It’s time to talk it’s time to change. Today is Time to Talk Day an annual mental health awareness day as part of the Time to Change campaign encouraging people to have conversations about mental health. Talking about my mental health isn’t exactly something I really need encouraging to do, most of the work I do with volunteering for a mental health charity involves using my lived experience whether it’s running peer support groups for adults, youth wellbeing sessions for young people or co-delivering mental health awareness training I’ve spent the past four years talking about myself.
Today I’m writing about something more personal and less general than my overall mental health, I’ve written about my diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and one of the most difficult parts of having BPD is forming healthy relationships. Without going into the details of how and why this is such a problem early childhood experiences are usually one of the causes of BPD and shape future attachments and how we view people. Some people have described BPD as the emotional equivalent of having third degree burns, for people who know me well and know how cynical I am it’ll be no surprise to know that I hate that comparison it is true though that intense emotions and mood swings are certainly an issue and when it comes to relationships and attachment this can be a factor in the way someone with BPD views others.
For me that attachment is often transferred onto people who can’t be what I want or people I can’t have the type of relationship I want with. I guess I almost have a type and it’s always the same kind of people I get attached to, it’s something I find hard to admit to that I find embarrassing to talk about but this is Time to Talk Day so I’m going to talk about it. Inevitably people leave, they move on, find new jobs or retire it happens when the people you get attached to are mental health professionals or employers, people with their own lives and careers. That doesn’t stop it hurting, loss and endings are something I struggle a lot with. There are three people who have been there over the past few years the last five years in particular, two of them were my care coordinators/ individual therapists one left a couple of years ago and one retired in September.
The third is an employer who leaves in two weeks but she’s not just my manager she’s seen me from almost the day I started as a service user who barely spoke to anyone (oh how times change), when I started my training as a peer volunteer to now harassing anyone that will listen to let me have a few minutes to speak at events, she’s not only been a good project manager but supportive when I’ve been struggling or in crisis; on several occasions she’s stayed past her working hours to talk to me when I’ve felt unsafe of wanting to self harm. I’ve cried a few times and no doubt will a few more, it’s painful as endings often are especially when combined with mental health problems but the biggest thing I gained from 2 years of intensive treatment for BPD was being able to talk more about how I feel and today feels like a very fitting time to open up about something difficult and hopefully in time feel less shame around my feelings.
The perks of being a dinosaur 