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And Don’t Say It’s The Ward
Very often, I have medical professionals ask me what kind of treatment I am looking for. This has always confused me, because how am I, someone with no training on psychiatry, supposed to know the exact kind of treatment that would help me the most? For the past year or so, this has continued to become a recurring thing, and each time, I am left just as baffled as the last.
But what about the times when I have known exactly what I would have needed, kept asking for it, and instead got turned down and told to deal with the worst of it on my own? Sadly, I have had way more instances of this happening than the slightly annoying question of “what do you want us to do for you”.
“Just Ask For Help”
People have always had all kinds of assumptions about me. For a very long time, I cared a lot about how others perceive me, what they thought of me, whether they liked or disliked me. Over the years, though, this has become increasingly more unimportant to me, as now in the prime age of 25 years old, I have a lot of far more crucial things to worry about. But there is still one thing that really bothers me when it comes to all the colorful ideas complete strangers have of me, particularly in online spaces.
They think I have never done anything to fend for myself, or to help myself with the bullying I faced as a Kid.
Marry The Empty
Over the years, I have gotten relatively used to feeling the way I do. I was 17 years old when I was first diagnosed with depression, and 20 years old when I got the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. It has also already been three years since I was diagnosed with BPD, my main diagnosis to this day. Time has gone on, a lot of things have changed – some for the better and some for the worse – and I have grown sort of numb to a lot of it.
Not One of Them
For the longest time, one of my biggest struggles as a traumatized individual has been not being able to feel like I am one. At face value, this might seem like a shallow or superficial problem to have, but at its very core, it has become one of the main contributors to my ever-present feelings of loneliness, desperation, and being neglected by everyone around me. As much as I have tried to tell myself that there is no reason for me to lack the sensation of having the identity and struggles of someone with childhood trauma, the way society at large treats people like me is the one at fault, and I am not in control of any of that. So I am left with the gnawing feeling of being alone and outcast in a space where I should find comfort in.
But why is that, exactly?
Invalid Submission
One of the worst parts of being traumatized by something else than familial abuse is the empty and hollow feeling I experience in relation to the identity of a trauma survivor. I cannot separate myself from something that shaped me as a person in such a fundamental way, it just has to become part of who I am, who I see myself as. But when there is a clear disconnect in my lived life experience as a traumatized person and the image the rest of the world wants to project, how am I supposed to find myself whole?
Guts & Core
I remember the very first time I heard about BPD emptiness when I was talking to the psychiatrist of the ward I was staying at in 2022, how understood I felt by the sheer mention of the word “emptiness”. It felt like I was finally being given the language to describe the gut-wrenching pain that had been eating me alive for the past year. Going back to the journal entries of late 2021 and early 2022, I’d written about a sensation of something gnawing at my insides, with no idea as to where it was coming from.
But there were other phrases I had used, too, to describe the feeling of emptiness. This article and the two illustrations are a representation of both of those sides of the emptiness coin.
Gaping Heart
When I was still in university, I remember feeling this unexplainable hollowness right above where my heart would be. The last year of scrambling through assignments and seminars was one of the most difficult time periods of my life, with my health collapsing while the work pile on my desk only grew higher. And the strange emptiness did nothing but add onto the already agonizing existence.
This Is All Pointless
A lot of the times, I feel like there is no point to anything I’m doing. It doesn’t only include art and all the other side hustles that I have created for the project, but it’s about everything that my life is. Being here, breathing, existing, moving from one day to another. If it’s all filled with physical and mental pain, how am I supposed to have the urge to continue living?
Life Update: What Is Mine, Is Yours
It’s been a while since the last life update, and boy has a lot of things changed during that time. In May, I was talking about my three-year anniversary of being together with my girlfriend. Right now, about three months later, the thing we have been waiting for for all these years has finally happened. My girlfriend has moved to Finland, to live with me permanently.
Withdrawing
When I’m going through my worst depressive episodes, one of the things that brings me way more suffering than I already need to be under is social isolation. It is so easy to just stay at home, not get out of bed all way, and retrieve into yourself and your misery even when the people close to you just want to help and be there for you. It infuriates me to no end, because I know that what I’m doing is not helping me in any way, but when you don’t have the energy to get up and fix something for yourself to eat, how are you supposed to do something so taxing as socializing with other people?