From the moment I started my second year in college, I knew I was in trouble. From the outside it appeared that I was back on track after my 'difficulties' the previous year. I had passed my repeat exams and made it into second year; I was living on campus, which gave the illusion of being more suitable for academic success than rented accommodation; I had a part time job at a pharmacy to pay for day to day living expenses and I was medicated and seeing a psychiatrist monthly. I was now ready to move forward with the next stage of my life, a healthier and happier person.
If only life was so straight forward.
Six weeks of group therapy and some pills were never going to undo six years of using self harm to cope with emotional turmoil and distress. More importantly, they weren't going to erase the childhood problems that had led me to start self harming in the first place. Your past experiences are an integral part of who you are, and when I returned to college I was the same person. My fear of abandonment was now a reality. I had, in my mind, been banished by my family. I felt unwanted and this feeling fueled the cacophony of self-abusing thoughts in my head. Coward, damaged, disgusting, disappointment, failure, freak, lazy, liar, obnoxious, stupid, selfish, ugly, useless, unkind, uncaring, unlovable...unwanted. The self-loathing I felt was so intense that at times I felt it would burn me up from the inside. I knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and no amount of medication would fix it. I was trapped in a loop; on one hand I understood that I was a bad person, and therefore couldn't to be loved or accepted. Yet I craved validation and love from others so much, that I hid how broken I still was, because people knew the truth they would rightly reject me. Please love me, even though I know you can't.
The mental pain I felt only intensified when I began living on my own. Almost immediately I began self harming again. Despite my six weeks in group therapy, I didn't know any other way to quiet the war in my head. Cutting myself became a way to survive my own thoughts, while also punishing myself for my imperfection. The problem with self harm, and most maladaptive coping strategies, is that over time they become less effective. You have to up your game, so to speak. Cut more often, cut deeper... eventually you need some other way to numb the pain. So I went looking for new ways to self destruct.
Let me be clear, the choices I made at that time were entirely mine. I in no way believe that my depression or personality disorder excuse my behaviour. BPD doesn't rob you of your ability to see right from wrong, and more often that not it will cause you to see things as good or bad in the extreme, there is no grey area.
As discussed in a previous post, I used casual sex to try and feel like I was wanted. Looking back I can see that one night stands, by their very definition, would probably make me feel unwanted. But I persevered, not linking my diminishing self esteem to what I was doing. And then there was the drugs. I started out smoking hash, although I rather quickly lost interest in it. It didn't stop the din between my ears and tended to make me nauseous. Ecstasy on nights out was a frequent indulgence, changing me from self conscious and melancholy to a happy, dancing twat. The drawback was the come down the next day, I always seemed to fall down much further than I had climbed. But speed, oh how I loved speed. I would snort a line anytime of the day. It made my head spin, gave me energy, made me forget why I was sad five minutes ago. I was in love with a narcotic, it blocked out all the pain and fear. It blocked out most feelings, other than the feeling that I needed more speed.
The problem with using drugs as an emotional crutch (other than the fact that they can kill you) is that they aren't actually fixing the core issue. In the short term they were the answer to my problems, but it was like putting a plaster over a gaping wound. It stemmed the flow temporarily, but eventually everything would start seeping out. You keep sticking more and more plasters over it, but eventually the whole thing is going to fall away, revealing the festering hole underneath.
I became more and more reckless, acting on any impulse without pause. I self medicated with drugs and alcohol, I abused my body through self harm and empty encounters, I tore away at the last vestiges of self respect I had and became a hollow, parody of myself. I was so busy self-destructing there was no time for academic endeavors, I attended three lectures over the entire year - the first one for each subject. I fumbled my way through the mandatory practicals, relying heavily on my lab partner to pull me through them.
Then, somehow, I managed to make things even worse. There are many versions of this story, several from my own mouth, but what follows is the truth. I was lying on the couch in the living room one night, smoking and watching television when I was supposed to be studying a years worth of printed lecture slides on the floor beside me. I wasn't completely sober, having stopped off at the student bar after printing said notes. As I lay there, alone, I looked down at the reams of paper and knew that I had no hope of passing my exams. It simply wasn't possible to cram a years worth of information into ones head in a week, and even if it was, I didn't understand half of them. I was going to fail second year, I would have to endure my parents disappointment again, and I had no-one to blame but myself. I pushed back the wave of panic that hit me, what was the point in panicking? This was just one more bit of evidence to back up what I already knew, that I was a failure. I felt nothing then, empty, but I was comfortable with empty. I stretched my hand out and very slowly pressed my lit cigarette onto the top of the pile. I didn't need the pages, they were better suited as an ashtray. I felt the last threads holding me to the world, pulling me toward a future life, slip away. I wish that was how the movie ended, a dark and foreboding final scene, the camera slowly closing in on my lifeless eyes before fading to black....
But a crazy thing happened, the pile of paper started to smoulder. I know, flammable paper, who could have foreseen such a thing? Interesting fact, a large block of printing paper won't burst into flames, but it will create a lot of smoke in a very short space of time. Queue me jumping up to grab the fire blanket(Don't ask, lets just blame the alcohol, flinging it dramatically over the paper, which just created even more smoke. My brain finally decided to join the party, I replaced the blanket with a pint of water, crisis averted. Or at least it would have been, if my flat mates hadn't come home at that exact moment to a hallway full of smoke. They were strangely not at all reassured by my attempts to explain the situation, and swiftly fled the scene screaming about carbon monoxide. And possibly something about me trying to burn the building down. Stranger still, when the accommodation manager arrived he refused to accept the explanations of the drunk, weird girl in the dog collar over the well mannered, pleasant girls from the country, and also decided I had tried to burn the building down. Should you ever find yourself in a similar situation, I don't recommend trying to defend yourself by starting any sentence with 'If I really wanted to burn the building down, I would have...'.
So, in less than a year I went from being 'back on track' to being evicted from my dorm under suspicion of arson, a guaranteed failing grade in every subject and my mental health was worse than ever, thanks to my brilliant attempts to escape life with mood altering substances. In short, I had destroyed what was left of my life in spectacular fashion. Looking back, I try and find some humour in what occurred back then. It does me no good to lambaste myself for something long since passed. But if you read this, and are struggling, numbing the pain will only work in the short term. Eventually whatever method you are using will stop working, and the sorrow and desolation will still remain, darker and hungrier than before.
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