Читать книгу A Sad and Sorry State of Disorder - Tracy Barker - Страница 5

Chapter 1

Distorted and unstable self-image or sense of self

For me, this is where it all begins.

Put simply, my sense of self depended largely on other people and how they treated me. If people were nice to me, I believed myself to be nice also – if they weren’t nice then nor was I.

I often felt as though the person I was with defined who I was in that moment. When they left, it felt like they had taken ‘me’ away with them, and I was left floundering, not knowing who I was. I was who they had made me in that instant. That is to say, I existed because they defined me. Without their definition, I was incredibly lost, and I relied on the next interaction to recreate another ‘me’. Parallel to this ran a subconscious aim to actually become the person I was with at any given time, be that good or bad, happy or sad, kind or unkind.

In social settings, I would fine-tune my behaviour accordingly. If the occasion was rowdy, I could be rowdy. If it was happy, I could do happy. For me it was like being a social chameleon, which most people can do to some extent. But, as with everything borderline, this was done to the extreme. Not merely to ‘fit in’ or be acceptable in any given crowd, but to feel like ‘someone’, and to become ‘someone’. I wouldn’t just show a polite interest in the thoughts and pastimes of those around me, I would embrace them as my own. If I met (and liked) a nurse, I would suddenly want to be a nurse myself, or a security guard, or a bin man and so on. If I spent time with someone who wore nothing but black, I would revamp my entire wardrobe to black. And so it went, and had gone, for many years.

I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. My sense of self was based on who I was with at any given time. So too was my entire sense of being. I tried to become the person or people I was with in order to give some substance and justification to my existence. And I sought desperately to find myself in others by allowing them to define me, or by trying to become someone else.

I had lost myself.

I was lost.

PART OF ME

A part of me

is gone,

crept into the bosom

of your compassion;

I diminish

to give room

to how great

your love could be.

I dissolve

and melt away from me.

A part of me

is gone;

leapt into the embrace

that I imagine.

I depend on you

to keep this

part alive,

and when you don’t,

a part of me

is gone.

THICKER THAN WATER

My head’s in the clouds,

my feet two feet above the ground –

without doing a thing

you’ve turned my insides upside down.

Inside-out my crazy world

is melting in my hands,

and ice and fire, and blood and stone

are now my sinking sands.

But you can’t get blood from this stone…

or can you –

if you break me down?

If I extinguish all I am

perhaps I’ll come around.

I’m skating on the thinnest ice

on the knife-edge blades of my heart –

without saying a word

you’ve torn my insides all apart.

Back-to-front I’ve dressed myself

in clothes I’d never wear,

I can’t see where I’m headed

running headlong through thin air.

But you can’t get blood from this stone…

or can you –

if you break me down?

If I extinguish all of me

perhaps I’ll come around.

A STRANGER IN A STRANGER LAND

I don’t belong here;

never have, never will –

it is a strange land

and I am stranger still.

I understand their language

but cannot communicate.

I am carried by the crowd,

swallowed in their wake.

I dissolve into the shadows,

sink beneath the strain,

glide across the oddities

for I, too, am strange.

I melt into the background,

enhance the scenery,

but this I know and cannot hide;

there’s none so strange as me.

THIS ME

This me is tailor made

to suit your every need –

everything you asked for –

guaranteed to please.

This me is custom built;

designed with you in mind

cleverly constructing

exactly what you want to find.

This me is made to order

created while you wait –

the finest architecture

just as you stipulate.

This me is solely yours

and if you want a change

I’ll be happy to accommodate;

I can simply rearrange.

MIRROR, MIRROR

My eyes are not deceived

Truly, this is what I see

A monster;

Seething, clutching

At chances long expired.

A beast;

Heaving, drooling,

Insatiable and wild.

An animal,

Untethered

Wiley, swift and sly.

An alien;

Abnormal, strange,

Come to bleed you dry.

My eyes are not deceived,

This is truly what I see –

Every time I face the mirror

This wretch stares back at me.

So, how did I find myself? My default belief was that I was, essentially, a worthless person. I tried to attribute worth to myself by trying to be someone other than me. The theory is simple: I had to find worth and value within myself, in order to find who I was.

But I also had to find who I was in order to see worth in myself.

The practicalities of this are not so simple. It is an ongoing process that begins with trust. And there we have our first hurdle. It is in the nature of many people with borderline personality disorder to be suspicious and mistrusting, especially when compliments are involved; it is easy to believe it when people criticise us or point out our faults because we know they are telling the truth. I knew I was ‘wrong’ from the inside out, so I never had a problem with believing someone who backed this up. When I say I didn’t have a problem, I don’t mean I took it on the chin and it was water off a duck’s back – far from it. It hurt like hell and usually resulted in me taking a step further into the mire of self-hatred and self-destruction. But it was easy to believe. It has always been easy to believe.

When people complimented me in any way, I was confused. I wondered why they would say something like that. What was the catch? What did they want? Were they being sarcastic? Were they setting me up to fall? Was it a sick sort of joke?

Because I was confused as to the exact nature of their sinister motives (I was certain this is what they were), my mistrust intensified; here we have a slippery person who is to be avoided at all costs, and if avoiding them is not possible, we need to keep a really close eye on what they’re really up to.

I’m not entirely sure how I managed to trust or, rather, how anyone managed to break through my fortified defences. I have had many people tell me I’m good at various things: painting, making jewellery, writing. True enough, I’ve always enjoyed these things but under my hypercritical eye this has never meant I’m good at them. I assumed therefore that people were merely trying to encourage me to ‘distract myself’ and do something I like doing.

It was not until I was well into my therapy that these little droplets of affirmation began gradually to soak into my psyche. Combined with learning how to challenge my negative automatic thoughts (NATs) and confronting my intrinsic suspicion, I slowly allowed myself to believe that when someone saw something good in me there might possibly be a grain of truth in it.

I had to begin to trust in the world around me: that it wasn’t conspiring against me; that it wasn’t out to trip me up and make a fool of me; that there was a small chance that I had (and deserved) a place in the world; that the world was not entirely unsafe.

Hardest of all, I had to begin to trust myself. As I began to find myself, I had to trust what I found, including the weaknesses and flaws that I had to ‘own’ (God, how I hated that phrase in the Therapeutic Community!) as part of what made me who I am. As I began to discover my own mind, I had to trust in what I thought and felt, as much as I was able to make sense of it in the early days.

As I said, this is an ongoing process, and it is often an uphill struggle. On a bad day, it is all too easy to feel worthless and mistrustful of others and myself, and I can’t say I always manage to rise above those feelings. But even that is okay. It’s okay to feel low, fed up or even worthless, because these feelings are part of me, and I am (mostly) okay!

Nowadays, a stranger passing me on the street might smile at me because she is a nice person, and I might smile back because I am a nice person too. Or they might not smile because they are in a bad mood, or I might not smile back because I am feeling low, and so on…and that is okay. Because I am learning that who I am is okay.