and eventually it will be nothing more than a distant memory etched on my arm, along with all the other mornings, afternoons, nights and evenings I've ever spent cutting. Just as I'm doing my best to move on in other situations within my life, my arm will do the same.

Although it may not seem like it, to me this is a part of taking care of what I want and need before I can be involved with anyone else. I've been doing this long enough to know how to not really hurt myself and, if I'm honest, I like doing it. Not in a 'doing it just for funsies' kind of way, but in a 'I know what to do to make myself feel better' kind of way. For as long as I can remember I have been plagued with feelings of guilt, to the point that I have no idea what I'm feeling guilty for anymore. I do, however, know that spending money and drinking make me feel guilty, so the usual retail therapy or drowning my sorrows with a bottle of wine is out, and cutting is in.

I also don't have a freezer, so going balls deep in a pint of ice cream isn't an option either.

This isn't to say I'm going to start doing it on the regular again, that's just not the case. What I am doing, however, is just accepting that this is a part of what's going on with me at the moment, and that's good enough for me.

xXx

Wednesday 12 June 2019

AAAAAAND here we go


I told you I would come crashing down, didn't I?

I hurt right now, I hurt a lot. I've been hurt, someone has hurt me and all I can think is what did I do wrong to make them act like that? Rationally I know it's not my fault, but I don't think rationally. I think in ways that blame myself for the pain that I'm feeling, that makes it my fault that everything hurts so god damn much.

All I can think about right now is, what did I do? What could I possibly have done (and when) that means bad things keep happening? I rack my brains over and over and over again and I still don't understand. I do my best to be a good person, I try so hard, but everything still hurts. What is it I need to do to fix things? What can I do to make it all better?

My friend Matt is with me right now. Well, not really, he's dead. I know he's not really there, but it feels like he is. I can hear his voice, feel him next to me and see his beautiful face when I close my eyes. I haven't felt like he was here this much since I was last in Paris and, if anything makes the pain and delusions worth it, it's feeling like he's here with me.

I know tomorrow I will feel differently, hell in an hour or so I'll feel differently. But right now, it hurts. It hurts so much and I would do anything and everything to work out how to fix it.

xXx 

Sometime's it's worth it


This morning, I received some of the greatest news ever delivered to mankind. Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, the show that shaped and influenced my life until it got a little bit shit, is returning for a one-off reunion show. It's impossible to put into words just how I'm feeling about this and I shall be singing along to the musical episode at the top of my lungs even more so than usual.

You will probably notice that, in the vast majority of my mental-health posts, I talk about how shit BPD can be. It's tiring, draining and down-right painful but, today, I'm bouncing off the walls and loving it. I'm buzzing, I'm excited and although it's highly likely that I will come crashing down like a sack of shit in pretty soon, I really don't give a shit. I'm happy.

It's often hard to explain to people the good side of my BPD because for the longest time good patches have been few and far between. Before I was diagnosed, I spent years refusing to take any form of medication because I was willing to put up with the lows in exchange for the highs. Obviously, this mentality only lasted for so long and eventually, I conceded that not only did I need an actual diagnosis, but that I also needed help in controlling my emotions in order to function as a normal human being.

Well, semi-function.

As a result of this, the highs seemed to fizzle out and the lows became far more common. Even as I'm writing this, I can see how it might seem strange that I just accept the lows as part of my everyday life now but, at the expense of not being able to survive, I'm happy to accept it.

Whilst this may seem like another post reiterating the pain I feel on a regular basis as a result of my condition, it really isn't the case. Today I'm happier than I've felt in days and I intend to hold on to that for as long as humanly possible. It may last the morning, the day or the week but right now, I don't give a shit. The mood I'm in is nothing short of euphoric, and I intend to enjoy it for as long as I can.

xXx


Tuesday 11 June 2019

What hurts the most



One of the things I find the hardest to explain to people when it comes to my BPD is how it feels physically. How my body feels when I'm in the middle of a bad patch much like the one I'm in right now. I'm not just talking about when I'm exhausted or hungover after quite literally trying to drink my feelings away or even how my arms feel when I slice them to ribbons, but how I actually feel.

It was only recently that I thought about writing this post after I realised that I'd developed a new symptom. I'm not a fan of new symptoms of my condition cropping up. I can, for the most part, handle the ones I've experienced for years but when I'm thrown a curveball and my brain decides that it's time for something new, I seldom know how to react.

The latest symptom is an actual feeling of my condition taking over. You know the sensation when you've necked 5 Redbulls and then come crashing down like Charlie Sheen at the end of a 2-week bender? That's exactly how I"m feeling, only these peaks and troughs happen within the space of a few minutes. Eventually, I know I'll learn how to get passed this one and soon it'll become part and parcel of my life with BPD, but all I can really do about it now is rest.

Aside from this new whole-body takeover, the place I feel pain most is my chest. It's a heavy, dragging feeling that sits rights above my sternum, and there's nothing I can do to get rid of it. Even I don't know much about the connection between mental illness and physical pain, but I'm at least 99.99% sure that painkillers aren't going to touch it.

I've been experiencing this type of pain a lot recently, which has not been helped by the fact that my immune system decided that working was too mainstream and so shut down last week. Whilst my chest infection is finally clearing and the dizziness and double vision are gone, the BPD pain is very much there.

This bad patch has been pretty rough, not just because of intensity but because of how long it's lasting. I'm doing my best to get out when I can and make use of the times I feel able to make it out the house but, for the most part, I've been spending my time at home in bed. I know that I'm strong and eventually things will be okay, but I"d really like to be done with this one now.

And no, I'm not going to the doctors.

xXx

Saturday 8 June 2019

Self Love Pt 2


In the same way that I introduced my previous post of the same name, please be aware that this post has nothing to do with masturbation.

Sorry

When I was 17 I made the catastrophic mistake of shitting where I ate and entered into my very first relationship with a guy I worked with. It was great for about 15 months, and then we had a delightful conversation over text one night where he simply told me he didn't want to be with me anymore.

To be fair he'd said it before but then we'd gotten back together, we really should have stayed broken up.

Anyway after a lot of screaming, sobbing and valium (this was pre-diagnosis and therefore pre-medication) I managed to face him again and head to work.

It was fucking brutal.

Finding me sobbing in the toilet, my friend Hollie came in to comfort me and uttered the immortal words, you can't love anyone until you love yourself.

I won't lie, at the time I thought it was bullshit.

To me, nothing else mattered other than getting him back and I relentlessly told myself that it was something wrong with me that made him leave. It took me years to get over him, and I finally found solace after bumping into him on a night out and crying into my friend Craig's arms under a clock in Downham Market.

I also may or may not have hooked up with one of his friends but what are you going to do.

Anyway, fast forward 8 years and I really am feeling the pain again. I can take BPD flare-ups, but this one is lasting a lot longer than usual. I'm doing my best to leave the house, eat and achieve the bare minimum of tasks required to call myself a human, but it's hard.

It wasn't until the other day after I'd spent a good half an hour rocking back and forth sobbing into my pillow that I remembered what Hollie had said. After all these years was I finally getting it? Was I finally realising that I have to change the relationship I have with myself in order to be in a relationship with someone else? Was it finally dawning on me that I need to take care of me first? Finally, it was.

Laying my head down to sleep, I said to myself that I needed to take care of my body, my brain and my heart if I was ever going to move forward, I realised that there's no way of getting out of it this time. I really can't keep going around in self-hating circles in a desperate bid to feel love that will, quite literally, only end in tears.

And, as my amazing friend Jill said to me in the jewellery cupboard of the Kings Lynn Hardwick branch of Argos, "no daughter of mine is ever going to cry over a man."

I'll keep you posted.

xXx