True.

Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Arterton as Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-west in Vita & Virginia (2019), with excerpts from Virginia and Vita’s love letters.

asking for reassurance is so embarrassing 😭

shoutout to abuse survivors & victims who fluctuate between “they didnt Really abuse me it wasnt That Bad its fine everything is okay” and “i hate them i want them to Burn” as a survival strategy, especially if you’re stil in regular contact with your abuser, and you wind up with a lot of self doubt because you spend so much time actively buying in to their gaslighting

it Is a survival strategy, it doesnt make you fake or bad. 

- Hello, good morning! How did you sleep?

- Oh, hi! I didn't sleep!

💖

The whole self love thing is good and all but some people can’t fathom being loved. They can’t imagine there being anything good about them. So they can’t simply just stop doing unhealthy things, there’s a process.

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.

I still catch myself thinking things like “but at least I wasn’t homeless” and “at least I wasn’t parentless” when I think about my abusive childhood. But then there’s voice inside of my head, reminding me. 

“Hey, you lived terrified of being thrown out on the street and left to starve to death. You were reminded almost every day that you are going to be abandoned and left for dead unless you do everything you’re told, and be useful enough to keep alive. Remember when you were 14 and you spend entire day painting and re-painting a wooden garage, and you were crying entire time? Nobody even looked at you. You weren’t allowed to stop, and you weren’t allowed to cry out loud. It was just silent tears all day. You had to do it if you wanted to live. And it was like that every day, no matter if you were sick, wounded, upset, dying inside - you had to work if you wanted to deserve to eat. You watched this family be family without you, how many times were you crying silently just listening them all laugh in the living room, having a good time, and you couldn’t join because they would all start insulting you and glaring at you if you did? You watched your mom hug your siblings and she wouldn’t hug you. You were convinced day after day that you were lazy, worthless, vermin and a burden on everyone around you. You were beaten, slapped, threatened, screamed at, insulted, attacked and picked up by your hair when someone wanted to take their anger out on you. You were scared of getting killed by violence, because you knew if they killed you, they would all say you deserved it, and were asking for it. Like they always did after hurting you. You were denied privacy, resources, safety and freedom. You were sexually abused at the age of 7. Nobody cared.  You started having panic attacks at the age of 16. Nobody cared. They all knew you were cutting yourself by the time you went to high school. They laughed at you.  And the worst is, you cared. You cared about all of them. You would never do anything to hurt or damage any of them. You were there for anything they needed. You were betrayed and kept in this state by those you loved. Your heart was so heavy - and still is, you feel physical pain in it for the most of time. You have ptsd now. You can’t work. You can’t even look at yourself and examine the damage done to you because it’s too much of a shock and you can’t endure the pain of knowing it. I don’t think it actually gets that much worse than that. You don’t have to compare it to anything.”

Typing Tutorials With Different Keyboards

After switching from the Russian phonetic to the regular Russian keyboard, I’ve had to learn to type all over again. I did some Googling and found https://sense-lang.org/typing/. It’s a website that teaches typing, but the coolest part is they have a bunch of different languages available. Change the language from the drop down menu here:

Then click the icon that has the hand with the coloured dots (it should say “lesson” next to it in your target language).

It will take you to a dozen lessons or so to practice typing!

Once I clicked on the first lesson, it took a while to load — I thought maybe I had done something wrong. Just be patient and it will start up.

Hope that was helpful!

Chernobyl (2019) Episode 1 dir. Johan Renck “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognise the truth at all.”