In Another Life I’m Normal. In Another Life I Don’t Hurt The People I Love The Most.

What’s the Real Lesson?

Here’s something that happens to ADHD children a lot:  Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Here’s how it works and why it’s so bad.

Child says, “I can’t do this.”

Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.

Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.

Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when it’s finally done.

The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasn’t trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.

The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:

-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.

-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.

-It’s not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.

-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.

I’m now in my 30’s, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because there’s no one else around to punish me.

But hey, at least I didn’t get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.

Goblincore really is ADHD culture… Yelling… Being impulsive… Liking shiny… Wanting to run away into the forest and shirk all earthly responsibilities… It’s meant to be…

A Real Narrative of Borderline

Warning: Triggering, perhaps, to some. A bit of a narrative I wrote recently to help people understand what it can be like living with a disorder that is often signified as ‘bad’. 

________________________________________

Sometimes I’m scared of myself, because of my disorder. People say ‘commitment’ and I curl in on myself and feel my heart constrict tightly in my chest. Commitment.

“Commitment? There’s no such thing as commitment when you have borderline, it’s even harder when you have antisocial.”

And no, it’s not because I get a need to dump a friend for someone more exciting that snorts cocaine and gets high every minute, nor need to have a quick fling whilst in a relationship. No, it’s because commitment means committing to me, a monster, and in turn, this monster needs to learn to commit to them lest it makes their lives miserable. It means 24/7, 100% effort that you, as nothing but a human, don’t have the mental capacity for.

When it comes to borderline, it’s safe to say I hate it. Everything triggers it, every word, every emotion I don’t understand. I can’t handle anything ‘normally’ and every feeling is exaggerated so much my head feels like it will explode- sometimes, I wish I had a gun so that I could actually make it do so. Then the ‘pressure’ would leave my head.

“I like you.”

Makes me happy, yet I don’t return the sentiment. Am I meant to like you back? I don’t even know if I can feel love. Once upon a time I ignored that statement and went for it, now it’s ingrained in me to go ‘that isn’t fair on them,’ and leave.

“I’m okay if you don’t feel the same.”

Makes me happy, yet I know that it will lead down a dark path. When hasn’t it? When has my borderline been on my side? It hasn’t. It’s no one’s fault, but its fault. It can’t handle emotion and doesn’t know what to do with it besides release it in a fit of rage. It’s 0 or 100, no in-between. For me that is punching a wall, or, on a bad day, playing with fire.

“Break up.”

Is like a double-whammy. It’s soul-crushing because you feel betrayed, even if you don’t really feel betrayed. It’s also a sigh of relief, ‘I don’t need to hurt them anymore. And thus, I will no longer be hurt.’ Some of us don’t’ want to be monsters, in fact, I daresay with borderline, the idea of being monsters tortures us endlessly. There’s this notion that being alone is better, and I think the longer you live with borderline, the more you realize loneliness is the best way to cope with it. You have nothing but you and your dreams and little room to hurt and hurt others, there’s no real people involved – real people you care about.

Friends leave. They don’t stick around except a few really good ones, who are able to see your hate and look past it. Relationships? Forget about them. The minute you make a friend, you start to get attached, and god help you if you like them. If you like them and think they’re cool, or epic, then that’s it. You’re doomed.

So are they.

You don’t want to hurt them, you’re a monster inside, but no matter how you go about it, you will. They like you: so you can swallow that anxiety that the future will fall apart and that you don’t want to lose a friend or cool person who you’re attached to, and you’ll give them what you want. Or: you shatter them and lose a friend anyways. Either way, your friend is gone. The person you cared about is out of the picture. One involves ignoring that you feel like a shithead, the other involves being a shithead, but it may work out better for them later. There’s no winning in borderline. Only losing. Only hurting people. And it’s never them that’s wrong– oh no. It’s always you. And no matter how much you deny it, you’re very aware of it.

So when people ask me what borderline is like I skirt the edges of truth because I know it’s ugly. It’s an ugly disorder, and very few except two people in my life get it. The one person seemed to understand the practicality of emotions, but not nearly as loyal a friend as the other and ended up following his own dubious impulses. I forgave it quickly, because I, although borderline and not antisocial, knew having impulsive behavior was tricky to get rid of – I still find myself punching the wall, or walking along a river at night. The other, a longstanding friend, gets it on a level unlike any other:

1.       The anger: mostly at yourself, and when you’re angry you get so angry you want to blow a hole in the wall, then in your head.

2.       The loyalty: loyal to a fault, so loyal you’d rather suffer and crawl through the dirt for someone than have them abandon you because you like them. That’s the problem, you care too much and feel emotions too much. But at the same time…

3.       Emotionless: that disassociation, where you feel nothing sometimes for days on end, where eventually you become so good at acting you don’t even know what real emotions are. Underneath it all, you care so deeply, but you don’t know why. ‘Why do I care?’ will have your brain feeling like it’s crushed because the question is beyond your comprehension.

“They baffle me,” is how he’d put it, “People ask me what I’m feeling, and I can’t answer. We don’t feel, or we feel too much.”

And then there’s the self-hate.

“Self-hate,” he’d say, “Is what gets us Cluster B’s. On the one hand, this personality is a part of us, it’s who we are…but we see others happy, falling in love, we see them get hurt by some action we did that we don’t get, and we realize …that will never be us. We will never be the good ones because even if we learn to behave properly and act good, in our head, we’re bad news. In my head, I still think ‘I want to punch you in the face.’ It makes you hate yourself when you’re aware you’re bad news, and especially so when you can control it. Then people don’t believe you anymore.”

We all hear the familiar words and phrases from loved ones. Many deny it – what, after all, even is borderline? Or antisocial? Narcissism? Stories and tales that depict the evil characters in books! Plot devices! Consider those as well, who don’t understand it: how can you not feel? Are you insane?

I am insane, at least I feel I am insane. But I still feel that twinge inside, that hurt when you call me as such. You’re side-lining me, making me an outcast for something I have no control over. I didn’t choose this.

Then there’s those who think they’re helping. These phrases vary from “It won’t hurt me if you tell me” to “That’s a bit selfish,” “Hah! That’s a funny thing you said there!” and “That’s evil!”

It is selfish, isn’t it? Imagine being called selfish. Or evil. Or having others find you amusing for your savagery, and the fact that you beat up a guy who looked at you funny.

Imagine being called a word that is immediately connotated with ‘bad’. Imagine being essentially called a bad person for something you can maybe control behaviourally, but can’t erase.

Eventually, you want to give up, run away, and let loose. ‘I’ll cut my hair, get 10 tattoos and have that crazy orgy I never had whilst getting high on cocaine. Because I’m bad anyways, and no one seems to care.’

Having this disorder sometimes feels like a sentence. A very misunderstood sentence that I’m being punished for.

The worst is…

You feel like you deserve it.

what’s some of y’alls favorite songs that u feel are relatable as a person with bpd/hpd/npd?

They will never understand the sadness that you can physically feel in your chest

- Hello, good morning! How did you sleep?

- Oh, hi! I didn't sleep!

💖

In defense of pre-natal screening

I’ve seen a lot of protests against screening fetuses for things like Down syndrome, autism and so on. Here, I’ll explain why I, an autistic person, disagree fundamentally with those.

(PLEASE NOTE: My reasoning is based on the idea that abortions in and of themselves are morally fine and that a fetus is not a person.)

“In a few years, there won’t be any people with Down Syndrome born anymore, because these days everybody chooses to abort them!” Ridiculously unlikely. There’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t have an abortion. True, there won’t be exactly as many born as there are now, but who’s to say that the current number is inherently better? How, exactly, do you calculate that?

“Well, what if everybody with Down syndrome fetuses gets an abortion, though? Just what if?” I say this with a maximum of respect: While obviously Down syndrome people have the same value as humans that everybody else has, it’s still true that Down syndrome causes a huge risk of poor eyesight, poor hearing Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and an early death. If a condition kills people then we do not need to actively try to preserve it.

“This indicates that people with Down syndrome or autism or whatever are undesirable!” No, it doesn’t. For many reasons.

Simply telling a woman that her fetus has, say, autism is not the same as saying it’s an undesirable fetus.

That a woman aborts an autistic fetus doesn’t mean that she wants everybody to do the same. It just means that she wants to have an abortion. As is her damn right.

All abortions are based on the idea that the potential child is undesirable. That’s why women choose to get abortions instead of having the kid.

The fact that people want to abort Down syndrome fetuses and autistic fetuses and so on might make them seem undesirable, but not whether the abortions are allowed to happen or not.

“If your mom had felt like this, she would have aborted you!” Once again: That’s the case with all abortions, regardless of reason. So unless you find all abortions immoral, this is not a valid argument.

“This is eugenics!” No, it’s not. It’s not a concentrated effort to eradicate black people–or any other people. It’s just letting women make an informed choice about their own bodies that affects nobody else. Lemme use a simile to explain: If a political magazine gets forcibly shut down because it criticizes the government, that’s censorship. If it gets shut down because nobody is interested in buying it, though, then that’s not censorship at all.

“This is offensive to many people!” A woman’s right to choose is her right. Regardless of whether you find it offensive or not.

“It’s discrimination!” If a woman who got raped has an abortion, does that mean she’s discriminating against actual people who were born from rape? No. And this is the same. Actual people cannot be discriminated against by an abortion because we’re not affected the slightest bit.

“Well, what if a woman wanted to abort a black fetus because she hated black people?” Then we still can’t force her to have the child. A fetus doesn’t become a person just because of the reason that a woman aborts it.

“Look, it’s not that I don’t think women should be stopped from making choices about their bodies.” But you do clearly want to stop them from making informed ones. After all, you want to withhold information about a woman’s body from her, so that she won’t make the choice she prefers with, but instead do what you’ve decided she should.

TO FINISH OFF: Since we have info about a woman’s fetus–or at least the ability to easily get it–denying it to her is blatantly anti-woman. It’s saying “We’ve decided you don’t get to know things about your body, because then you’ll do as you want instead of doing what we’ve decided that you should.”

HhehhahahahrhhehehehhhagahaggaggggaGgahhHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

You almost had me.

You almost made me think you didn’t blame me for everything.

I almost started blaming myself again for everything.

I have so much to be guilty for, don’t I?

Hhehhehhheh silly silly silly funny joooookke

Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

I don’t even cry anymore