Is there anyone who isn’t aware of mental health problems? Survive or thrive? Sink or swim?
Much like my life and my mental health the way I approach these awareness days/ weeks/ months are how I feel about can vary. This is partly down to whether I’m representing the organisation I volunteer for or another mental health group or whether I’m just representing myself. Having started this blog at the beginning of the year having awareness events can be a prompt to write and I always try to be genuine, I want to present the reality – my reality of having a mind that is often not mentally healthy but the reality is it’s often not very interesting.
I often feel like contradiction and the idea of survive or thrive fits that nicely because I can be one or the other or both, although I want to be seen for the things I do at mind or with mental health awareness rather than the things I do to myself I also want to fight the illusion that I create. The term high functioning is thrown around a lot in various communities whether it be neurodiversity, learning disability or mental health it’s meant to be a compliment yet I’d happily drop the term into the nearest active volcano; I’m a (mostly) high functioning borderline I volunteer, I live alone, I’m in a relationship and while none of these are bad things they tend to be used to overlook the other side of things and the part the wants to sabotage all this because the more you do the less help you get.
Black and white thinking is something frequently mentioned with BPD but it’s not as simple as they make out my thinking can be very black and white in specific areas but in others I can see in technicolour. There’s a lot of mental push and pull especially when it comes to “recovery” I’m not a fan of the recovery model some days I want to move on from all this and thrive others I miss and crave the self destruction some days I go round in circles between the two and it’s times like this that being high functioning and self aware is actually painful because I can see what I’m doing to myself and others but there is no pull in the world strong enough to stop me from self destruction that can override the self hate and self sabotage.
I found myself arguing with someone the other day trying to break this myth that I’m high functioning and can manage without support that I’m ok that they only see one side of and it’s not the side that gets kicked out of a&e at 3am or that feels like the internal rage could burn up the entire world if it was fully released. So many things are subjective and thriving is one of them, as much as I welcome the idea of mental health awareness I’d like an awareness of the lack of services of the people who turn up to an appointment to find their care coordinator has left, of the people who feel that they’ve been chucked onto the mental health scrapheap because they’re not recovered and the high functioning people who are really just treading water and desperate to keep their head above water.
The perks of being a dinosaur 