the elysia is fragile, um

2024 07 1

A preface, this weblog is about emotions that came up around the same time premenstrual_syndrome is supposed to happen.

It's always such a relief being able to look at our emotions and say, "ah, it's PMS". it's always so easy to forget about. swear to god, if you neglect your check ins for just a couple days you lose it all.

Also we have no clue why the text isn't selectable

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i think we will create a tree of what is going on.

• our physical environment is unwelcoming, feels liminal, unreal, too adhd to do anything
• • unable to engage with interests due to bad enviro, or do self care. overwhelmed by the important tasks we can't focus on
  • • disassociate from a lack of interests, and neglect selves from lack of care. rely on others for support to talk through things. hate ourselves for how little we can do
    • • others don't give support, BPD is triggered, long term spiral ensues. disassociation is stressed and we can't get out, through talking it out, since we're not real
      • • everyone hates me. im going to lose everyone. i believe (delusion) that im gonna do horrible things to the most vulnerable and special ppeople in our lives, i cant be trusted. im just a husk
        • • we deserve to rot. im not gonna eat or go out or see people. i deserve to suffer

this is where we've been at this last week. we've had a few interventions, namely, a certain mothkitty reached out to us, and at least two of our newer relationships seem to be moving in a positive direction, at least in regards to security and closeness (although, we're not sure if we should be happy with that or not). a friend bought us pizza to help feed us one night, a couple people took us to the grocery store. but for the most part, we feel very low.

today, though, we had a friend come over and we had fun. we got to share a couple special interests, we made a proper meal for ourselves, and we got to talk about our feelings. he listened, and he seemed to understand the complexity of it all. the nuance in relationships. we appreciated that and it helped us a lot to feel valid in what we had shared. we basically told him about that pyramid of things that had happened, just in a lot more detail. we took care of ourselves. it was really important.

it's almost certainly delusional, but we believe we'll soon be abandoned by all the people important to us. they've told us all these horrible things we've done to them, all the ways we've hurt them. we believe them!! we respect the people in our lives a lot, and w're happy they've shared that with us. we did hurt them, we were horrible.

we see how emotionally stable we are now in the present, and ask ourselves, "what would it take to be rotten like that again?". it's a fluke that we feel stable. just look, we can't even feed ourselves after a couple months, and we try to issues people have with us for just being disabilities, illnesses, trauma. we're manipulating and lying constantly, we can't stop. we're talking to people we shouldn't, forcing the weight of our existence on people who don't deserve it.

sure, we could continue to be healthy. love ourselves at face value. continue being confident and strong. but who are we really. what do we hope to achieve by doing that. eventually, we'll find some sucker who is willing to love us and we can make them do everything. someone who will listen to us, and talk back to us.

we know quite firmly that we don't like being independent. why don't we like it? why do we so badly crave someone who will talk to us about BPD in a healthy way? it's surely because we want to hurt them?? we keep doing it, even to people we have known for ages and say we love enormously.

we keep doing this, right? over and over?

in the past, we had a mutually healthy relationship with another BPD system before. The relationship ended because they realised they didn't know what a relationship actually meant to them.

we stayed close for a long time after breaking up. it was only when we started to grow distant and our other social supports began slipping away, that our BPD made us unstable again. we went back to them to try and get restabilise, but it was too much for them. we self sabotaged a lot and our self hatred was scary for them. they told us that our BPD wasn't safe for them to engage with, and that they wanted to stop talking to us. and we respected that! we respect them and their boundaries a lot, and massively appreciate them being upfront about it as soon as possible.

to be clear, our healthy BPD relationship with them still prominently featured BPD, we just engaged with it in positive and caring ways, mutually. unstable expression of BPD was destructive and self sabotagey and insecure, and came afterwards. it wasn't just that bpd "came back", it just started being expressed in an unhealthy way. We can heal BPD long term and minimise its impact on our lives, but we don't know if it ever goes away, it's always living in our brain. It's a part of us, and we're okay with that. It's a lot of why we are the way we are, in so many wonderful ways!

them leaving and, in practise, abandoning us, though, does make us think, that maybe the only way for us to grow as people is by being cut off. Forced to feel the trauma, with no way to escape it, other than "learning our lesson". it is hard not to think that we're only able to learn our lesson from people breaking off from us. and that the threat of that is what keeps us in line. our mind is constantly telling us that if we weren't scared of social reprecussions, we would do horrible things. constantly.

thinking of it, though, if that was the case, then that must've happened long before we had that positive and constructive relationship. we must've been abandoned and decided we wanted to change to make it not happen again. we wouldn't have been able to have a healthy relationship had we not already done that? and so that would mean it no longer applied to us anyways. it already happened years and years ago

we don't think that did happen, though. What happened was that we deconstructed our emotions and who we were. Got to the bottom of why we felt this way, and decided that, in order for our own and others' sake, we wanted to act a certain way to support ourselves. we didn't do it to maintain our relationships, or to have healthier relationships in the future. we did it for our own sake. changing how we acted made us happy, and we met a system who did self love in a very similar way to us.

we want to hold onto our relationships. believing that we just want to hurt people makes us scared. we're scared of being left behind, abandoned. we hate ourselves, we hate ourselves more than anyone could possibly know. we don't trust ourselves with our loved ones, since we believe (probably delusionally) that we will harm them.

hearing our friend today actually listen and respect us is the only reason we're able to process these emotions now, and call them delusional. him being there, along with a quick text from someone else we've met in town, made us realise that our physical relationships have been exclusively positive. that we aren't just meant to hurt others, and that we're growing.

we went to see an ex last week, who we've known for 25% of our entire lives. in that same trip, hundreds of kilometres away from home, we also saw a friend we met online for the first time. our experiences with both of them were awesome, it was so wonderful. it was such a nice trip. and it helps our BPD a lot to think about how well it went.

just the fact we can be so close to an ex even today, after so much time and hardship. if we have been able to maintain that, maybe we aren't evil, we aren't awful. maybe we aren't rotten to the core. plus! we saw someone new, too! and we had a great time! in the moment, we were horrified of hurting them or making them uncomfortable, but the way we expressed that was by asking them and checking in on them to make sure we didn't overstep anything. we expressed BPD in a healthy way. it was magical.

the reason why our relationship with our ex was strained in the past was because we were used to relying on our partner to emotionally support our BPD. We were used to this because our last relationship had been heavily based in mutual BPD care and accomodation. we also were under pretty heavy abuse from other people in our lives at this time, which snuffed any attempt at self love and self reliance; we needed that emotional support.

we think what enables our relationship to be so positive with them now, is that we've successfully escaped those abusive people. They have been ejected from our lives. we don't need to be as emotionally dependant on anyone as we once did, since we have so many more spoons available for taking care of ourselves, and frankly more social supports in general!

a while ago, we temporarily moved in with our current partner, for a couple months. we wanted to see how it would go, and also to use the security and comfort to help us pivot away from the abusers in our lives. the same emotional dependence that strained us in our last relationship was still there, but less severe. living with them helped us heal an enormous amount of trauma we didn't think we would ever be able to heal from, and gave us the spoons and emotional support to finally grow to be independent of our abusers for when we were to move out again. that momentum has carried on in a really surprising way, and since then all of our relationships seem to be moving into much healthier and more sustainable directions.

at the same time, we've continued to neglect ourselves. we still haven't learned how to not be emotionally dependant on someone close to us, and we don't know if we want to learn how to be independent emotionally, either. it feels nice being understood, and we like being able to sit down with someone close with us, and talk about what's on our mind, in a complex and nuanced way. of course, we're also trying to learn, since the people we love are very important to us, and we're trying to fill the gap with therapy and self care. and, until we can find someone who can accomodate BPD, or someone we already know gets better at it, we're trying to spread our emotional needs across many people.

but we're in a transitionary period, and it's really hard. coming to respect ourselves and learn to do self care is taking way more spoons and executive function than we have available, and doing self care is so intimidating. we currently need to do interior decorating and to find therapy, these are the most important things for our mental health at the moment. but, theyre so big and complex, and take so much commitment and mental energy. So much collection and composure, focus. we have been trying to get our friends to help us commit to this, and they always say they will, and then they never make plans. It hurts. we can hardly even focus on discovering ourselves or engaging with our special interests in the meantime, because of how hugely our physical environment and lack of therapy affect us.

in addition, spreading emotional needs is easy when we text people, but when we see loved ones physically for a couple days, it's hard not to pivot all our attention and emotional needs onto them (it feels like a waste of time and money if we don't!), and so navigating that is something we need to work on. it's really hard. we think for the time being, we need our loved ones to remind us to talk to other people while they're over, and encourage it in a BPD friendly way. it's good when it is framed like self care and them trying to take care of us. it makes it feels like they want us to do it cus its healthy!

we're also trying to be more proactive and saying when we'd like some time to ourselves to focus on the other people in our lives and also ourselves. It seems to be a lot scarier to do towards the people we feel closer towards, though, and that makes it hard to take initiative, even though we know it would be mutually healthy. I guess,, i guess we;re scared of being abandoned.

we're really traumatised and fragile

we want to learn to love and respect ourselves. we want to learn to be self reliant. we also, simultaneously, want to have a deep BPD intimacy!! being understood on a core level. maybe not accomodated, but respected and understood. we are currently making a comprehensive bpd care and accomodation guide, which is also meant to help others understand and hopefully we can show it others so whenever something seems off with us, they can check it, and see what is going on in our mind and what we need. writing it has been very hard and overwhelming, we're doing our best!!

We are able to love, and be happy. we're able to be close to others, and it'll be magical.

I wish it wasn't this hard for us to get ourselves not to slash up our body. we are magical and special. it'll be hard and these things will still be hard for a while. healing and growing takes time, and it's not our fault. we'll mess up and hurt people. we'll feel terrible for it, we may even be trauamtised by it. but we deserve to try ! we are our best