I've busted my ass in therapy.  I don't mean I've picked up some tools that I can use to bludgeon people into telling them why I'm not wrong, I mean I've busted my ass.  I've learned so much, I've grown so much, and for the most part I've got my shit together.  Pretty much every therapist I've had since high school has expressed amazement that I came out of my childhood haflway sane, much less as high functioning as I am.


One of my therapists goals for me was actually to accept that I am human; I was so driven to try and find what I was doing wrong that I ruthlessly cut out any behaviours that were "unhealthy."  

I redlined myself, constantly keeping myself at the point of failure, just so I could face the next issue.  I remember being curled up in  chair in the fetal position, in actual physical agony as I started to confront some of the pain that was the underpinning of my existence.  But I gave myself no reprieve.  Every week I'd come back ready to enter the cage again, face myself down, and get "better."  

Yeah, that worked about as well as can be expected.  I made some pretty impressive strides, but the goal of perfection is not an achievable one.  At some point I crossed the line and became so aggressive in pushing myself that I lost the ability to set everything down.  I lost the ability to rest.

Which brings me to the current space.  I've spent so much time analysing, over analysing, counter analysing, and just dancing around in circles that I no longer know what normal is.

Part of my BPD is to take a scenario and to play it out to the bitter end.  I'll play out whole conversations and whole relationships in my head.  Hours of conversation, days, months, years will all pass within seconds through my head.

And the worst part is I'm rarely wrong.  I know enough of human nature, of psychology, of myself, of others that I have a pretty damned impressive track record of knowing people.  So I'll have these conversations with myself, play everything out, and it never ends well.

Because ultimately I'm flawed, and just assume everything is going to end up bad.  It could be low self worth, it could be just being beaten down too much, it could be any number of bites from the shit sandwich that is life that I've taken over the years.  But it doesn't matter.  At the end of the day, it always ends badly for me in these conversations.

What worse though, is when the conversations bleed out into the real world.  When I get mad at my wife for the conversations we haven't even had yet.  When all of the hateful words she's never said to me cut me to the quick.  

And eventually it all blends together.  And I don't know how to stop it.  I see us digging ourselves deeper and deeper into our respective holes.  We both want it to stop, but don't know how.  I see her flaws, and try to compensate for mine, but then I end up not knowing where the line is between enabling, being responsible, and my bpd.

And I don't know what to do.  I see all the flaws in myself, and in my wife, and realize that it's hopeless.  We're doomed.  It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow, it may be years from now. But we're doomed.

And I wish I didn't know these things.  I wish I knew how to be normal.  I wish I could fight it out without the certainty of defeat looming over me.  And then I realize that is probably what normal is.  All of the same doubts I'm having, but with less tools, less awareness, and ultimately less hope.

I still don't know what I'm going to do.  I still expect tonight will be a nasty fight.  I expect things will end badly.  But, I also expect I will continue to try, continue to grow, and hopefully emerge from this a better, stronger, healthier person at the end of it all.

Because that's all I have.  Is me.  So I might as well be the best me I know how to be.