Extremes

 

A BPD diagnosis will include a lot of symptoms seen as extreme. If I have learned anything about how people are going to view me whenever I try to vocalize how I've experienced life, it is that my emotions manifest orally in ways others experience as extreme. For some reason, my vocal limitations are seen as part of me having a diagnosable mental problem. The actual words I've tried to audibly express don't find their way through ear canals. My inability to orate calmly finds its way into a chart as a symptom of some mental health diagnosis, often BPD. If I try to explain why a lifetime of recurring pain and blame hurts, why the death of my kitten left my voice disconnected from the rest of my mind, I am told I protest too much, I must be hiding something, or I am simply making weak-ass excuses for not wanting to figure out how to vocalize like a normal person. And then the biggie, the one response guaranteed to shut me the fuck up: I am told my shaky voice, my obvious distress, my inability to maintain eye contact, all mean I am lying.  (I dare anyone to spend 4 years of childhood staring into the eyes of someone like pam, and come out of that relishing eye contact.)

Once, while attending an adventist academy in Arizona when I was 9, I tried to tell my mom that pam was at my school every day, staring at me on the playground, watching me in the cafeteria to see if I took, or even looked at, any desserts, making sure I was not talking to other kids about anything.  My mom replied by saying, "Why would she do that? That's crazy." Think I ever tried to talk about it again? Think I can vocally talk about that time in my life right now in a calm voice? Think the terror and frustration in my 9 yr-old heart upon hearing that word "crazy" can be kept from distorting my facial muscles and skin if I try to speak aloud about all of that now? Part of why I am diagnosable with mental illnesses is because I cannot speak "correctly." I did not want to be taught the shit I was taught. I did not have any idea how my future was being formed by my childhood experiences.  If there was any way for me to have unlearned every goddam thing that created extreme responses in me, I would have learned it. Fifteen years ago, when I finally went to college, my 4.0 GPA was proof that I am a person who is quite capable of learning. I am not the dumb slut blond everyone sees. If I could unlearn my incorrect vocal deficits, I would have done it by now.  

Do I have BPD? Sure. But I have learned something this past decade, and that is the truth behind that popular definition of insanity. Same shit is gonna keep happening to the humans in my group, if they keep being blamed and re-exploited over and over. They will keep having that "kick me" label of BPD slapped on them, which makes them targets of predators like my sda principal, like Marc Maron, and that will only lead to further escalating behaviors that will be used to increase the blame placed on the person diagnosed with BPD. This problem will never be solved if we don't stop sexualizing and blaming cis girls from the moment they are born, and letting predators use those girls with no repercussions.