Call us the Yuckers

TW: suicidal ideation

It’s awful to think that you have something, only to find out that you don’t. Think of the joy of finding that unexpected 20 dollar bill in a sock, but reverse it and turn up the intensity.

What I thought I had, for much of my life, was a sense of “ok” mental health. I had triumphs and tragedies and all the sitcom stuff, along with the full range of colors needed to turn mistakes into happy accidents. At one point in high school I saw a therapist a couple of times, but to me it was just about handling a situation, not tending to the ongoing headspace.

Here is a life hack that I should’ve mentioned on day 1 of this rhetorical adventure into madness. Take care of your headspace. Do your best with what you’ve got to make sure that you take care of it.

I can tell you all about the consequences of not doing so. Some care is better than no care and no care sucks.

And speaking of my lack of care and self-awareness, previous employment had exposed me to the concept of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in the form of a journal review. I remember reading the article and thinking, “Oh my, that way of living. That unstable sense of self. The emotional roller coasters. The mood instability. The self loathing. The deep, deep desire to self harm or unalive. The burden of reading relationships in binaries and acting excessively.”

Always, always excessively. Let it never be said that borderlines do anything halfway. When we succeed in tasks, we are glorious. When we fail, we fail hard and often accelerate the destruction in a perverse act of defiance to circumstance.

This is just a fancy way of saying that if something is broken, that borderline often wishes it to brokener.

Listen to me: I told you that I was crazy in a detailed and more sensational entry here, and in case you missed that memo, I am more than comfortable with ascribing that adjective to myself.

Return to present: I read an article about BPD once and thought: this sure sounds like a cocktail of awful. My oh my oh my. Wow. Yikes.

Understanding my diagnosis has become a kind of Rosetta Stone for my life; I am able to go back and decode certain events, behaviors, actions, and perspectives against how borderline traits could explain them, at least in part. I say borderline “traits” because I cannot say if I have always met at least 5 of the 9 BPD criteria in my life. The point is this: now that I am more self-aware of the maladaptive engine driving this train, I know this:

I should have known better about myself when I read the article, but I didn’t. My concept of self did not include mental illness. THAT was something that I thought I just kind of did from time to time.

Talk about something going over the head.

Please, pay close attention to all of my self reflections in this blog. I have flawless observational powers and crystal clear introspection.

This next thought sounds selfish, and for that I apologize. The cost of authenticity is that we both get to see the parts of me that are yuck. If you gaze at the dumpster fire that is Nathan and say yuck? I say yuck.

And trust me, borderlines are much better at saying yuck. Call us the Yuckers, especially when we look in the mirror.

This is the thought for which I am not really sorry but still electing to apologize: When it was starting to become clear that my behaviors were not disconnected or isolated, and that I might actually have a mental health diagnosis in my future, I felt filthy, disgusting, shameful, and loathsome.

I wasn’t sure what was wrong with me, but it felt like it corrupted me to the point where there was nothing good left.

:: Enter the Microsoft Paper Clip, with them cute little eyeballs, holding up a memo. The memo reads: In borderline terms, what Nathan is doing here is engaging in black and white thinking, where he is assessing something to be all good or all bad, with no useful mixture in between. ::

I should not have felt this way for suspecting I need mental healthcare. Nobody should.

But Mental Illness isn’t treated the same way that a broken limb is. When I broke my ankle as a teenager, I did what everybody else did: I paraded around with a Sharpie and made everyone notarize, with their own signatures, the fact that I was a clumsy liability to my health insurance company. I’m a klutz! Would you mind certifying that in permanent marker?

It is not quite the same with mental illness. There’s a yuck factor there.

People who break a limb break a limb.

People who are mentally ill feel completely, entirely, totally broken, and why should’t they? The mind is the command center for how people navigate everything; when that is trouble, it feels like the whole of the operation has been compromised.

When we snap a bone, we proudly seek care.

When we are mentally ill, we quietly think that we are not worth the trouble.

I thought, for far too long, that I was a very stable picture of mental health, only to discover that my assessment was deeply mistaken. I went from “I’m ok” to “I’m not OK” in force, culminating in a serious slide into depression in the summer of last year. When this happens, the identity is shaken, and severely so.

My sense of self, goodness, and purpose was gone, snapped right off. If it would have been my ankle I would have gone to the doctor and posted all of the autographs on Facebook by now. When it came to my mental health, however, I did not think I could or should be fixed.

From now on, I will treat borderline personality like a cast. Anyone can see it, and through blog comments and so forth, anyone can sign it as well. The cultivation of shame is exhausting and I’ve become so very tired of it.

Anyone need a Sharpie?