December 18,2020
2:00am
No music
The sound of the downpour outside is filling the living room. A repetitive clanging is coming from the vent pipe for our gas fireplace as the water tries to find a route into the room and were it an undamaging thing to do, I would try to find a way to help it. I love the sound of the rain falling and that’s a little strange so far as I’m concerned. I find it calming but the sound is a cacophony of randomness and chaos which is how my brain normally is. It’s coming in waves now, heavy then light, just like the waves of uncontrolled emotions which rule my life.
It is two o'clock in the morning and I should be asleep but my brain won’t slow down long enough for that to happen. I’ve spent many nights like this throughout my years going back to before I was a teen. Some of my earliest memories were from before I was seven or eight years old, laying in my bed with a small transistor radio beneath my pillow as I listened to the hockey games until four or five hours after I was supposed to be asleep. Then I would lie and look at the ceiling, my brain creating swirling patterns akin to paisley or fractals which I could actually see in my bedroom. I’d fall asleep sometime after midnight and then be up for school at seven: not nearly enough sleep on a daily basis for a child of that age but my parents never knew and I never told.
It was at this age that my anxiety first began to rear its ugly head, making me nauseous just looking at my morning oatmeal or my eggs, which I was supposed to dip my toast in and sop up the disgusting runny yolk.
A little older now at ten, my bedroom was moved downstairs and was close to the rec room my parents had set up. We had a large, thick piece of sponge which would go in the opening between the two rooms in place of a bedroom door. The foam had a vertical seam in it and I had torn through it just enough so that I could stand and watch the TV in the other room while my brother and sister were up later each night than I was supposed to be. It was around this time that I remember the nuclear holocaust film THREADS played on TV for the first time and I watched through the hole in the sponge. The uncensored and gruesome images of nuclear war I saw as a child still haunt me to this day.
Now I had my first full blown panic attack at the UBC museum of Anthropology. My teacher recognized it as something strange but it was passed off as a one time thing, never to happen again. Not true, I learned to hide it better, often excusing myself to the washroom when my heart began beating through my chest and I was unable to catch my breath.
Still, I was awake late into each night. Now I was twelve and had a ghetto blaster with a pair of headphones so I could listen without the possibility of being caught for having the radio too loud.. On top of listening to hockey games I would often stay up until two am listening to the local radio station playing radio science fiction and other classic radio plays from the early days of broadcasting in the late nineteen thirties. I knew who the characters The Shadow, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Digby O’Dell all were. I would lay there listening to whatever they would play, secretly hoping for a science fiction play from X Minus One or Dimension X, some of which I can remember all these 35 years later. One of the most popular radio shows was called Lights Out and ominously ended each episode with the phrase, “It...is...later...than...you...think.” Still, I would crawl out of bed at seven am to get ready for school, my parents none the wiser.
Soon we moved into a larger house and the radio wasn’t enough to keep my mind occupied while I lay in bed at night. I began reading the encyclopedia, from beginning to end including the year end additions my parents paid for. It was a World Book edition so the writing was at my already advanced reading level. I wonder what I would have done had my parents sprung for the higher level Britannica encyclopedia, but I digress. In months, I had burned through all the volumes and needed something else to occupy my mind. I was awake until three or four most nights now. I began borrowing/stealing my sister’s collection of young adult romance novels. Sweet Valley High and others were not exactly what most 13 year olds were reading but I was devouring the written word but had access to very little so what was there was what I read. I was down to three or four hours of sleep most school nights but soon, two new wrinkles would change everything.
My father had been spending the summers in Toronto for the past couple of years. He was in construction and work in BC was slim so he’d drive to Ontario and work the long days there while saving up everything he could and coming back in the fall when the snow came to Toronto and the construction scene would slow down there as well. He would then go on unemployment for six months until he’d head back East the following spring. This went on for a couple of years and no doubt contributed to me being able to stay awake into the late hours each night without getting caught.
It was also this time that I began playing rep hockey, a higher competitive level of the game where, rather than only playing teams from my small town, we played teams from around the Vancouver area. But ice time was at a premium so rather than practices being at reasonable times in the evening once or twice a week, they were at four or five in the morning leaving the evening ice times for games with the other towns. My sleep went from minimal to non-existent once or twice per week as I would be awake until my alarm would go off telling me that it was time to get up for practice at four fifteen in the morning. Still, I got good grades, was a year ahead in math and was ready for high school to come along and knock me down.
My first fall and winter of high school were horrible. I was bullied nearly every day and beaten once every couple of weeks. I was awkward, overweight, in choir and a nerd, a deadly combination as far as high school survival goes. To this day, I believe the only reason I didn’t have it even worse was because I was still playing hockey, as well as volleyball, which gave me a little bit of credibility. As bad as it was for me, there were others who had it far worse.
Near Christmas of my grade eight year I had an accident at home, falling down while jumping off the couch and landing on the dog. I fell forward and landed on the empty juice glass which had been sitting beside me on the carpet. When I got my balance and looked at my hand, a gash was in my palm, blood was pouring out at a terrifying rate and my brother who was staring at me was in utter shock. He picked me up and dragged me into the kitchen where he wrapped a tea towel around my hand in an attempt for pressure to stop the bleeding. It was soon apparent that this wouldn’t work so he grabbed me and took me to his car where he sped us both to the local hospital. In the ten minutes it took to get there, not only were the tea towel and my sweatpants soaked in blood, but a puddle had formed on the floor of his car. I was taken into the emergency department and quickly rushed in for life and hand saving surgery. As I type this at forty six years old, it has only now occurred to me that this trauma may have affected me in ways I never realized and was clearly the first time I faced death for had things not happened as quickly as they did, I would surely have died.
That spring would be the last time my father would head east. Given an opportunity he said was too good to pass up, he chose to stay in Toronto that year and seek his financial windfall, being written into a woman’s will as her sole heir of her $750,000 estate. He never called my mother and told her about this. Rather, he wrote her a letter and told her of the choice he had made. He never explained any of this to me, once stating that I was handling it all like a child because I had nothing to say to him.
So there I was, going into my grade nine year, sleeping three or four hours and night, being bullied and beaten, suffering from anxiety and panic attacks and ostracised by nearly all of my peers each day. I guess you could say that when the depression set in it was inevitable. The small amount of homework I had needed to do to keep up with my courses over the years now dropped off to nothing. I coasted on what I learned from the lectures and lessons each day. This sufficed in classes like math and science where the marks were almost entirely based upon test scores but I quickly fell behind in English and Social Studies, where homework played a key role in my grades. In a normal home, when an intelligent student begins to fall behind the parents step in and crack down on him, at least making them do their homework if not trying to find out what was going on, but i was no longer in a normal home.
Unbeknownst to me, my mother was barely hanging on. Working full time, she was forced to sell the home and move us into a townhome across town, a home small enough where she could afford the mortgage payments. She was barely mentally and financially skating by and was in no place to come down on her son whose grades were slipping but was still passing. It was all she could do to stuff all of the problems she had down inside and just get through each day. The fact that she coped in this way was not lost on me, and I learned to stuff my emotions and problems deep inside where they could not bother me anymore.
I was 15 when we moved into the townhome, having now taken on a job to have a little spending money and the freedom to buy some new clothes from time to time. I also quit playing hockey. My weight had begun to bloom due to my emotional eating as I tried to cope with what was going on around me and even my teammates had begun to bully me about my size. The last thing I wanted to do was take my clothes off around a bunch of other boys teasing me three or four days a week. I actually wasn’t that big but stopping hockey and working in a restaurant was going to change all that and what little self esteem I had crashed as the number on the scale went up. Still, if my mother recognized any problem I was having I didn’t hear about it from her. By this time I had failed courses for the first time. I was now a year behind my peers in Social Studies and, far worse, English. Falling behind in that course meant that I was now repeating the tenth grade and unless I figured out a way around it, I wouldn’t be graduating with my friends.
Still, the bullying and occasional beatings at school continued. Now I was a target for being the kid who was too stupid to pass his courses, despite my straight A’s in the sciences and math ad because I was getting good grades in those courses my mother never came down on me about my grades. Instead, she stuffed her frustration inside and so did I. I no longer had a father and now I barely had a mother. She was distant and difficult to talk to. An example of this is that I never received the sex talk from her, so I grew up not even understanding that girls, and eventually women, were interested in sex as well. I thought, based on what the media around me had taught me, that they did it as a favour to men they cared about. My self esteem was so low that I never thought a girl should have to do a “favour” for me like that so when girls would make overtures towards me I would rebuff them. I was like this until after I lost my virginity at twenty three years old. I was emotionally and relationship stunted because my view on everything had been filtered through those damn Sweet Valley High books which preached romance and niceness and sacrifice for the woman you cared for. Never did I learn that relationships were about honesty about oneself as much as they were about honesty to the other person.
Alone and not understanding relationships at all, my depression blossomed in the well fertilized ground within me. I didn’t think I was deserving of love and never wanted to force anyone to care for me. The few times I opened up my heart I was rejected forcefully so I learned to keep those feelings to myself. I became convinced that anyone who showed even a shred of feelings for me would break my heart eventually. Looking back now, this lesson being taught at such a young age, is obviously the roots of my borderline personality taking hold. Combined with the vitally growing anxiety and depression within, the BPD would colour the rest of my life.
So now the question is which came first, the BDP or the sleepless nights and the inability to form close, trusting relationships with those around me. I honestly don’t know. Due to my other complicating illnesses and how long they have been affecting me, the BPD line is disturbingly blurred. If my father had not left, or at least had not left in such a callus and unfeeling manner, would I still be dealing with BPD today? After all, the sleepless nights and the bullying were there before he left and the life threatening event of my hand injury may have been the trauma which triggered my BDP. I mean, what twelve year old is going to come that close to death without some sort of mental scarring. Maybe I was just genetically predisposed for all this to have happened the way it did or maybe I can lay all the blame squarely on my father. How much of this is my fault? How much of this is my mother’s fault for never teaching me the healthy coping skills I needed or for even making me do my fucking homework.
I look back thirty and forty years to the person I once was and I wish I could figure out where it all went so wrong. They say that depression is living in the past and anxiety is living in the future. For a normal person with those disorders the solution is simple if difficult: learn to live in the present. But, for a person with BPD added atop those problems the solution may be impossible and is, at the very least, improbable. Through medication and treatment, depression and anxiety can be controlled and even cured in many cases but there is no cure and no medication for borderline personality disorder. There are only coping mechanisms which require deep therapy with a committed counselling partner. This is not available to me because I am living on minimal funds and cannot afford the $150 per session, $450 a week, needed to implement the dialectical behavioral therapy which borderline patients need. I have a workbook on DBT which explains how it all is supposed to work but my cognitive abilities are limited to writing like this and trying to keep a check on my hygiene.
As much as there are millions of other BPD sufferers out there, I am alone in this and perhaps that’s the greatest little piece of irony about my life. I am terrified of being hurt by those I care about and maybe the person I’m most afraid of is myself because in the end, no matter how much work I do and how much I get past my other problems, I only have the barricade of myself to get passed and that’s the one brick wall I never learned to knock down, the one ball of suppressed thoughts and emotions I’ve never learned to cope with. I know I am not the one to blame about how I ended up here but am I the only one to blame because I can get out of this hole I am in?
The rain has stopped and the world is silent once again. My brain has begun to fill the silence with the questions which haunt my life and my hope of quieting them by writing them here has failed. I am again alone with the non-loneliness of my existence for I will never be by myself again. constantly surrounded by the voices which haunt me, like a pounding rain which ebbs and flows in it’s power but never completely subsides.
