Early in his film career, famed stuntman, actor, and stunt coordinator Kane Hodder found himself some rubber cement and burned most of his nerve endings off.
Seriously. He was an upcoming entertainer at the time of the incident, and a local paper thought it would be fun to do a story on his stuntwork; as part of the interview, Hodder would set himself on fire in proper cinema style. In those days, the industry standard for this trick was rubber cement.
Hodder did not have the mixture that he normally used, and opted for a product that was handy. When we went to light himself up, he got more flames than he prepared for, and so much that the nerve endings on his burn sites disintegrated, leaving him in a serious state, but also one that was (for several hours after the incident) pain free. Hodder would go on to spend some time in a hospital that pretended like it knew how to treat severe burns, only to almost die and find a transfer to a proper burn unit in another hospital system.
Think about the kind of heat it takes to immediately erase pain.
All the nerve endings burned off. Completely. All the damage, and for a time, somehow no pain at all.
The other day, I was chatting with someone on the internet, and they told me that BPD is basically like having exposed emotional nerve endings all the time.
This is the gospel truth for how it feels to mosey about with borderline personality disorder. This is a life of ceaseless emotional vulnerability.
If you have been hurt by someone with this BPD, understand that they live in a constant state of emotional regulation management. There is never a break from this, because those with the condition have no built-in defense for their emotional nerve endings.
The last time I had a cavity filled, it took the doctor 6+ injections of the numbing agent. I was eventually able to get numb, but not until the drill struck the enamel after shot 2, 3, 4, and 5. Each strike of the drill felt as if the tooth were not numb in the slightest.
Imagine emotions like that. Those who DO NOTE live with BPD are like patients who take a shot or two of an oral numbing medication and proceed pain free. They feel that something is going on. Often, the feeling is rather unpleasant to them as well, and even distressing. But, such patients have more of a resistance to the present trauma. They have emotions too, but with more protection and regulation.
There is no insulation for the BPD palate of emotions, so when trauma provokes the emotions of a borderline, know this:
The borderline cannot stop the pain; it is felt as if the strike has inflamed every last part of the nervous system. The emotional pain burns hot, and so hot that the nerve endings are damaged beyond repair, leaving the borderline in unrelenting shame and emptiness until the nerves heal and the cycle repeats.
I recently found myself in a situation in which my emotional nerve endings were exposed to the elements, and in a way that I was not expecting. Out of prudence, as the situation itself is still in the cooldown phase, I won’t speak about many of the finer details at this time.
What I can say is this: the emotional nerve endings for me were gone. For the first time in my life, I was scolded for my rhetorical decisions, and by someone who hardly reads the words on this space.
I do not, I should stress, run my space on WIX like North Korea keeps watch over its people, but I DO see feedback, in real time, on which locations are reading and for how long. As the readership for this blog is squarely in the modest phase, I am not overloaded with data and pings.
Simply put: This makes it much, much easier that I am going to remember the locations that I see. Until now this was just data that was academic, and often fun (this information, for example, has revealed readers from places such as the UK, Turkey, and Egypt). On balance it was something I hardly thought about at all. It was nice to know, but there wasn’t enough data to shape my messaging.
But here is a pro-tip: If you are going to suddenly tell me, in a conversation in which my mental health blog was not the topic, that you do not like my ‘Mentally Nathan stuff’, and that I shouldn’t be putting mental health content out there, and that I should absolutely be blogging about something else instead?
Try reading my blog more than once for just a few minutes. Criticizing content that you haven’t fully reviewed is an insanely bad look for an ostensible grown-up.
At present I probably have something like 30,000 words of copy on here, or about the length of a small novella. A fast reader could make it through this in very little time; a slower reader would not be saddled with this content forever.
There simply isn’t that much content yet; it should be easy to get a better look and offer a point of view that reflects that.
I have had more backstabbing in the past 12 months than I care to think about it; several instances of it sent me straight into medical leave, as well as periods of intense anxiety, depression, dissociation, and suicidal ideation. Along the way, I heard some stuff that was pretty blunt and callous.
Nothing that was said to me this past year, or at any time before that in my time as a human, was as painful was this.
The source of this pain is twofold: For one, Mentally Nathan is a project that is a direct extension of a key component of dialectical behavioral therapy, opposite action; I am combating the shame and stigma of mental illness by writing about it candidly, with my name attached to the mess inside.
I had to crawl through fire to decide I was going to write about this. Going public with such issues is not without consequences (as I have recently learned), and it takes a certain amount of bravery to go through with it.
And yes, as I have long thought myself to be more coward than action, I have no problem with this self-assessment.
Mentally Nathan is not just my writing; it is my entire experience distilled and put into that which is most precious to my skillset: my words. To invalidate this is unimaginably cruel; to do so without having read most it? That is embarrassing, and I am embarrassed for anyone who would proceed with words that have no actions to justify them.
Second, blogging is tough. We live in a world were content is overwhelming in its volume. There are no creators stepping onto the internet every second. There is so much activity that most blogs are dead before they start.
And at about 40 readers strong at the moment, it’s hard to say that I am not on life support. The blog is good for me. The positive feedback, especially from readers who say that I have helped them, feels magical and otherworldly. For that I’m grateful. I have no plans to quit.
But 40 readers a post is, in a space that doesn’t have much niche competition (male borderlines rarely write about their experiences, as the disorder is under diagnosed in men) still amounts to a blog that is on life support.
Note to anyone who reads this: If you are going to insult my writing, especially when I am in the struggling phrase, you are going to burn all the nerve endings off.
When that happens, what happens next is anyone’s guess, but making yourself scarce in such moments will not be a terrible strategy.
Yours Mentally,
Nathan
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