When A New Cafe Opens On The High Street, Yuki’s Constant Fears And Worries Finally Catch Up With Her

me: “I have social anxiety”

what people hear: “I am a bit shy”

what the internet reads: “OwO cute shy boi,,must protecc!! hehe so quirky!1!!”

what social anxiety really is: taking months of knowing someone to feel comfortable enough to have a real conversation, your mind going blank during small talk, inability to participate in groups of more than three people, mentally rehearsing “simple” tasks such as ordering food or making a phone call and your heart racing anyway, constantly feeling watched, being afraid of getting places too early or too late, fear of being judged over the most random things (”is this a socially acceptable ice cream flavor to buy?” “what if they think my shampoo is weird” “will they hate me if I get up to throw my trash away?” “what if I emptied the dishwasher wrong!”), having panic attacks when you have to ask a teacher for help, constantly feeling left out or excluded even with friends, your hands shaking when you get called on in class, being overwhelmed in crowds and public transportation, disliking being touched, perpetual fear of disappointing those in authority, overall difficulty forming relationships, missing out on milestones or social events because you either have no friends to go with or know it will be overwhelming, preferring to be in groups of three so that conversation isn’t solely up to you, making so many everyday tasks so much more difficult than they need to be due to a crushing fear of being judged by random strangers you will literally never see again and needing to be seen as flawless

Ain’t that the truth?

A Real Narrative of Borderline

Warning: Triggering, perhaps, to some. A bit of a narrative I wrote recently to help people understand what it can be like living with a disorder that is often signified as ‘bad’. 

________________________________________

Sometimes I’m scared of myself, because of my disorder. People say ‘commitment’ and I curl in on myself and feel my heart constrict tightly in my chest. Commitment.

“Commitment? There’s no such thing as commitment when you have borderline, it’s even harder when you have antisocial.”

And no, it’s not because I get a need to dump a friend for someone more exciting that snorts cocaine and gets high every minute, nor need to have a quick fling whilst in a relationship. No, it’s because commitment means committing to me, a monster, and in turn, this monster needs to learn to commit to them lest it makes their lives miserable. It means 24/7, 100% effort that you, as nothing but a human, don’t have the mental capacity for.

When it comes to borderline, it’s safe to say I hate it. Everything triggers it, every word, every emotion I don’t understand. I can’t handle anything ‘normally’ and every feeling is exaggerated so much my head feels like it will explode- sometimes, I wish I had a gun so that I could actually make it do so. Then the ‘pressure’ would leave my head.

“I like you.”

Makes me happy, yet I don’t return the sentiment. Am I meant to like you back? I don’t even know if I can feel love. Once upon a time I ignored that statement and went for it, now it’s ingrained in me to go ‘that isn’t fair on them,’ and leave.

“I’m okay if you don’t feel the same.”

Makes me happy, yet I know that it will lead down a dark path. When hasn’t it? When has my borderline been on my side? It hasn’t. It’s no one’s fault, but its fault. It can’t handle emotion and doesn’t know what to do with it besides release it in a fit of rage. It’s 0 or 100, no in-between. For me that is punching a wall, or, on a bad day, playing with fire.

“Break up.”

Is like a double-whammy. It’s soul-crushing because you feel betrayed, even if you don’t really feel betrayed. It’s also a sigh of relief, ‘I don’t need to hurt them anymore. And thus, I will no longer be hurt.’ Some of us don’t’ want to be monsters, in fact, I daresay with borderline, the idea of being monsters tortures us endlessly. There’s this notion that being alone is better, and I think the longer you live with borderline, the more you realize loneliness is the best way to cope with it. You have nothing but you and your dreams and little room to hurt and hurt others, there’s no real people involved – real people you care about.

Friends leave. They don’t stick around except a few really good ones, who are able to see your hate and look past it. Relationships? Forget about them. The minute you make a friend, you start to get attached, and god help you if you like them. If you like them and think they’re cool, or epic, then that’s it. You’re doomed.

So are they.

You don’t want to hurt them, you’re a monster inside, but no matter how you go about it, you will. They like you: so you can swallow that anxiety that the future will fall apart and that you don’t want to lose a friend or cool person who you’re attached to, and you’ll give them what you want. Or: you shatter them and lose a friend anyways. Either way, your friend is gone. The person you cared about is out of the picture. One involves ignoring that you feel like a shithead, the other involves being a shithead, but it may work out better for them later. There’s no winning in borderline. Only losing. Only hurting people. And it’s never them that’s wrong– oh no. It’s always you. And no matter how much you deny it, you’re very aware of it.

So when people ask me what borderline is like I skirt the edges of truth because I know it’s ugly. It’s an ugly disorder, and very few except two people in my life get it. The one person seemed to understand the practicality of emotions, but not nearly as loyal a friend as the other and ended up following his own dubious impulses. I forgave it quickly, because I, although borderline and not antisocial, knew having impulsive behavior was tricky to get rid of – I still find myself punching the wall, or walking along a river at night. The other, a longstanding friend, gets it on a level unlike any other:

1.       The anger: mostly at yourself, and when you’re angry you get so angry you want to blow a hole in the wall, then in your head.

2.       The loyalty: loyal to a fault, so loyal you’d rather suffer and crawl through the dirt for someone than have them abandon you because you like them. That’s the problem, you care too much and feel emotions too much. But at the same time…

3.       Emotionless: that disassociation, where you feel nothing sometimes for days on end, where eventually you become so good at acting you don’t even know what real emotions are. Underneath it all, you care so deeply, but you don’t know why. ‘Why do I care?’ will have your brain feeling like it’s crushed because the question is beyond your comprehension.

“They baffle me,” is how he’d put it, “People ask me what I’m feeling, and I can’t answer. We don’t feel, or we feel too much.”

And then there’s the self-hate.

“Self-hate,” he’d say, “Is what gets us Cluster B’s. On the one hand, this personality is a part of us, it’s who we are…but we see others happy, falling in love, we see them get hurt by some action we did that we don’t get, and we realize …that will never be us. We will never be the good ones because even if we learn to behave properly and act good, in our head, we’re bad news. In my head, I still think ‘I want to punch you in the face.’ It makes you hate yourself when you’re aware you’re bad news, and especially so when you can control it. Then people don’t believe you anymore.”

We all hear the familiar words and phrases from loved ones. Many deny it – what, after all, even is borderline? Or antisocial? Narcissism? Stories and tales that depict the evil characters in books! Plot devices! Consider those as well, who don’t understand it: how can you not feel? Are you insane?

I am insane, at least I feel I am insane. But I still feel that twinge inside, that hurt when you call me as such. You’re side-lining me, making me an outcast for something I have no control over. I didn’t choose this.

Then there’s those who think they’re helping. These phrases vary from “It won’t hurt me if you tell me” to “That’s a bit selfish,” “Hah! That’s a funny thing you said there!” and “That’s evil!”

It is selfish, isn’t it? Imagine being called selfish. Or evil. Or having others find you amusing for your savagery, and the fact that you beat up a guy who looked at you funny.

Imagine being called a word that is immediately connotated with ‘bad’. Imagine being essentially called a bad person for something you can maybe control behaviourally, but can’t erase.

Eventually, you want to give up, run away, and let loose. ‘I’ll cut my hair, get 10 tattoos and have that crazy orgy I never had whilst getting high on cocaine. Because I’m bad anyways, and no one seems to care.’

Having this disorder sometimes feels like a sentence. A very misunderstood sentence that I’m being punished for.

The worst is…

You feel like you deserve it.

Adhd things that need to be talked more about (because adhd is more than just not being able to focus)

Short term memory loss. Seriously, I forget things that are said to me 5 minutes ago or will forget I opened a soda and will have 3 open cans by the end of the day with none of them finished. A lot of people don’t know about this, and so they think that I don’t care enough to listen to what their saying (which I do!!! I just can’t remember it) or that I’m lazy because of all the things I don’t end up doing because I forgot I had to do them.

Lack of motivation. Listen, I honestly can’t do anything on my own for the most part. I have to have someone else tell me to do something or have them set goals for me because it’s so damn difficult for me to do it myself. Again, I’m not lazy, I just have trouble doing things on my own

Language processing difficulties. Sometimes, English and words in general don’t work out in my head. Reading or even listening to someone talk can be extremely difficult for me to understand because my brain just won’t work. Why? Can’t tell you 99% of the time! It’s not that I need to focus, it’s that my brain is just buffering.

Needing multiple forms of stimulation at all times. I have a tin of putty that I keep in my book bag and a smaller one I keep in my purse at all times because of this reason. If I want to learn anything at school, I have to be able to look at something, hear something, and have something to do with my hands. Otherwise, it’s probably a big nope for me. What’s frustrating is that since this isn’t talked about enough, I often get called childish or get looked down upon because I have to play with silly putty in a highschool class.

Hyperfixation. Adhd can mean not being able to focus, but it’s also focusing too much on something! This can mean anything from a certain interest someone is in to at that moment, to something like a song that has been stuck in your head for a week. People seem to not understand this and think that we’re boring and have nothing else to talk about or that we’re annoying because we keep bringing the same things up over and over again but that’s not the case. Trust me, I’m annoyed with the hit or miss song too, but at least it’s not playing in your head constantly like it is for me

These are all the ones I can think of right now, but it’s really important we talk about this stuff more. All of these things that come with adhd can be very frustrating for those around us because they don’t understand that we can’t help it. To an outsider, it may just look like a person with adhd is just lazy and doesn’t care, when it’s actually just how our brains are wired. None of us want to be frustrating to others!! In fact, all of this frustrates us too!! But since adhd is just known as “not being able to focus”, people don’t realize what all comes with it and how it can really fuck everyone over.

Please add more if you can think of anything else!! I’m horrible with lists lol

House Of 1000 Corpses (2003)  

Witches’ Sabbath / The Great He-Goat, 1823, Francisco Goya

Medium: oil,canvas

one of the biggest struggles of being borderline, at least in my experience, is that i hate the idea of using my disorder as an excuse.

i don’t think that a lot of people realize that having a personality disorder means that EVERYTHING i do is because of that disorder. every emotion and behavior comes from it, and i have to actively correct and change my responses and cognitions regularly to keep myself in line.

so it’s hard, because you spend your whole life trying to function normally, because you CAN if you really really try. and people are okay with you having bpd, until you actually present a symptom. but if i get irrationally angry, i can’t say “it’s because i have bpd,” because it will come off as an excuse, even though that’s honestly why. i don’t KNOW why i’m so upset about this, i don’t KNOW why my mood dropped so quickly or why i want to die on days when nothing bad has happened. the only response is because i’m borderline.

but it’s just an excuse, or people think it’s a crutch, and so you have this diagnosis that explains everything about you, but you can’t use it to explain why you do things. not the way that you can explain that you’re sneezing so much because you have a cold, or you can’t eat ice cream because you’re lactose intolerant. those actions or avoidances are because of health problems that people are okay with. you explain that this is why you are doing or not doing something, and they’re grateful to have an explanation. but it’s not like that for us. we suffer in silence so we aren’t seen as manipulative or just unwilling to change. and it isn’t fair.

“All the effort in the world won’t matter if you’re not inspired.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary