Wait, What's living in the present?🧘🏽‍♀️ 

7/23/24

👋🏽Hello Friends!👋🏽

I was reading "You are a Badass" by Jen Sincero, and I don't usually enjoy reading. It would take months to read a book. I'm pretty sure I have had a book on anxious attachment for almost 2 years now. Reading is definitely not my favorite hobby.

While I was reading "You Are a Badass," I was reading it on a lake beach with my sorority sisters while they were in the water. The chapter that I read was regarding living in the present. Which is something I'm not usually good at. I'm either stuck in my past or anxious about the future. It's either overthinking something that happened in the past, recalling past memories, being anxious about what's going to happen next, making plans for the next 6 months, or thinking about someone I shouldn't be thinking about.

The one pillar of DBT that I'm the worst at is mindfulness. Mindfulness is truly my biggest enemy, besides time. Being mindful goes hand-in-hand with living in the present; no wonder I suck at staying in the present moment.

🧠What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the act of being fully present and aware of your thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Click here to learn more about mindfulness: What Is Mindfulness? (verywellmind.com) 🧠

Over time, I have gotten better at being mindful; I sure don't suck at it as much as I used to. But I still have a lot of work to do. My therapist always tries to get me to work on mindfulness, and I just tell him... "Yikes, that's a no-go for me." I guess I should listen to him (don't tell him I said that; he'll have a field day).

While I was reading the one chapter in "You Are a Badass," there was something that clicked with me. Sincerto said, "When we get so wrapped up in our heads, we miss out on what's available to us right now in the moment" (p. 41).
I mean, she is completely right, so why is it so hard to live in the present?

Well, I can't give you that answer, but I can tell you when I have a hard time in the present. All my life, depression and emotions have been in my life. Everything else in life became second to my emotions. Then my emotions and thoughts became priorities. It's hard to focus on anything else when you have such emotions.

Balancing my emotions is something that I've been working on for years because my brain simply doesn't process emotions the same way as others. Luckily, I have a ton of resources that I either found or someone told me. One way that I found to help me stay in the present is to identify my emotions and journal what caused them. I use an app that my therapist showed me called "How We Feel," and it shows a ton of emotions with definitions, and I can choose which one I feel like I'm feeling the most. I also use an app that I found when I was searching for BPD resources called "DBT Coach." I decided to subscribe to DBT Coach because I figured that I would be more inclined to use the app if I paid for it, which could be very helpful for me since I needed to use my DBT skills more.

These apps together really have helped me take a small step back, think about what I'm feeling, and write a little. Now this is just a tiny step in the right direction, but it's more than I've done in the past.

I try to take one of my ex-boyfriend's philosophies to heart a little more, which is to just live in the present and not worry about the future since we can't tell the future. I've tried so many times to apply that in my life, especially when it comes to being in love, but my second biggest enemy, time, always loves to get into my head. It feels like hours when minutes can pass by. I truly wish I could figure out when I always have this sense of urgency and why I have to basically "itch the scratch" to feel relief. I wish I could find it in my brain and rip out that programming (along with some other ones), but wouldn't that be so nice? I guess this also goes along with the mindfulness and impulsivity that I feel as someone with BPD.
I guess I have to do a little bit more research and get some more work done.

Wish me luck
Until next time, friends!💝

Jade

Abandonment... Aka Hell for Borderlines💔 

7/14/24

👋🏽Hello friends!👋🏽
At least for me, abandonment is the biggest fear next to being forever alone. Over the last year.. maybe year and a half, I have been slowly working on spending more time on my own. This is to help with that fear of being ✨forever alone✨ because being alone isn't a bad thing, and we all should have times when we are alone to rejuvenate, think, and just be. But growing up, I felt alone, so I hated being alone. As a result, I made every effort to avoid feeling alone. This included jumping from one relationship to another when I started seriously dating in college (sorry, I'm not counting high school relationships since they were only for a few months).
I always, and I mean ALWAYS, had to have some guy occupying my mind to be okay.

🧠"Abandonment trauma is the fear or anxiety of people you are close to leaving you. People struggling with abandonment fear may have trouble building healthy relationships." - Dr. Geralyn Dexter (Verywellhealth)

Want to learn more about Abandonment and Attachment Styles?

Click Here to Learn more: Abandonment Trauma: Signs, Causes, and Healing (verywellhealth.com)🧠

Fear of abandonment is my BIGGEST symptom of BPD, besides feeling empty. And it honestly sucks.
Especially where I'm at in my recovery journey since I am more logical than before but also emotional. So my brain's favorite hobby is playing tug of war.

For example, I have someone very special in my life that I've known for years who comes and goes a lot. And every time they leave, it's the worst feeling in the world. I feel like the world is falling apart every time someone that I have feelings for leaves me.
So, when this person leaves, I logically know I'm going to be okay. I know it because I've lived through it countless times, but it still really badly hurts.

When I experience any type of huge fight between me and my F.P (favorite person), I implode. This also happens if I have a huge fight with a select handful of my best and closest friends. And when I implode, hell breaks loose, literally. Logic is thrown completely out the window. The littlest of things are the biggest things in the world to me; I can't eat, I just cry, I want to hurt myself, I start to spiral... you get the picture. And this is EVERY time I am with an F.P.
Saying "that sounds exhausted" is a complete understatement.

🧠What's a Favorite Person or F.P. ?

When I first learned what a F.P. was, I was told that it was a person who was your go-to person. And this goes beyond just knowing you can rely on them; it starts to become the person you ALWAYS go to first and expect them to help and give validation.

Want to learn more about the term "Favorite Person" or the BPD and Favorite person relationship?

Click Here to Learn more: Understanding the BPD Favorite Person Relationship (verywellmind.com)🧠

IT IS exhausting.

Having problems with properly regulating emotions is exhausting, questioning your self-identity and self-worth multiple times a month is exhausting; feeling stuck and empty all the time is exhausting.
Having BPD IS exhausting.
Unlike other people who can leave me, I can't leave me. I can't leave my brain or shut it off. I'm stuck. It's hard.

I feel as though people don't really give me (or any person with BPD or any other mental health conditions) enough credit for how exhausting it is to just go about daily life with everything going on inside your head. I completely understand (or at least will at one point) how people can feel exhausted around me, and that's completely valid. It is.
But no one ever considers how exhausted I am and how tired I am of living this way.

I know this post is on the darker side of the blog, but that's how it is with BPD: black and white. While I've been having episodes and struggling when writing and posting these posts, it was finally time to talk about my fear of abandonment. This blog is going to have some "darker" or more sad-sounding content because having BPD is really hard and I have a lot more bad days than good. Technically, I have more "I feel nothing" days than any bad or good days. I just hope this helps people understand a little bit more from a Borderline perspective, even if it's just the tiniest bit.

Until next time, friends!💝

-Jade