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 Post subject: The Weather on Mars
PostPosted: Wed Jan 31, 2018 9:36 am 
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The Ophelia of IMWAN

Joined: 09 Feb 2016
Posts: 3321
Location: Under Fur Blankets Galore
Bannings: Loveshack.org, SI.com
My mentor Finn often tells me, “The gods never give us a burden we cannot bear,” and I’ve always hated that phrase because the majority of my life seems to consist of burdens I cannot bear. Today is no different. Today is Samhain, October 31st, the most sacred day of the Pagan calendar. It is a Celtic Pagan holiday, a day to honor the dead who have gone before us, and revere the gods who look after our dearly departed. Although I am a Hellenic Pagan, not Celtic, and though I dislike the idea of talking to ghosts, I usually observe it because the eight Pagan holidays—the Sabbats—are one of the few remnants of my ancient and ailing religion that contemporary worshipers can still remember.

I worship Asclepius, the god of health and of medicine. I have in theory dedicated my life to healing and soothing others. I don’t have the aptitude to become a doctor, and so instead have familiarized myself with the application of healing herbs. I once took an apprenticeship at an herbalist’s shop and spent years memorizing the properties of every plant and essential oil on the apothecary shelves. I make every attempt to help the suffering— to be a good, caring, compassionate person— but when the time comes that I actually need to be, my constant emotional overwhelm and the helplessness that is its companion freezes any trace of goodwill I have.

Today is no different. Today, the most blessed day of the year, as my mentor sits at her altar in deep contemplation of the gods of the underworld, I lie a despondent heap on my bed, shaking with grief, my only prayers taking the form of choked and tearful pleas to Charon to take me away from this miserable existence and let me find rest with the souls of the dead. This is not unusual for me. I have an illness which greatly reduces my tolerance for emotional pain. I have very little ability, if any at all, to hold myself back from my emotions. So little, in fact, that I find myself having breakdowns of this nature nearly every day. The only variations are in what I’m crying about, and I cry about everything from natural disasters to the fact that butterflies are short-lived. This time, it’s that my husband has Sleep Apnea and I have to use my own money to help pay for his CPAP machine. I’m terrified he’s going to die in his sleep or that he’ll become an invalid and I’ll have to look after him forever. Statistically speaking, both of these things are absurdly improbable, which I know because I’ve obsessed over my worries enough to incessantly Google the probabilities that they might come to fruition. Even so, logic doesn’t have much place in my perennial breakdowns, and these thoughts overwhelm me to the point where I’m left fervently wishing I could be blinked out of existence, or picked up by the Grim Reaper in a wayward canoe.

I have Borderline Personality Disorder. Its hallmarks are an acute fear of being abandoned, bouts of self-destructive behavior, non-existent self-esteem, a black-and-white worldview, uncontrollable mood swings, and intensely heightened emotions. Those who have never heard of Borderline wonder if it means I’m fundamentally mad. They’ll ask, “What, is it like you’re on the border of insanity or something?” Among those who have heard of the disease, reactions are all the worse. There are books written to help people cope with simply knowing someone like me. On Amazon, a search in the Kindle section for “Borderline” receives about ten books targeted at loved ones seeking help to deal with someone else’s Borderline for every one book aimed at the actual sufferer of the condition. People tend to assume, because of my condition, that I am a self-absorbed monster who has no idea how to empathize with others, an evil demoness who will burn you in your bed for looking at me the wrong way. Marriage and relationship advice forums are fraught with anecdotes of late-night screaming, black eyes, cold-hearted cheating, callous divorces, and broken dishes— all attributed (though the accuracy of the armchair psychology is debatable) to one partner having Borderline. “Why would she do this to me?” the distraught husband asks. “She’s probably Borderline,” comes the chorus of replies. “Don’t bother trying to ‘understand’ her. Just leave her. She’s selfish and evil and that’s how she’ll always be.” Even my therapist advised me not to tell anyone about being “Borderline,” because of all the stigma that the name carries.

I wrack my brain for any possible escape route. I’d get a divorce, but it’s not as though I can support myself without him. I couldn’t bear to be alone. That would be worse than death. Immediately I’m struck with shame for even going there. What kind of woman even thinks about divorcing her husband because he’s sick? Still, the idea of having to look after and provide for someone else is among my worst nightmares, and I have to escape somehow. The alternative—staying and witnessing my husband’s discomfort—is unimaginable. Being without him, too, is unimaginable. So I do not make any choice except to lie there, a weeping lump of nauseating self-pity.

I can’t say I blame society too much for their disdain. The stigma doesn’t seem to be wrong. I’m not trying to be self-absorbed; I simply am, try as I might to be otherwise. Usually, the best I can manage is to cloister myself away from everyone else so that if I cannot help them, at least I’m not a hindrance. I lack the fundamental distress-tolerance skills with which most people are born. Other people can go through something trying and be upset, grieved, but able to go about their lives relatively well in spite of their pain. They can get up, and go to work, and benefit others, and talk to people, and smile, and praise their God, and be okay. Though an inconceivable idea to me, they actually have degrees of suffering that aren’t “miserable” or “perfect”. They have a barrier there that protects them to some extent from the merciless ravages of grief, shame, fear, or self-pity. They can at will dull the pain temporarily, long enough to function in their lives.

I can't do that. I see other people who can sometimes smile through pain and think, "By gods, if that happened to me, I could only die!" I have as much control over my tumultuous psyche as I do of the weather on Mars. My feelings come up out of thin air like dust storms, blinding and choking me, and then settle into nothing again as suddenly as they came. When something overwhelms me, I cannot simply put the thought away for later; I am at its mercy, left helpless but to be literally brought to my knees with an intensely primal pain, curled in on myself for gods know how long, wailing uncontrollably until the feeling decides to stop. This is because I lack the barrier that allows others to distance themselves from pain. I have no emotional skin. Every single touch burns like fire. Every tiny problem feels like far too much for me to bear. Every emotion is magnified exponentially. I'm never just slightly nervous; I'm either completely okay or I'm frantic with fear. I'm never merely sad; I'm brought lower than the dust in bitter despair. I'm never annoyed; I'm spiteful. If I am none of those things, I am overtaken with a profound nothingness. I cannot even conceive of a situation in which I could feel something mildly rather than being caught in a constant solar storm of overwhelm.

Currently, this overwhelm translates to lying here convulsively sobbing into my pillow, contemplating my own death rather than honoring the deaths of my ancestors, because I don’t want to have to support my sick husband, to whose well-being I avowed myself before my gods and my family. Clearly I prioritize my own comfort above everyone else’s, at least when I’m alone with my thoughts. While I try to come to terms with this, to accept it as a mundane fact of my life, I cannot touch upon the thought without dropping to my knees, sick with shame and self-resentment at the notion that I am a lesser caliber of human being than those to whom selfless action comes naturally. I love my husband more than I’ve ever loved anyone, but I don’t know if I am able to love anyone enough to handle a crisis with them, even a minor one— whatever that means. Maybe I don’t have enough empathy or love in my heart, because other people can deal with issues like this without a second thought, yet it’s making me desperate to escape at any cost. I fear and resent the idea of having to be in any capacity responsible for another human being, even when that person is the one I claim to love most. I probably am, at least in part, the monster people see when they see Borderline. This thought triggers another wave of crying. I have been sobbing for thirty-eight minutes without a moment’s pause. My head is throbbing. An errant ringlet is stuck to my swollen face. I wonder, a little astonished, how my body can even produce tears at this point.

And then, having at length exhausted myself from crying, I realize that the understanding of my lack of moral fortitude is irrelevant. The acknowledgement that I am a sentient pile of hot garbage does nothing to change me, and it does nothing to help him. However, there is something that might. For the last three years and a bit, I have been in therapy—Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, they call it—to help me learn to acclimate myself to stressful situations without completely falling apart or doing something destructive like attempting suicide or filing for divorce. The skills I have learned there—things like actively staying in the present moment, distracting yourself with pleasant sensations, and putting off acting on harmful urges for a set period of time —seem to be things most other people are born knowing, but as I have mentioned, the coping skills that are innate to much of the rest of the world are foreign to me. I snap open the back of my phone case and retrieve a worn list, wrinkled and faded in places where my hands and the creases in the paper have worn off the ink. It is a list of things that may ameliorate the pain of everyday existence that don’t involve self-destruction of any sort. I follow it. I slowly rise, retrieve a glass from the cabinet, fill it with mineral water, and drink. I draw myself a bath. I prepare oatmeal and toast. I begin to feel more human and less despair personified.

Borderline Personality Disorder is truly less a flaw in character and more an illness. Even my self-description as one who lacks moral fortitude might be a symptom. Therefore, the god of healing whom I revere can help me through it. The question of whether one is or is not a good person is not really the right one to ask, for the impulses one has in the face of crisis can’t be stifled, only the actions that follow them. The question to ask is not whether it is wrong to fle in the face of a crisis. The question to ask is how one can survive moment-by-moment, whatever that survival may mean, until the crisis passes. I will never be the kind of person who is capable of boldly and selflessly throwing myself headlong into the service of others, but perhaps merely continuing to exist and turning my mind away as best I can from my own anguish is its own sort of virtue. I remember my mentor’s encouragement: “Let your tears be your supplication; the gods will understand.” For the first time today on the blessed day of Samhain, I kneel at my altar and pray.


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