I’ve spent the past hour trying to write up everything in my head.  I have BPD.  If you have it, I don’t need to describe the spiral.  If you don’t, you’ll hopefully never be able to comprehend that spiral.  So I’m going to bury the lede here: describing that pain is either unneeded or impossible.

Instead, I’ll go more into how I pulled out.  

Today was bad; recent times have been good.  You know how that goes.  My world was ending, in all senses of the word.  Either you know the clarity that comes after the fight, when you see everything about yourself you hate, or you don’t.  If you do, you have my sympathy.  If you don’t, then consider yourself fortunate, at least in this one thing.  

But I was mid dance, and caught in the rhythm.  Hate self, self is to blame, end self.  Other is to blame, hate other, end self to get back at other.  That’s unfair, I’m horrible to even think like that, hate self, self is to blame, end self.  It’s the basic step of the BPD shuffle.  

I spent an hour hating.  Hurting.  Feeling hope.  Losing hope.  Thoughts spinning, and cutting, interspersed with moments of clarity that lead to more hurt.  Which lead to more hate, more hurt, more hope that maybe I can fix this.  Oh, no I can’t so there goes hope.

And then the music stopped, and so did my dance.  Well, more to the point, I heard the music.  In this case it was by Alan Walker – All falls down.  It’s about a relationship that is failing, in all the ways I understand.  And it’s so fitting, and so inevitable.  Until the refrain hit.  The refrain which just says, on repeat “I’ll be fine.”

It took an hour of that song on repeat to sink in.  I’ve got legitimate gripes, and there’s some pretty fucked up stuff my gf does.  

And I’ve got my own boat load of crazy, as outlined above.

But I’ll be fine.  And when I started to realize that, is when I started to crawl back out of the hole I dug for myself.  

As long as I was focused on what I was losing, there was no way to escape the freefall.  The thought process I alluded to above was based on loss.  But the way to stop that isn’t to focus on what is in play and what I stand to lose.  

I have me.  I’m broken.  I’m flawed.  I’m brave.  I’m strong.  I’m smart.  I’m crazy.  I could go on ad nauseum.  But as long as I have that, it’s enough.  My girlfriend isn’t my world, I am my world.  If I lose her, I still have me.  And I’ll be fine.  

And once that started sinking in, I was able to start letting go a lot of what was happening.  Not because it changes the reality of the situation, but it puts in context what I still have.

And I really think that may be the cure-all for what’s going on in our heads: remembering that we still have ourselves, and that’s enough.  Our life may not be pretty, it may not be perfect, it may not be what we want, but at the end of it all it IS enough.  And that’s what matters.  

Because no one can take that away from us, and since we’re enough, anything else will be ok.  It may not be fun.  It may not be glamorous.  It may hurt.  A lot.  But we can get through it.  *I* can get through it, and if I can, you can too.

It’s silly.  There was a chapter in a book I read recently (“Your erroneous zones” by Wayne Dyer, I highly recommend it) talking about how a lot of what we struggle with is being “enough” as if we can be anything else.  He speaks about how a dog doesn’t struggle with being a dog, it just is a dog, and no matter what, it can’t fail at being a dog.  And that’s how we are.  We can’t fail at being us, because that us is intrinsic to who we are.  We can fail at a lot of things.  But we can’t fail at being ourselves.  And I think forgetting that fact may be at the core of a lot of my thought process with BPD.  I don’t have a sense of self, because I keep thinking my self has to be defined, either externally or internally.  

But I’m me.  And I can’t be anything other than that.  And that means it’s the one thing I can’t fail at.  And so no matter what, I have me.  

And you have you.  It may not feel like you’re enough.  But you are.  And as long as you’re enough, then all the rest will work out.  

It may not be how you want it to be, but it will be “enough.”  

Whatever you’re struggling with, whatever I’m struggling with, it can be difficult, but it’s not world ending, because we carry our world with us.  

And that’s enough.

I’ll be fine.

So will you.
