I thought I had a restraining order on this bastard, but apparently I am still the DSM’s favorite human on Earth. It’s getting batshit ridiculous. I am about to make my ringtone a chorus of kindergarteners singing the ABCs so that if anyone asks what my diagnoses are, I can tell them to call me and let it play. Nevermind the various LGBT+ letters and acronyms that happen to apply as well.
On the positive side, what has been revealed in the past few days has finally shined the light on what I would consider the “final boss” of all of my demons. It is a sinister thing, capable of hiding its traits behind every other acronym I have been gifted with and cherrypicking through them for the best ones to weaponize. Which is to say, every nasty thing that it has done to me, I have thus far chosen to fight using entirely the wrong toolset, as I’ve mistaken these things for autism or something else. The good news is, after battling this beast since at least sixth grade and barely gaining ground on it (I am thirty-five, y’all, I am fucking tired,) I have found the high ground and, soon, I will have the ability to stake it through the heart.
Anyway, I’ll stop waxing poetic about it, because not naming it is giving “I’m ashamed” energy: it’s BPD. I am now on a mood stabilizer (christ that’s four pills now, I can’t stand pills) and, for the first week, my homework is to continue utilizing TIPP (it’s something they teach you in DBT therapy that I happen to be at least halfway doing by accident) and journaling every day.
I’m not going to follow typical suggestions on “How to Journal for BPD” websites because, to be honest, every blog or article I’ve found in the last few days has been written in a way that rubs me wrong. It’s a lot of “woe is me,” “my life is ruined but I will survive,” or “I’m a delicate little flower” type voices and that ain’t me. This shit has an 85% COMPLETE remission rate; you don’t just heal to the point where, when the big feelings and uncontrollable behaviors flare up, you do a coping checklist to calm yourself down, you actually rewire the superhighways trauma has built in your brain so that those disproportionate reactions no longer occur at all. If I had it my way, I’d be locked in a room or building with specialists and the only way out would be remission, and I would be eager to be there and get started. This shit has blown up almost every job and close relationship and personal project that I have ever had and I haven’t been without suicidal ideation since I was a pre-teen, so why the hell would I not accept anything less than the death of it?
Anyway, I will play at the BPD journal formula just a little this time, but in my own way.
*Disclaimer: I will do my best to be accurate, but it’s only been a few days since therapy, so the diagnosis is still new to me and I may fail to explain or understand some nuances. Hopefully I will be accurate and not regurgitate anyone’s false claims or stigma biases. Call my ass out if I do, or if I oversimplify something, or for any reason, really.)
Symptom Overlaps
“How do you go twenty-five-ish years and not find out?” I mean, I was only diagnosed with autism at 34. Speaking of, Autism and BPD are both masking disorders, and when BPD is strongly internalized and hiding behind every other thing and being managed to the best of the person’s ability without knowing it, some of the key signs to diagnose it fail to appear or get blamed on something else.
- Intense emotions, meltdowns, shutdowns? Autism
- “Favorite People”ing? Autistic/ADHD/OCD hyperfixation
- Black-and-white thinking? Autism
- Rejection sensitivity? ADHD
- Internal, self-looping negative thoughts? OCD with a side of Depression
- Struggles maintaining a normal, healthy work life? gotta be Autism
- Intense grudges, never forgiving, never forgetting a single wrong a person has ever done so that the instant they cross a line you can condemn them to the lowest ring of hell and submit a thesis to justify it? maybe it’s OCD, or PTSD, or bad social skills from Autism. Maybe it’s Maybelline
- Constantly reliving non-traumatic negative events and conversations in your head? PTSD or OCD or an uncontrolled ADHD mind fueled by depression
…you get the point.
There’s something that weaves through every bit of that and binds it together, however: People. It’s socially instigated, every bit of it.
- Meltdowns and Shutdowns do occur in both BPD and Autism, but the Auti-flavored ones are sensory related, not caused by social cues.*
- Favorite Peopling is a very specific thing and it does look like the product of OCD to some degree. Think of the most deranged Swiftie you know. They can be described as obsessed. However, they have a near zero chance of getting to know Taylor, so they’re never going to count the seconds after they’ve sent her a text because they immediately feel hated or dumped or ghosted etc., or constantly manipulate and test their relationship to prove to their insecurities that the friendship is secure and they aren’t about to get hurt or blindsided.
- Black-and-white thinking in Autism typically means having rigid ideas of right and wrong and other conceptual things, while BPD targets people, considering them irredeemably bad or an absolute saint, or putting them in categories such as “safe” and “unsafe to be around.” (I’ve literally used the term unsafe without knowing I was doing this in the past.)
- I do get ADHD rejection sensitivity, but it manifests as a normal amount of anxiety. The BPD rejection sensitivity is, well… refusal to say things because someone might get mad at you, or their tone changes and you assume they hate you to the core, or you don’t get a job after an interview and take it so personally that you want to set fire to every individual molecule in the interviewer’s body. Again, completely social and rooting in being hyper aware of reactions (and misreading them for the worst, usually.)
- When I am in a calm, somewhat clear state of mind, I do have reoccuring looping feedback thoughts but they aren’t negative or about me; usually, I’m writing or comic-crafting in my head or building a playlist or stuck remembering and replaying that time I rode the same elevator with a famous musician. In a bad place, however, the same mechanics happen, but I’m reliving every terrible wrong that has traumatized me or being crushed by the weight of every cruel thing I’ve ever said or done or the voice in my head repeatedly says verbatim thing likes “you never should have been born,” “you will never be anything but a modern peasant,” “if your life was displayed before all people on Earth the chorus of spiteful laughter would deafen the Milky Way.” Complete self cannibalism on every level. That or it’s getting extremely spicy dwelling on some grudge, sometimes because someone has erred or inconvenienced me in some way that reminds me of every wrong they’ve committed or was similar to someone else’s crimes and so now I can’t stop thinking about the other person.
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Autism has made for some difficult situations in places of work but it has never caused anything in the realm of being fired or written up. Being unable to not tear down a piece of shit regional manager that was being such a dick that it was straight out of satire, though? Being called to the office about it the next day and throwing my badge at the managers immediately before launching into a steely cold villain’s monologue about every wrong that regional manager had committed to our staff like I’d memorized a sermon? Proceeding to insinuate they were weak little boys for not standing up to him when they told me to be nice? …if you get justice boners, it was def. one of those moments but it was 100% a BPD explosion lmfao. Mine are almost always morality-based, admittedly flavored by the rigid autism, but they are social outrage episodes from BPD at the core, and they are NOT typically proportional by normal standards, even if this example felt good to remember.
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A meltdown from social cues from BPD can stimulate your nervous system, making your senses much more vulnerable, which can cause both meltdown types to occur. They can both set off and feed each other, because God’s favorite creation was Schadenfreude.
I could go deeper but I already feel like that tin hat looking guy in the meme.
Stigma and the Therapy Dilemma
Something keeping me from journaling until today has been that I have every temptation to be outraged because I have been being medicated and treated for BPD for a shitload longer than a few days. I can forgive not putting the diagnosis on paper–there is an outdated idea that it is untreatable which is an insurance company’s wet dream–but also people with BPD carry a stigma that they are unbelievably difficult to deal with, so a doctor may look at your report before meeting you and boom, you’re colored very unfavorably because the dude’s ‘phobic about it. It’s so weird, because I am the most gentle compliant little thing when I am talking to someone who is doing their job. I want a working person to have the best day ever. I’m not going to argue every point and refuse suggested treatment just because. Like, what?
However, it wasn’t just kept off of paperwork. I have been being treated both medically and therapeutically for years without being explicitly told it was for BPD. The mood stabilizer I am on was given to me under the guise of treating OCD years ago but I came off of it (inb4: it may have been for OCD originally but that is an off-label use for it.) About two years ago, though, I was in a mental crisis and my psychiatrist made me answer the question of whether I needed to be admitted, but I was too mortified by the idea that everyone at work would hate me for not being there (social rejection sensitivity cackles in the distance.) He put me on a medicine often used BPD a week or two before asking me that, but it had unpleasant side effects, so when everything got worse, he put me on Lithium, and Lithium fucking worked. Unfortunately, I was not getting bloodwork done and had either an OD onset or an allergic reaction (it met criteria for both, a swelling of fluid where the spine meets the brain that was the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life.) I had to come off of it, but things eventually somewhat stabilized and I went back to work.
If I had been told about BPD, I would not have chosen to come off the mood stabilizer. It’s that simple. I can’t fully justify being enraged about it because the first prescription really may have been only for OCD. However, so many suggestions and coping mechanism that have been gently suggested or hinted at throughout the years were strategies for managing BPD, but they weren’t telling me that.
Simply put, my life may be very different and I may be fully remissioned by now had I been told bluntly what it was to begin with. This is the same rage I felt when it was suggested I may be autistic. I got tested immediately, found out it was very much the case and that I was so text-book high functioning autism that the specialist couldn’t believe I was 34 before finding out. I then was told that the therapist said the only reason she hadn’t mentioned it before was because I was holding down a job.
Excuse the goddamn fuck out of me? The autistic people I have worked with for years are still working there just fucking fine? Also I have struggled with maintaining a job and not exploding on people all my life so that’s barely true?
Maybe I’ll talk to her about it, as she’s my main therapist again. I swapped to the autism testing place for therapy for a year or two but ultimately went back when my PTSD therapist became too sick to practice. (btw the PTSD therapist had to stop doing PTSD therapy on me on step 3 out of 8 because I became too unstable and at some point she even loaned me a book on BPD but didn’t suggest I had it… that one’s on me for being dumb because that was pretty obvious looking back.)
I didn’t want to journal because I was afraid I’d do a massive vomit about how enraged I want to be. I didn’t want to trigger a Jekyll-Hyde sitch. That’s… typically why I don’t write when I’m feeling anything. I look at how I acted in my teens and I do not ever want to go down that path again. Emotional, explosive, neurotic, psychotic. I’m under so much terror that that’s the “real me” and that my “adult self’s” full-time job is being the dam that’s holding back Lake Fucked-in-the-Head.
Now I’m being told that at an emotional peak is when I am SUPPOSED to write. It seems so fucking immature to indulge that shit, though. Kind of screams crying for attention and making mountains out of molehills… heh… which… which is one of those bad stereotypes people with BPD suffer. They’re called dramatic, attention-seeking, hypochondriac… because the reaction is seen through healthier eyes as disproportionate, despite the person’s experience being extremely real. It’s quite literally their brain and nervous system being amped up out of control. It’s one of the things they mean when they say “trauma physically changes your brain.”
Still, I know what it looks like and I know that if I calm down, my logic takes over. I don’t think I want to broadcast my weakest states of mind, not because I am ashamed per se, it’s just that most of the time… even when I have every justification… I’m mature enough to recognize what damage it may cause or how absurd it can be read to others. (TBH I’ve lived under the idea that the feelings WEREN’T real and that denying them as immature was the answer because I’m “smarter than that.” …wish it worked that way.) I’d just accepted that I’d always be a caged rabid tiger inside and I’d have to keep tranqing myself and living in between the beast’s wake-ups. Now, I’m seeing that the tiger isn’t rabid, it’s just stuck in constant pain that can be treated and it’ll make it a hell of a lot less grumpy. Or something.
…did you know you can have an OCD compulsion to talking in analogies and metaphors… my new psychiatrist pointed that out… it’s a form of meta-OCD but…
I am not getting into any more mental health talk right now, good God.
I’m tired of talking about it right now (as far as compiling a journal entry. I’ll still gladly answer questions etc.)
To call back to the titular metaphor, my mailbox is currently packed with these letters: ADHD, OCD, BPD, CPTSD, and the B(or P) and T in LGBT+ with a shoutout to PDA being my flavor of autism and FTM my flavor of transgender.
That’s… A2,B2,C2,D5,F1,H1,M1,P3,S2, if I did that right. B1 P4 if you swap bi for pan.
Yo, if that was written as a molecule, I might consider getting it as a tattoo. Nah… I did consider my first tattoo being the periodic table info box for gold since it’s Au like autism, though.
Anyway, bout to go play in the yard. Adios~
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