When I (or if I) finally get around to a string of posts that outlines all the nuts and bolts of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), they will basically resolve around one key and core fear. If you meet a borderline, you will meet someone who represents one out of 256 possible cocktails. In every single one of these persons, you will find what many (as I would) might deem to be the mother of all fears:
The Fear of Abandonment (FOA).
In a general sense, this is the sum of the fears, rational and irrational, of the borderline. We are afraid our colleagues will laugh at our ideas. We are afraid that are significant others are quietly working on a relationship exit strategy. We are are afraid that our friends would rather us go away. We are afraid that some drastic change in our lives will make us unappealing, unattractive, unlovable, and irredeemable.
Shortly after my stay at Western Psychiatric hospital, an event that seems like it was ages ago now, though it still sits comfortably from a distance of only a few months, my family decided to join some other relatives for a beach vacation. By this time I was very much in intensive outpatient therapy and very much out of vacation time at work. Just about every circumstance dictated that I stay, at home. Alone.
And to be clear, it was the solitude itself that I was dreading, and that itself is a kind of paradox. Borderlines tend to cope with guilt, shame, and unregulated emotions by doing the very thing that can only feed into their FOA: they seek isolation, and sometimes ferociously so. In the past year, and generally before my intake especially, I spent long stretches outside isolating, doing nothing but gently rocking back and forth and trying to place my ailing mind somewhere else.
This latest trick, I soon learned, was dissociation: Just imagine, for now, dissociation as this: you have rejected reality to the point where the only thing you can do is take your mind and separate it from you body. The experience leaves you feeling half in and half outside of yourself, and it is among the oldest of psychological defense mechanisms.
Some forms of solitude even did me some good: I took a camping trip during my medical leave as another attempt to reset my entire being k. (newsflash: resetting your entire being in 48 hours is painfully difficult and probably not realistic, even if the woods are nice and the animals are friendly). I can’t say that I came away from the trip a completely new person, but it was nice to get away from some of the usual settings and stressors and into the woods.
The woods are good for me. Nature is good for me. I need to think more on the things that are good for me.
Solitude is not always good for me, and some forms are insufferable for the borderline. This initially seems puzzling, but overtime it takes on a weird logic. Being a borderline is like being some chaotic, dynamic, interactive soup of contraries. Nothing about a borderline makes sense half the time, at least a glance.
And at a glance, it would have been clear to anyone that “Nathan staying in the same house where his wife and kids usually are, without his wife and kids there,” is probably going to make for at least one rough evening.
It is hard to describe solitude like I felt when I realized that my wife and kids were, for the next week, gone. Yes, they had called. Yes, I had talked to them. I knew things were fine. Intake had done me good and outpatient was showing immediate benefit. Everything was fine, fine fine—
—Except for solitude so thick and heavy that it seemed to cover the house in a blanket. Having had some experience with panic and anxiety attacks by this point, I can say that there are some panicky episodes that come with a sense of dread; here I don’t simply mean fear, but the type of fear that makes you feel like some struggle is already lost. Fear can motivate, but dread paralyzes.
The first night alone this way was, without question, the longest night I have had all year.
And what exactly am I getting at here?
The other day, I had something of an epiphany. I realized that I have periodically, and probably for most of my life, been accused of being an attention seeker. I have been called an attention whore more than once. Furthermore, I have always been bothered by the language that so and so was an attention seeker. For the longest time, I could never figure out why such language bothered me.
I am an attention seeker. My speech and mannerisms can be animated and erratic. My outfits are personal, but also loud and very much nonsensical. I enjoy having people in my orbit. I like talking in groups. I am, of course, active on social media and the internet. At some point, everyone who knows me as heard or seen something that probably looks like a play right out of the attention seeking schema.
And in many cases, I suppose it was. From where I’m sitting, I consider attention seeking a matter of survival at times, and perhaps a virtue elsewhere. I am deeply afraid that I am either irrelevant or will quickly become so, and the truth is that I have never been a beacon of popularity. The phrase, “I feel left out” would have applied to adolescent me much of the time. I had a history of feeling like a third wheel in all scenarios. Be that real or imagined, the fear was absolutely there and still has roots in me.
I am an attention seeker because loneliness is awful and abandonment is worse.
Guilty as charged, but please stick around for awhile.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
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