My OCD is bad this evening, and there is nothing I can do to satisfy the compulsion. Instead of taking a bunch of pills and going to bed, I thought I’d try and squeeze in the post I was going to make before my OCD hijacked everything.

We’ve just had a violent heatwave here (I actually just typed heatache by mistake just then, shows where I’m at!). I don’t mind the heat. I missed a lot of summer as I was in hospital, so was glad I could still squeeze in some beach days before the colder weather sets in. Now the weather has changed dramatically, reminding me of the way emotional abusers suddenly turn. Many people start to get Seasonal Affective Disorder during autumn, and with the added loss of my psychologist, the season feels particularly cold and melancholic. “Beware of shapeshifters”, “Trust no one”, “Run away”, “The end is near” are phrases Linkin Park has put in his music video for his song “Final Masquerade”. A masquerade is an event where people wear masks. My psychologist wore a mask. Sometimes I caught glimmers of the cold, heartless person she is behind the mask, such as the day her face for some reason morphed into my old teacher’s. I don’t know whether it was her make up or what it was. This teacher had a nasty side as well. She spread a lot of misinformation about mental health and I don’t believe she had any lived experience perspective. When I started speaking out against the things she was teaching, I was expelled. I was still struggling with depression and was often late to class. One time the staff found me in the bathroom holding a pin which I felt like injuring myself with. The staff used my mental health against me as a reason to stop me doing placement and ultimately remove me from the course. Yes, I was discriminated against, but because I hadn’t openly disclosed my disability to them, I suppose they thought they could get away with it. Similarly my psychologist used my mental health against me to end our relationship. I didn’t think it was possible, but the levels people will sink to continues to amaze me. “Too unstable”, “too much”. Those words haunt me, stinging me like shards of glass stuck in my skin. I feel like I walk around with a sign on my back saying “get rid of me”. But I came across a quote by C.Olavasdaughter yesterday which brought me comfort: “Darling, you’re magic, and people are afraid of magic. 400 years ago they would have called your wildness and beauty witchcraft and burned you on a stake. They don’t burn the magical ones anymore. They just leave them out in the cold and make them feel like freaks.” This is how people with BPD are treated nowadays. We are discriminated against. We are stigmatised. We turn to hospitals suicidal and are not given a bed, dumped on the floor of the waiting room crying with not a single soul stopping to ask if they can help us. Or we are told we will only be given 48 hours in hospital, and if we protest, the staff threaten to use their security to force us out. The private system is only marginally better. We are allowed to stay longer, but if we play up, the hospital can blacklist us and refuse to give us another admission. In the final meeting with my psychologist she brought up all the times I’ve played up in private hospitals and how they struggle to manage me there. She said she is part of the private system as well, and she is siding with the hospitals, agreeing that I am too difficult to manage. Continue reading “Shapeshifters, being believed, and nihilism” →