This week has been a very interesting one. So, first off, I’ve always been a little bit different. Always had trouble living life on life’s terms. I have always been afraid, always been thin skinned, always taken things personally. Always been afraid of being alone, always been bullied, always been sure there was something wrong with me. Always looking at the person next to me to see how they did it, and trying to do the same. Always sure that I would be rumbled, and people would see how crap I truly was, and that nobody would ever want to be my friend.
So when did that change? Well, about eight and a half years ago, I started taking things a little more seriously. I started looking at the circumstances in my life, and how people were always being unreasonable…I started looking at how the common denominator in that was me. I started thinking that, as someone says in Bridesmaids “You are the problem. You’re your own problem, and you’re your solution”. How true. My relationships with people have always been interesting, different, fraught. And although I got help, a lot of it didn’t make sense. Not until I reached my rock bottom (those other ones were just practice), when I developed extreme Post Natal Depression, and was forced to evaluate my own life.
I was forced to see that if I always let other people define me, then when I was alone, I would always feel weird and sort of nothing-y. I learned that nobody was going to show up and help me fix my life. I began to see that I was my solution. I also learned along the way, that the reason why I behaved like this, was because I had an underlying mental illness. I have a mental illness. I don’t like having a mental illness. I want to be all better, because I decided that I should be. But at the same time, it is a relief, when I relapse and I look at the criteria for having Borderline Personality Disorder. Because, there in black and white are all the things I do. All the things that I struggle with. And I realise, again, that this is not something that I enjoy. This is not something that I brought on myself. This was the answer to the question the 14 year old me asked herself again and again “WHAT THE F&*K IS WRONG WITH ME? WHY AM I LIKE THIS? WHY CAN”T I LOVE MYSELF?”