Introductions

Hi there, I see you've somehow stumbled across this blog. Congratulations, you've won one free ticket to what might be the most tedious, uninteresting, whiny, emo blogs on the internet. Please, feel free to discard your ticket in the trash. Or, if you really have a vendetta against someone, give it to another person. Make them suffer a little. It's okay, suffering is funny. Anyway, here's a little bit of information about me in the event that you, for whatever reason, care enough to know.

I'm a 26 year old male living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Average height, overweight, self-loathing, and something of a gross internet nerd. I enjoy reading, writing, sleeping, drinking, Netflix, and video games. I live alone, have next to no real friends, am unable to sustain a healthy relationship, and suffer from severe mental illness. So yeah, I'm the whole package. I started this blog just as a way to vent my frustrations with myself and life in general. I don't really expect or care if anyone reads this; on the contrary, I'd prefer if no one did because I am likely going to come across as a raving lunatic.

I suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder. For those of you unaware of what that is, allow me to elaborate. It's an enduring and all-encompassing condition in which the person afflicted has a broken and disjointed way of viewing relationships and experiencing and coping with emotions. Furthermore, there is a disturbance in the individual's sense of identity where there is no cohesive sense of one. The person is unable to regulate his or her emotions and are constantly at their mercy. This causes exaggerated interpretations and reactions to otherwise benign social stimuli. The borderline defines his or herself through relationships and is unable to function alone. Their identities become immersed in the people they are involved with and in the absence of a significant other, they more or less cease to exist. Their entire worlds revolve around terrifying and debilitating fears of rejection and abandonment, and the intense emotions generated by these fears lead to impulsive and self-destructive behaviour in efforts to cope. Thinking and beliefs about the world generally devovle into dichotomies, or black-and-white thinking. Situations and people are always seen as either all good or all bad. There is no gray area for the borderline, they lack the ability and brain wiring to interpret as such.

Now, I'm an educated borderline. I recognize the signs and symptoms as they occur and can reflect on them. I know that I'm crazy while I'm being crazy and can predict how I'm going to react to a given situation. However, this does nothing to actually modulate my behaviour. This is because I am unable to reconcile the logical part of my brain that knows better with the wild, out of control emotional part of it. Maybe there's a disconnect between my prefrontal cortex and limbic system. Maybe my corpus collosum is underdeveloped. I really don't know and would really appreciate an fMRI to find out. All I know is that my education does nothing to help fight against my emotionality. Once my emotions take control, they begin distorting my logic and views of everything around me. I begin coming up with rationalizations for my behaviour. Or cease to care about the ramifications. Sometimes I even feel like I'm trapped within my own head and can do nothing but watch in horror as my emotions wrench my body and hurt those around me. I get impulses that I simply cannot control and they run wild.

Since I was 15, I have spent more time in romantic relationships than not. The longest stretch outside of one was about six months when I was 19. When I'm outside of a relationship, I feel empty, meaningless, and obsessing about being in one. When I am in one, I obsess about it. I constantly pick the relationships apart, overanalzying the quality of the relationship and the feelings of "rightness" that I may or may not feel. The times where I feel comfortable and secure in a relationship are absolutely fantastic. I feel like I'm on cloud nine, I'm happy, outgoing, personable, and genuinely happy and at peace with the universe. But the insecure times, which can be brought on in any number of ways, are agonizing. I end up sabotaging all of my relationships and end up ending them before the other person can. I assume that the other person is bound to leave due to being unable to tolerate my erratic and intensely emotional behaviour. The last relationship I was in actually ended in that fashion, which happened about two months ago. She left me because she couldn't put up with me any longer. I hate myself and her for how it ended. On the one hand, I completely understand why she left. I wouldn't want to put up with me; hell, I hardly even manage to. I only put up with myself because I have literally no other choice. She was right to flee. I'm insane and am incapable of sustaining a normal, healthy relationship. But on the other hand, I am beyond angry. I am seething with blind rage. How could she leave me like that? How could she abandon me in my time of need, when she was the one person that I could depend on to make everything okay? I'll get more into her in a later post. I am still reeling from the dissolution of that relationship. Whenever I think about her, I get extremely anxious, angry, resentful, and self-destuctive impulses that seem to say "So you're going to continue on as if nothing is wrong, like nothing that was between us ever mattered, like the fact that I loved you meant absolutely nothing to you? Fine, I'll show you. This is what you've brought me to." My impulses include drinking, popping pills, and self-harm. I mix pills and booze occasionally but nothing too outlandish, really. Like, last night I drank three bottles of fruit wine and downed five muscle relaxants and a couple of my antipsychotic meds. Boy, I was flying and felt great. I was really giggly and felt loose and tingly. I laughed at everything, it was a good time. I feel shameful about it, which keeps me from doing that all the time. As I already mentioned, I also self-harm. Say what you will about it being totally emo and for angsty, attention-seeking teenagers but it really does help. The relief of tension it provides is overwhelmingly pleasurable. My entire body feels light. I close my eyes, tilt my head back, and bask in the tingly sensations radiating throughout my entire body. I also feel very shameful about that because of promises I've made that I wouldn't do it. As such, I only do it maybe once every few weeks. No, I don't cut my wrists. I don't want people seeing the scratches. I cut my shoulders and upper legs. Hidden and no questions asked. They're only superficial surface wounds, anyway. They heal up completely in a few days to a week. I treat them with peroxide and wash them with warm water and soap. It's just about relieving the tension and feeling good.

I've been suicidal on and off over the past year. I've daydreamed about ending it all, escaping this emptiness, that hollow pit that I feel in my core. Escaping the pain of a meaningless existence. Downing a whole bottle of pills with a quart of rum, jumping off of the MacKay Bridge, walking into oncoming traffic, these are some of the ways I have daydreamed about. I think about writing a suicide note, acknowledging my own cowardice and apologizing to friends and family but asking them to understand that this is my descision and to respect that. I also think about how everyone would react, who would attend my funeral and what they would say about me, who would cry, stuff like that. I've been to the ER a couple times over suicidal ideation but I'm always sent home. The mental health care in this province is a joke. I have therapy that begins later on this month, so we'll see how that goes. I need to see a regular psychiatrist but the wait lists for one is ridiculous, I was told it could be anywhere from six months to a year. If I end up dead sometime soon, I'm blaming the system. As well as my own weakness. But I digress.

So there you have it, a little bit of info on who I am. Not that I have a cohesive sense of who that is because I don't. I feel lost and confused all the time. My interests and values tend to change depending on who I'm dating. I really ought to cut dating out entirely, now that I think about it. I always end up hurting the person I'm with, putting them through unnecessary pain and frustration. I need to put myself in a relationship quarantine so I don't cause any damage to anyone but myself. It would be the noble thing to do. I'm kind of a terrible human being. Hell, I feel like I'm not even human half the time. I'm a monster who cannot be understood. I hurt and destroy all those who are around me. I deserve to be alone for the rest of my life, really. Drinking and cutting myself into oblivion while the world goes on happily.

On an entirely different note, I'd like to mention that while the name of blogs implies that my musings will be centred upon the subjective experience of living with Borderline Personality Disorder, I will probably make many posts that have nothing to do with that topic. Sure, I could change the name to something more representative of the content, but frankly, I don't care that much and I can't really think of a better name. I'm kind of an idiot. Also I won't be updating on any sort of schedule; it'll be more of a I'll do it when I feel like it kind of thing.

Until next time.

- K