Tag Archives: mental illness

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The Picture

I used to be obsessed with The Picture of Dorian Grey. You know, the Oscar Wilde book. The concept of a painting in an attic holding all your sins and mistakes gave me a sense of hope, I guess. A hope that all the ugly things that live in my soul that sometimes appear on my face would be kept somewhere safe. Where they couldn’t hurt anybody.

I live with Borderline Personality Disorder. BPD is a cluster B personality disorder, and by the definition of the DSM 5, is:

“A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by 5 or more of the following:

  1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
  2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
  3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
  4. Impulsivity in at least 2 areas that are potentially self-damaging, for example, spending, substance abuse, reckless driving, sex, or binge eating
  5. Recurrent suicidal behaviour, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behaviour
  6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood, for example, intense episodic dysphoria, anxiety, or irritability, usually lasting a few hours and rarely more than a few days
  7. Chronic feelings of emptiness
  8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger, for example, frequent displays of temper, constant anger, or recurrent physical fights
  9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms.”

I present with 8 of these factors. Years of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy means it’s mostly kept safe in the attic, as I make sure to distance myself from situations that my dumb ass brain can’t handle. I’ve been single for 8 years because that’s one area that my dumb ass brain gets really dumb about. My marriage – written about in excruciating detail on this very platform – is a lesson in how dumb.

So, I’ve stayed single. Single and safe.

Then I made the mistake of falling for a friend.

This friend, who I’ll call S, has been in my life for over 15 years and is a kind, generous, accepting person. He treats me with respect and deference, doesn’t judge my insane behaviour traits, and doesn’t treat me like I’m fragile. So, of course, over time, I fell hard.

Now, I’m desperately afraid of making myself vulnerable to people I like, so I just let it be what it was and enjoyed the friendship. I put my feelings and all the messy stuff associated with them in the attic, in the picture, where they were safe. Where I was safe.

But then I had a health scare (I’m fine now), and the picture started rattling in its frame. I ignored it, and it rattled harder. I started to pay attention to the picture, the one in the attic, where everything was hidden away and safe, and let it influence my everyday life. I convinced myself that something was there in my friendship, and the picture rattled and rattled and rattled.

I let it out. I let the painting’s colours run and I ran with my feelings and I told S that I was into him.

He rejected me. Gently, I guess, but a rejection nonetheless.

I did not respond in kind.

The door to the attic opened. The stairs creaked as my painting crept down them, vibrating with its spiky sickness. All hell broke loose as my picture, the one kept in the attic where it was safe, the one that held my ugliness and disordered thinking toppled down the creaky stairs and landed on me with a crash.

Overwhelming feelings of shame, humiliation, worthlessness and defeat settled over me like a weighted blanket of doom. I’m suffocating beneath it as I call my sister, desperate for air and some sense of calm. She does her best, asking me what happened, asking if he was mean.

I said no, he was not mean. His response wasn’t awesome, but, you know, he’s a lovely guy. He just doesn’t love me.

And that’s the crux of it. He doesn’t love me because I’m unlovable. I’ve been told that all my life in various ways.

My mother: “I love you because I have to but I don’t like you.”

My brother in jest: “I’ve been thinking and I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re a bitch.”

My father: “You came to Australia and became my problem.”

An ex-boyfriend, succinctly: “Your dad is mean to you because you’re hard to love.”

The same ex-boyfriend: “I don’t want to have kids with you because they’ll get your mental illness.”

My ex-wife: “You’re too sick to love.”

S said none of this. Of course he said none of this. But the picture, the one kept in the attic where it’s safe, the picture shows me all this, plain as can be on its mottled, mouldy canvas. And because it’s there, paint and blood and tears all smeared together and startlingly obvious, I believed it.

Google tells me that “Romantic rejection for individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) often triggers intense, volatile, and devastating emotional reactions due to extreme abandonment fears.”

It’s entirely accurate. It is extreme. Unreasonable, even, to feel what I’m feeling right now. I wish I could switch it off, get over it, stuff it back in the painting and put it back in the attic where it’s safe. But I can’t. Even after 30 years of therapy, it’s the one thing I haven’t got a handle on.

Let me be clear, I know there is nothing wrong with having feelings for someone. I also know there’s nothing wrong with expressing those feelings to that someone. People do it every day and the world doesn’t end. There doesn’t need to be this drama and chaos and calamity. It’s all fine.

But, unfortunately, for me it’s not all fine. It triggers something in my brain that is viscous and vicious and gross and I don’t understand exactly why. Psychiatrists aplenty have told me why over the years, and I get it intellectually. But emotionally? Well, that’s a different monster. A monster that I pour into a picture. That I keep in the attic. To keep it safe.

But now, it has affected a friendship that is extremely valuable to me. Not because of his reaction, but because of mine. Well, maybe because of his, too. I made myself vulnerable and now I’m paying the price.

So, I’ve pulled away for now. I’ve rejected him back, even though he tells me our friendship is safe. It’s not safe for me anymore because I’ve made it not safe. I showed parts of myself that I don’t show many people. And now I’m exposed.

I don’t want pity. There’s nothing to pity. That picture of me that holds all my disease and discomfort isn’t pitiable. It’s dangerous and violent and unfit for human consumption.

So, I’m doing what I do. I’m retreating to tend to my wounds. I’m trying not to think I ruined it, but maybe I did. This thing I live with – my personality – tends to ruin everything.

I’ll put it back in the picture.

That picture. The one in the attic. Kept there to keep it safe. To keep it hidden from the world, hidden from you so I can go on pretending that I’m a fully functioning human being.

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I’m Still Here

CW: Suicide.

I called the CAT team tonight. There are a couple of reasons why I did that. Firstly, because I really, really wanted to die. Secondly, because I wanted to die but I didn’t want to disrespect the people whose house I’m staying in by ending my life in their home. Thirdly, because I made a promise to my friends that I would reach out if things got bad. Fourthly, because I didn’t want to burden my friends with another night of me sobbing on the couch.

I’m on a ridiculous amount of anti-depressants, and they’re probably going to go up in dose this week. I see my therapist regularly. I have wonderful, supportive, amazing friends who love me and tell me so all the time. I have a talent – many talents, actually – that I’m proud of and work on constantly. I have moments of awesomeness. I have moments of being babin’. I’m fairly intelligent, I’m quite funny, I’m fun to be around. But I consistently seem to fall in love with people who don’t believe I’m worth fighting for. And right now, I’m very, very alone.

I’ve never really had a problem with being alone. But now, it looms. It’s crushing. My family, whom I adore, are away from me in other countries and on other plains. There is nothing more lonely than being surrounded by incredible people, but only wanting the company of one. And when that one proclaims that they no longer have love for you, that in essence, you’re not worth the fight, suddenly the world seems very large and expansive and empty.

It’s an odd feeling to know that I’m worthy and deserving of love and happiness and all that entails, but feeling so lost and hollow that that knowledge seems meaningless. I, once so independent and fearsome in my knowledge of my place in the world, am now directionless. Without a home, without my beloved cats who are not doing well without me, without my family, I’ve been very, veeeery slowly hauling myself up a very steep hill, all the while impatient to be settled again, to be over and done with her, to be happily single, living the life of my dreams. Unfortunately, the realisation of that dream seems to be moving further and further away, like when you try to run down a hallway in a nightmare but it keeps stretching on away from you.

I don’t feel like this because my marriage ended. That hurts, yes, but it’s not the reason I am teetering at the edge of the pit. I feel like this because I never saw it coming. I trust my intuition keenly, it’s never steered me wrong. But this time it gave me no warning. I had relaxed – maybe a little too much, but I finally felt safe.

And then I wasn’t.

I feel like this because it all seems so cruel. I didn’t deserve any of what has happened to me. I’m not blaming anyone, because I’m tired of that pointless circular game. I’m usually the type of person who will cry and wail when I’m hurt, but then I’ll pick myself up, dust myself off, acknowledge the part I had to play in why things fucked up, and with that acknowledgement, things seem to move on naturally. Awesome things happen, and suddenly I find myself not grieving anymore. This time, though, it’s different, and I’m struggling. I’ve acknowledged and acknowledged and acknowledged, but I still feel so very lost.

I was doing fine. I actually was doing really fine, and then something happened and I rolled back down the steep hill, bumping and grazing myself along the way. I didn’t fall down as far as I was when I started, but it’s a significant drop. I don’t have the energy to start heaving my way back up that bloody stupid hill, but I can’t stay here. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m relying on other people so much that I feel like I might forget my own autonomy. I don’t trust anyone. I still have a lot of love, but my wall is getting higher and thicker and I feel myself hardening and cracking like cheap paint in the sun. This feels bad. It feels so bad, and nothing I’m doing seems to be helping, and I’m really, really scared.

I had made peace with suicidal ideation just before everything fell apart, and then it’s like the Universe went “okay then, let’s test that theory.” Fucking Universe and its experiencing itself through me in a way that’s not starry and delightfully magickal. Fuck it.

Do I really want to die? Obviously not completely, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to write this. But the desire to be with my mum, to be away from this endless darkness, to be free from this sticky, sickening pain is so great that sometimes I have to call the CAT team. And that sucks.

I’m sharing this because writing about it whilst in the thick of it helps, and also because a friend of mine once told me that she had spent an afternoon reading every single post on my blog and it helped her to feel less alone. I know I’m not the only one out there in the pit.

We’re okay. We’re still here.

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The Weight of the Cross

I hate Sydney. I’m up here touring a lesbian show for Mardi Gras, and I’m trying desperately to make peace with the city that stole whatever innocence I had left. This city with its cockroaches, rude drivers, homelessness and drunken backpackers. I’m here at a time when I should be celebrating my gayness, where the rainbow flag waves with pride in the humid breeze, where my wife and I can hold hands with confidence in the busy Newtown streets. But all I’m doing is trying not to be broken.

I lived here for a very short time more than ten years ago. I lived here to attempt to move on from my failed relationship with my ex girlfriend. To be more accurate, I lived in the Cross, in a brothel where I worked. The Cross – Kings Cross – is Sydney’s notorious red light district. It’s been cleaned up considerably since I walked its pavements and ate in its dingy restaurants. It’s still a tourist attraction, but maybe for different reasons now. In my day, there were streetwalkers every few metres, interspersed with junkies, strippers, and organised crime bosses. It’s where I witnessed an Aboriginal man, high off his head, being brutally manhandled into a paddy wagon, and when I say manhandled I mean beaten across the head with a baton and thrown – literally thrown into the van. It’s where I witnessed a woman being slashed and stabbed by whom I assumed was her pimp in an alley by the brothel where I worked. It’s where I walked passed a teenager dying from an overdose in the gutter. I saw all this, and I kept walking. I told no one. I pretended it wasn’t happening. I was too afraid. I kept walking back to the brothel where I let men pound me for $110 an hour so I could forget. The Cross is where I lost myself.

Being back here is like paying penance. Every time I come to Sydney I have a headache. It feels like a tight band around my head, just behind my eyes. My mental health deteriorates more the longer I’m here. I thought that touring here, doing something I loved here would create new, better memories. I’m all for facing my demons head on, but I think this is one dark part of my life that I can never make up for.

Sydney broke me. I realise that now. I forget the effect it had on my life until I’m back here. I was walking up Darlinghurst Rd with my producer and a few cast mates the other day, hanging up posters for our show because our theatre is just down the road in Woolloomooloo. We turned left onto Bayswater Rd and I couldn’t keep going. I couldn’t walk past a particular street. It was an odd sensation, feeling trapped in my shoes. It’s like being stuck in tar. I started to cry, the tears prickling in the corners of my eyes as the band around my head tightened. My wife asked me what it was that hurt me so. I couldn’t tell her. That fear was back, laced with a sprinkling of shame. This is the place where I learned not to care. This is the place where I hardened my heart and my soul. This is the place where I fell apart, bits of me scattering everywhere, and I still can’t put the pieces back together again.

Never before has my mental illness affected my ability to perform, but tonight it did. My head was scattered, my thoughts disappearing into black holes. Being here a week, trying to keep it together, dealing with missing my cats and my home and my ordinary love-filled life finally dealt its blow and I gave one of the worst performances of my career. I came offstage and burst into tears, so embarrassed, so mortified that I couldn’t get my shit together enough to actually do my job and act well. This place is threatening to tear me apart again. Thankfully, my cast and my producer are a tight knit group of understanding and compassionate people. They deserve a better me than the one they’re getting.

I am tired. I am beaten. The weight of my experiences and decisions is heavy on my heart.

I am trying not to be broken.