Tag: borderline personality disorder

Hope and Pain

I realize how volatile I am. How my emotions swing from me loving from the bottom of my heart. From being the girl on top of the world to being sad, pushing everyone away. Hating.

Deep inside me the sensation has grown that I cannot be helped. No matter how many amazing people I have around me, who want to help me. And no matter how much I wish they could help me. They cannot.

This goes hand in hand with the fact that forcing someone to therapy will never do any good. We have to accept the truth at some point. We have to get better ourselves. And we have to walk this path alone. No matter how much we may fear loneliness. The only way out of the pain, is through more pain. And I am not saying, we should all give up hope. Because there is a way out. But it is not as easy as we keep thinking. And we are more alone than we like.

When there is no one there to help us, we have to help ourselves. No human being can take away our pain, no matter their efforts. All there is left to do is for us to be courageous enough to embrace the cold of this sickness and to realize that we are our only way out.

But there is one thing that all those people trying to help us can tell us: We are worth the efforts. We are worth it, even if we cannot believe it. We may not be understood. We may be in the dark. We may be exhausted from all the mood swings that throw us all over the emotional map, but we cannot give up. Because if we do, we are insulting everyone who ever tried helping us. All their efforts are in vain if we stop fighting.

Sometimes that thought is all that keeps me going. All that keeps me from grabbing a blade. Because in a world where every single thing we believe in, every single thing we feel, can become the total opposite in the blink of an eye, the blade, its impartial cold and the pain it causes becomes the only constant in our lives. Becomes certainty.

And certainty is all we long for. And when we loose faith in the people who are close to us. In the people who believe in us. When the emptiness swallows our trust, we seek comfort in the cuts. A friend once told me to put up pictures everywhere. To remind me of the people who believe in me. The people who I do not want to disappoint. Hoping that this will keep me from doing it. However all it does is it makes me feel like I already am a disappointment.

And I know that everyone who does believe in me will contradict me. But I cannot just stop feeling a certain way. I am aware that this is one step of getting better. But when it comes to getting better, sometimes every single step feels like running a marathon. And yet: we are the only ones who can run it.

So all we can do is hold on to the believe that there is a way out, even if it feels like it is going to take everything we’ve got. And sometimes even believing that there is a way takes everything we’ve got. But it is crucial to getting better. Realizing that we are the only ones responsible for what is happening to us. Realizing that we are the ones to change something, if we do not like it the way it is now.

On our way to getting better, we have so many people who wish to help us, but can’t. Well, their faith in us. Their pushing us to get better, may be the thing that gives us the will to heal. May be the thing that empowers us to run that marathon that the next step is.

Emotional Intelligence: Curse or Gift?

No feeling understood can be the source of great pain. It is a symptom for many mental diseases, such a Borderline Personality Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Social Anxiety and more. Not being understood leads to the loneliness that we humans dread so much. Feeling a bit lonely from time to time appears to be a normal part of life and nothing to stress out about. It is not like anyone who ever feels lonely has a serious mental issue. But when is feeling lonely an actual problem? When is the pain that it causes too big to be ignored? Being honest I think this has a lot to do with how the individual experiences the loneliness. But at the point, where it seems that the isolation starts to swallow everything it is definitely a problem.

Now, where does this all-threatening loneliness come from? Throughout history there have been brilliant minds such as Van Gogh who suffered from severe mental disorders and loneliness and yet were extraordinary personalities. And we see a pattern: many artists showed this issue. But why artists? Is there something, that makes artists different from other people? Something that makes them lonely? I think there is.

It is “emotional Intelligence” and I am honest I do not like the term. It is the ability to “see deeper”. Yeah, what the heck does “see deeper” mean. It means, that an artists sees connections that others don’t. And this is why that person can be an artist in the first place: As an artist, we do not define the world newly (though some do create worlds), but we find extraordinary connections between ordinary things in life. We shed a new light on the existing world.

But this “seeing connections that others don’t” is making artists lonely. Because we think differently. The way we perceive the world is different. We feel the world differently. And often times, we cannot explain why. We are not able to tell, why this beautiful sunset moved us to tears and the people around us do not understand. We keep asking fundamental questions. We challenge reality day after day. This is what cannot be understood. Why ask the same questions over and over. Why do we see connections between separate things in reality? And sometimes, we do not even know why we just happened to know what is going on in another person. We do not know how we could find the right words to comfort them. But we probably just saw those subtle hints in the world around us and without even realizing what we were doing, we followed our “Intuition” and did the right thing.

I am throwing around words like intuition and emotional intelligence and some might still not know what it is and say that these are not scientific concepts. Well no, they are not. But intuition and emotional intelligence in essence is the ability to make connections between things. And because it is something that not everyone has to the same extent it can make a person lonely.

But there is a bright side to it: in many sciences making connections between things is crucial for progress, which means that people with high emotional intelligence have a higher probability of understanding science faster. Note that it is only the the likelihood that is affected, because it is possible, that someone has high emotional intelligence and is great at human interaction, but has problems with math, because those two fields are so different.

However if we have high emotional intelligence, we have at least some area in our life, where we see connections that others don’t. This allows us to be better in that field than other. And this is a fact that we can draw energy from. We may not always be understood. But in turn we are allowed to have a deep understanding of the world, which I personally find overwhelmingly beautiful.