Adventures in Therapy

I'm back with a new URL and an old hatred for Facebook's community "standards" since I have been in some algorithm-induced exile for over a MONTH.

Believe you me...one day I will properly address Facebook's blocking of my blogging, their complete lack of an avenue for redress and that first amendment that I'm so fond of, but for now...let's talk about brains. Actually, let's talk about just my brain. I'm not a neurologist but years of therapy have prepared me to discuss this very topic.

You see, I started this very blog to help my brain. Writing helps me process my emotions. And if you've been reading for a bit you know, I have a lot of those. Under normal circumstances I consider myself to be a pretty rational, albeit insanely dramatic, person. But once emotions are involved I throw the logic out with the bathwater.

I have an addiction to reality TV, I have a bad habit of becoming obsessed with one craft and then abandoning it in favor of another, and I also have borderline personality disorder. It's actually not as fun as Madonna makes it sound. I think Tinker Bell syndrome would be a more descriptive name as I don't feel I am on the borderline of anything. Rather I am either at the north border or the south border. One extreme or the other. And of course, if I don't get attention I am pretty sure I will literally die.

Borderline personality disorder, or BPD as the kids are calling it, is a mental health disorder that includes but is not limited to:

• self-image issues
• splitting (seeing things as black or white)
• difficulty managing emotions & behavior
• intense fear of abandonment
• difficulty being alone
• impulsivity

So quarantine has not been very cash money for me, as you can see. It turns out that the only thing worse than being expected to perform under what I would call a psychotic break and what my therapist would call "a difficult time" is having nothing to distract you from the feelings you don't want to feel. (Stay tuned for next week's episode for more on that.)

Mental health issues or mental illnesses or whatever you want to call them - they're often misunderstood, stigmatized or made fun of. Now don't get me wrong, I am under the impression that everything can be joked about. Remember my whole shtick about free speech? But I think that a little understanding goes a long way. And knowing that you're not alone goes even further.

A lot of people are struggling with mental health issues right now. Loss of a daily routine, layoffs, alone time, lightened mental load, limited distractions and is anyone else having INSANE coronadreams? So I wanted to share a little about my experience in the hopes that it helps someone, even if that someone is just me.

The thing about mental illness, at least in my experience, is that we are aware of it. I'm not a delusional girl convinced her favorite boy band member will notice her some day. Okay I am, but that's irrelevant to this situation. I know what circumstances will trigger me. And I know exactly how I am going to melt down. I know that the elaborate facade I have constructed of being a reasonable individual who can separate emotion from reality will crumble, exposing all of my faulty wiring, the cracks in my foundation and the cobwebs I've been avoiding.

I know all of these things. But I'm powerless to stop them. I can write out a list of all the signs that point to a good outcome compared to signs that point to a bad outcome. The positives could outweigh the negatives 100 to 1. If you were taking a standardized test and asked to predict the end of the passage you would definitely predict a happy ending. And you would be right. That is the reasonable assumption. Yet I remain convinced that the worst case scenario is the only possibility. Catastrophizing doesn't seem dramatic to me. It seems perfectly logical given what I feel I deserve. I can recognize that my thinking is equivalent to 2 + 2 = no one even likes you and your parents are disappointed but I can't fix it.

So if I can't help but have an ongoing panic attack because I am convinced that once I really care about a guy, every message he sends will be the last time he ever speaks to me, what do I do? Glad you asked. I bother my closest friends with my delusions by asking that we go over all the evidence and rank the possible outcomes. Once they properly interpret the situation, I ignore their advice and make myself sick worrying anyway.

I have found some helpful coping mechanisms and my patience has increased ten fold in the last few years. Of course, 10 times 0 is still 0 but I do sense a slight improvement. The thing is...any progress I make becomes punishment because even though I am learning the appropriate behaviors and the appropriate reactions, my outcomes are still all wrong. No guy has proven to be worth the benefit of the doubt. There are no benefits. Only more and more doubt.

My mom says hope for the best, prepare for the worst. I say spend so much time preparing for the worst that you treat everything with suspicion and wait for the other shoe to drop on the accelerator, driving the car you're in off a cliff. Like if Stanley Kubrick directed a remake of Thelma & Louise.

There have been lows. Times when checking social media felt like playing Russian roulette. How many posts could I see before something triggered me and I wondered what the point was anyway? Weeks where I rapidly lost weight because I couldn't shake my anxiety long enough to eat a meal and the broken positive feedback mechanism of a society that values women based on their appearance meant that "have you lost weight?" translated to congratulations and not concern. Months of not texting friends back because I was waiting for the right name to appear on my phone even though he was always the wrong guy. Years of cutting myself because sometimes the only solace I could find was in looking as broken on the outside as I felt on the inside.

But there have also been highs. Coming up with a chart to process my emotions and earning some gold stars from my therapist. Learning how to mute people on all forms of social media. Being able to vocalize what I need in a relationship. I mean, I have yet to get it but, progress is progress.

At the end of the day, I still have borderline personality disorder. I am still hopelessly extroverted. And I still need external validation no matter how convinced my therapist is that I will one day be able to validate myself...who's delusional now Lauren?

And even though it is really hard, especially under quarantine, I like being a people who needs people. We are the luckiest, after all.