ITS ALL IN YOUR HEAD

entery one

I'm not crazy.

I know saying 'I'm not crazy' is exactly what a crazy person would say to make you think they aren't crazy. But you have to believe me.

I will not bother introducing myself. My name has been used too frequently it dosent even sound real anymore.

"Good morning X"

"How are you feeling X"

"Put down the knife X"

"How does that make you feel X"

"Time to take your medication X"

I suppose they were trying to remind me of my identity. Trying to keep whatever but of humanity I have left strong. Teaching me I'm more then just a patient number. But it didn't work. Nothing feels real anymore. Not even my name.

So hi. I guess I'll go by X.

I'm just your ordinary young adult who just happens to be a mental patient. I don't know when it started, or when it all went down hill. It all happened so fast— or maybe it happened gradually. All I know is someway and somehow the young child full of potential and dreams is now a young adult full of prescriptions and white lies.

"Things will get better, X."

"Keep your head up, you can do it X."

"Be patient, some things just take time, X."

How delusional do they think I am? Do they really believe that I'd hear that and think 'ohh things will get better! Wow who knew! I'm sure glad they told me, I would have been depressed forever!'

No. I'm not that stupid. At one point I may have been, at one point I probably held out hope that maybe they were right.

But hope is a flame, and mine died out years ago.

I have just been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. For those of you who don't know— to people that means I'm a psycho. A crazy person, someone too unpredictable and rash to be trusted, someone with the tendency to become violent.

However, I have a subtype of Bpd. They refer to it as 'High Functioning'— but it's no such thing.

I have quiet bpd. What is it? Well that one extra word in there makes it out to be a term that refers to people who meet the criteria for the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder but who don't fit the typical profile. Instead of expressing myself and taking it out on others I internalize it and take it out on myself.

Yep, I can't even do my mental illness correctly.

This 'high functioning' parasite that I have been blessed with makes it so that I want to literally kill myself one minute— like pills in hand ready to kill myself— to being euphoric and feeling like a goddess the next.

Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. Up and down. That's how I live my life.

And goddam is it exhausting.

The funny thing is... this was entirely preventable. Sure I had all the criteria's of bing predisposed, but the kicker was my childhood. That cemented this disorder. It literally made my brain develop differently.

Let me explain: part one- my amygdala. That is a fancy word for a part of the brain that regulates fear and aggression. In my brain and I'm many others with BPD our amygdala's are small. Now what does that mean? Well the smaller the amygdala, the more overactive it is. So when I experience an emotion, it is extremely intense. So much so that the smallest thing can make me feel like a close relative died, or that I have won the freakin lottery. There is no middle ground. There is no grey.

The next part of my brain that's F'd up is my hippocampus. Sounds funny, right? Well it's kind of important. Long story short it's the body's data processor. This means when something happens, someone dosent respond to a text, he smiled at me, I dropped my bag at the grocery store— the hippocampus decides the correct emotional response. For me my hippocampus is in a state of continuous hyperarousal. That's right, it's freaking horny as hell! Making it dysfunctional, and unreliable. It consistently misinterprets threats, meaning thanks to that I find a lot of things threatening, when in reality my brain is just lying to me.

Then we have the Prefrontal Cortex. Now if you don't know what that is you didn't pay attention in school and good luck to you. It's responsible for reason, rationality and decision making. My prefrontal cortex is far less active then others. In fact it's classified as inactive and inefficient. Which can make me impulsive, cold to peoples feelings, over reactive, and contributes to my extreme black and white thinking.

The next part of my brain is the Hypothalamic-pituary-adrenal axis. Long name I know. Basically these little guys manage the pressures of daily life and maintaining homeostasis.
They are responsible for my body's production of cortisol. And they are doing a hell of a job. Cortisol is a natural chemical released during times of stress. People with BPD, myself included, have abnormal levels of cortisol in their bloodstream. And too much Cortisol means stress levels in daily life are always overwhelming. Crippling. And what does that do to the parts of my brain we have talked about? It slowly erodes parts of it away

That's right. My brain is stressing the F out and is unintentionally releasing chemicals responsible for its own destruction.

It's ironic really because I too an responsible for my own destruction. But let's not get into that right now.

I don't know why I had to become this. But all I know is it is never going to go away.

There isn't a magic pill. There isn't even a pill at all.

I mean even depression has a pill. But no, with us there isn't any, the doctors can only prescribe cocktails of antipsychotics and mood stabilizers and hope it helps us for a time.

There is no fix for it. So I'm going to have to live with this.

I might as well document it. Who knows maybe it will make someone feel less alone— less crazy.

So here it goes—

This is the diary of a mental patient diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.