Thursday, May 9th, 2024, 15:15

Mood: Drained

I promised myself I'd finally update today and just try to be more consistent with this. I have no one to blame but myself if I have access to non-FAANG tools and still rely on them heavily as a means of self-expression and documentation. At that point it's really just laziness on my part.

I'll get the mental health stuff out of the way first. The long and short is that my mental health is poor--what else is new?--but I'm trying very hard to do things about it. I recently saw my new psychiatrist for a follow-up and she was incredulous that, in two or three months since she saw me, I made no progress in psychotherapy. This was not due to my lack of seeking psychotherapy, but rather to my providers' inability to take my diagnosis seriously. I've been refraining from discussing it on a public platform because I don't want to publicly admonish anyone else in the helping fields, as our jobs are hard enough as it is, but I'm really still in the thick of being frustrated and upset about the whole situation.

Here are just a handful of things I've been told after being both formally diagnosed with and speculated by multiple providers to have borderline personality disorder:

• "I thought you were too insightful to have that."
• "You don't try to kill yourself to manipulate others to stay with you, which is part of the DSM criteria." (It's not, for the record.)
• I wasn't outright told by one provider that I don't have it, but I did complain to her that I have been diagnosed with it and not had it taken seriously, and she mostly just listened to me vent my frustrations and then begin a new treatment regimen not at all indicated for BPD.

I'm really sick of being this way. I'm sick of the meltdowns and the insatiable appetite for someone to Give a Shit About Me, even in the face of when they do. I'm sick of the constant intrusive thoughts about how either I'm gonna harm myself or the world's gonna harm me. And I'm so, so fucking sick of having spent the last several years of my life and money trying to fix this and entrusting people who told me there was nothing wrong with me like that. Especially now that I've learned that the whole fucking thing that causes someone to be like this is invalidation, and being told nothing is wrong.

I spent my childhood watching freaky tragedy after tragedy happen, and simultaneously being told nothing was wrong and I was simply overreacting emotionally to it; I'm not sure how a four-year-old is meant to react to the news their uncle has been murdered, or any of the other things I'd seen or been through, but anyway I did it wrong and chose to have feelings about it instead of not. Now that I've developed BPD on account of my upbringing, I'm supposed to just be okay with so many of my last providers now telling me that I have been too smart, insightful, or some other nice thing to have it? I can't help but feel like I have entrusted people to take care of me, who have hated who I actually am and therefore insist I cannot be this way.

So now I'm seeing a new therapist for this problem. I expressed my frustrations to them and asked what their thoughts were, and was told that, in their experience, a lot of therapists frankly fear treating BPD, and therefore insist that clients don't have it when they present with it. It was therefore their opinion that I've been gaslit by past providers instead of having them tell me, professionally, that they simply couldn't help. Whatever's caused me to be in this situation, I'm just spent. It's messy and embarrassing to put my business on here, but maybe someone will read it and resonate with my experiences, and learn that they deserve better than care providers who can't help them but pretend they can anyway.

I've also lately been really frustrated with being stuck in Indiana, particularly with the rampant destruction being done to our educational system, and I cannot help but feel like perhaps our professionals in this state just maybe receive subpar training. One of the therapists I was seeing previously had begun to describe other clients as "just a narcissist", which lost my trust in them. The new therapist I see is telehealth based out of another state, and was recommended to me by another patient with BPD. I am about at the end of my fucking rope with this shit. I do everything I'm told: therapy, meds, a good diet and exercise. And here I am: 32 and I cry in the hallways before work in the mornings because I just can't handle myself properly.

If something does not change, and soon, I don't know what I will do. All I know is that no person with mental illnesses deserves to be treated this way.

Okay, now that that part's over, you can just look at pictures of plants and food. So, yep, I've been coping a lot with plants and food.

The first shown, the t. zebrina or "silver inch"--yes, it has another name, but I've been asked by other Jews to not use it--and no, I will never call it a "Wandering Dude"--is one I've managed to keep alive for seven whole months! That's longer than I've ever kept a plant alive in my life. I've placed her by the kitchen window now to see if more light helps her thrive more. The echeveria "Perle von Nurnberg", the lovely lavender-ish succulent, is a new one I got because I wanted to try my hand at a succulent and just loved the echeveria genus. She's currently not getting near enough sun, but that will change soon when I finish her hanger and situate her by the silver inch. The huge crimson plant is a coleus of some kind, a "King Crab" maybe, and is fussy. I would not be surprised if I kill this one quickly, sadly. And the red fittonia has been easy and an absolute joy. I was very afraid to start working with fittonia, because so many people online described them as being dramatic, but as long as they're kept watered and in reasonably enough sun, they're happy. Just look at this white fittonia given to me by my child's grandmother; a little bit of water and sun and she stands proud:

For food, we have been putting a lot of Japanese curry sauce on potatoes, as the Japanese do. Quite good:

See? Like, how can I follow up a long post about being mEnTaLlY iLl with these pictures of food and plants? How dare I be unhappy? This is my biggest thing I think I need to work on this year, is owning the right to be unhappy. I've been through therapist after therapist affirming to me, yes, the stuff you went through was bad and you're in the right to be unhappy, but how does that work when they turn right around and tell me the manifestation of that unhappiness is not true? I don't know, but I know I need to start working on appreciating life's blessings a little more, because, again, how dare I be unhappy in the face of all this beauty?