It might be hard to believe this, but my mother is unaware of this blog. She’s a luddite, still writes on an old Brother word processor, doesn’t have any use for the Internet. I once explained that she could get an email account and check it at the library. She got anxious. “Doesn’t email go to your home address?” she asked. So, there's that.
There is a reason I mentioned all of this, and we’ll get to it in a second. First, I want to acknowledge that it has been a while since I posted to this blog – at least by prolific Alisa standards. To recap: In three days it will have been a month since my fiancé dumped me, a month before our wedding. I began to blog about this miserable experience, both because I had been scheduled to launch this blog – about the long and, one hoped, happy road to recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder – and because the sudden breakup happening at exactly the same time seemed a sadistically serendipitous moment to chronicle the ups and downs of going through a major life disruption as a woman with BPD.
Quick interjection: BPD is a serious mental illness marked by unstable relationships, impulsive behavior, and pronounced difficulties regulating emotions, which tend for us to be much stronger than they are for other people. As one psychologist put it, having BPD is like having an emotional engine that runs hot but has no brakes. Another psychologist compares it to being a third-degree burn victim, only the lack of skin is over your emotions. Fun, right? Yeah, no. Not at all. Oh, and for the record, BPD, once thought incurable, is actually highly manageable and even fabulously destructible with the right treatments and hard work – work that I had only recently begun with Dialectical Behavior Therapy when said former fiancé walked out on me. His reason? He needed to work on himself, I needed to work on myself, and until we did the work we were just spinning in destructive and incompatible circles because we were both screwed up. Mature, really. And devastating. And true.
Another quick interjection: Once thought to just be the product of abuse and crummy parenting, BPD has now been shown through MRI to have a significant and heritable biological basis. The limbic system, the part of the brain that experiences empathy and emotions, is extremely overactive for people like me, lighting up like an ocean oil rig in the darkest night. Meanwhile, the frontal cortex, that part of the brain that regulates and controls said hyper emotions is as well-meaning and ineffectual as a toothless 19-year-old guard dog.
The reason I haven’t written much lately is that after holding things more or less together for the first two weeks of the breakup – probably because I was still basking in the glow of denial – I pretty much fell apart like a smashed scone, crumbled into the clumps of calamity that are BPD at its worst. Well, almost worst. I’m still alive. So that’s something. A stunning 70 percent of people with BPD will attempt suicide at some point, with between 8 to 11 percent of us succeeding - a rate that is 50 times higher than the general population.
I mention all of this because during my little blogging hiatus there was one particular rainy night, where being home alone was unbearable (my son has fortunately for him been on a family vacation with his dad and stepmom for two weeks), where I shuffled dead-eyed and zombielike up and down the gleaming and silent white aisles at Target, feeling empty and pointless, buying enough dog and cat food to keep my pets okay until the police found them after my demise, and enough ready-light charcoal briquettes to fill a small grill that I could situate on the passenger’s seat of my gold Elantra while I, clutching my favorite pillow that still smelled like He Who Left Me, knees curled fetus-like against my chest, drifted off forever, from the cramped back seat into the spacious eternal night. My plan was to do this on an isolated dirt road in the mountainous national forest outside of Albuquerque, so that no one I knew would have to find me. I wrote my notes. Put them in envelopes. Licked them shut and almost regretting not getting a paper cut to the tongue.
I was ready to go.
Now, let me explain something. A lot of neuro-typical people and psychologists like to say and even continue to teach that people with BPD are grand “manipulators,” that we do this flashy suicide stuff just to get attention, or to seek revenge against those who’ve hurt us. This is entirely untrue. Completely untrue. At least for me, and for many others I’ve read about. The reason I planned this dramatic final solution to my common and temporary problem was far simpler than that. The excruciating pain in my brain and body was too much to handle. Because of the malfunctioning bits of my brain that make pain more painful and essentially unstoppable (without the coping skills I’ve yet to master), I simply couldn’t function. It was like having a dagger stuck through the center of me, turning round and round like a rotisserie. Breathing hurt. My skin hurt. Thinking hurt. Waking up hurt. Everything but sleeping hurt, and so I resorted to doing plenty of that, thinking, as I drifted off, of the beautiful description author Dean Koontz once made of sleep in the wake of a massive emotional loss; he called it “the little brother of death.” I wanted that relief to last forever. That is all.
Again, part of me was sane enough to recognize I needed help. Big help. Help to stay tethered to the planet. I didn’t really want to leave. I just wanted to feel better. I needed everyone I could get.
Okay. So I realized that I was going to need to come clean about this mental illness stuff with everyone I knew, in order to rally Team Alisa Alive, to do something that experts recommend loved ones of people with BPD do for moments like these, which is to come up with a literal written plan to prevent the afflicted person from killing themselves. To do this, I was going to need my mother. The mother mentioned above, without the Internet.
Couple days ago, my father accompanied me to the small town outside of my city, where my mother lives alone with a hugely fat black Chihuahua named Pokey. Pokey’s head is like a velvet baseball. Mom is a bit of a recluse. We knocked. She answered. I hadn’t spoken to her since Mother’s Day, when I offered to take her to dinner and she snapped at me that she was too busy and I, hurt, hung up and avoided her subsequent calls. She opened the door, and hugged me, a big, sad, happy, sincere hug. My father and mother have been divorced since I was 11. He walked into her house with me, and we all sat in the living room where she spends all her waking hours watching TV. I told my mom I had something important to tell her, and that I needed her help and support. I expected the usual negativity, but it didn’t come. Instead, she looked worried.
“Three different doctors have diagnosed me with a serious mental illness,” I told her.
“Well, I coulda told you that,” she replied with the characteristic "support" that had thoughout my life done nothing to help my disorder not happen.
I told her what BPD was, how it worked, and I cried. I told her how my whole screwed up life finally made sense, all the pain I’d caused, all the people I’d offended and hurt, all the bridges I’d burned, all the drama and instability, all the recklessness, the eating disorders, the suicide attempts, the anger, all the needless moves from one house to another, one city to another, all the constant chaos, upheavals and commotion, and all the failed relationships. She’d liked my fiancé, the one who walked out. She was sorry to hear he was gone, but not surprised. After all, I’d been hurting everyone, including her, for years.
“I have a collection of all the nasty letters you’ve written me,” she said. “I call them the Mommy Dearest letters.”
I looked her in the eye, feeling as though I were truly seeing for the first time just how much damage I’d done. I felt sick. And incredibly, inexpressibly sorry. I told her it wasn’t that I was a bad person. When my brain was in control, I was a good person.
“I know you are, honey,” she said, her eyes soft and loving. “Most of the time, you’re a kind, decent, compassionate and wonderful person. It’s just those other times...well.”
“And she’s been that way since she was conscious,” added my father.
"It's not you guys," I said. "It's not your fault. I know I blamed you for years. But it's biology, a lot of it. I inherited this."
And we talked, about my Irish great-grandmother who'd committed suicide, about my Irish grandmother who was negative and cruel but always just blamed her "Irish blood," about the many relatives on my mom's side with drug addiction and criminal histories and impulsive disastrous lives. And we remembered episodes, events, from the earliest years of my life, moments in time when the disorder had been parading itself around, twirling in its little pink tutu for all the world to see, and yet none of us had a name for it, or a way to help me.
Now we did.
We went out to dinner. The three of us, all together for the first time in years. It was peaceful. It was forgiving. It was loving. And we put together a plan for Team Alisa, to keep me alive. Until I was out of this darkness, my parents would be my angels, there for me at every hour of the day or night, watching over me, loving me, accepting me, protecting me. Helping me escape this prison.
As my father and I drove back to Albuquerque that night, he told me that he had seen a side of me that day that he had never seen before – a self-aware, truly remorseful, compassionate and loving side, a gentle side, a side that was starting to exercise discretion and mindful control of her impulses, a side that understood and felt the ramifications of the life I'd led until now.
“You’re healing, m’ijita,” he said, using the Spanish word for “my little daughter”. “You are on your way.”
And so it is, just as they tell us in Zen Buddhism, that sometimes those bleak moments that you believe to be the worst things in your life, like the moment your beloved walks out on you because he’s drawn a line in the sand and said you may no longer cross it, that you must get well, that you must focus on YOU now, can turn out to be your life’s biggest blessings.
I am here. I am loved. I will not die.
And I am not going anywhere but up.