I’ve been trying to catch up on my commitments after a really difficult few weeks of being unstable or cut off and dissociated, following the contact from my abuser and the issues that came up during my meeting with the police.
This catching up has involved writing several emails, and putting together feedback on a document I’ve been asked to help put together. (I’m helping compile some material that may go towards a course supporting others with mental health conditions to manage money and debts.)

I have wanted to do this. I care about these topics and the other people I’m writing for. Yet it is a fight to get myself together to do it. My concentration is terrible. My brain seems to be exhausted quickly. It takes me so long to get down a few sentences that I then get frustrated about that itself, which doesn’t help. Thoughts, connected thoughts, then ever more rapidly spiraling thoughts, whip round my head out of control. But this doesn’t help me write. I can’t translate the thoughts into written or spoken words. I don’t know how that can be, since the thoughts must be in words! Where do the words go? Why does the spiralling take over til suddenly every idea is lost, any communication impossible, and an aching, frozen foggy feeling envelopes me?
The only thing loud and clear then are the voices telling me what a load of rubbish my ideas and words are, how I’ll hurt or be disrespectful to someone (or whatever the specific fear is that day), how nobody would want to read this, how it’s worthless….
An email that I’d think should be simple, which I think other people would expect had taken me a few minutes, can take me a couple of hours, including my obsessive checking once I have managed to get any sentences written down. When I was in office work, I was noticeably slow or would lose track of the passage of time. Sometimes, the same experiences stop me writing here, though they are not usually as bad. I’m inefficient and left exhausted. I turn to comfort behavior lile uncontrollable constantly eating sweet “bad” foods because of an unsettling aching hunger that probably isn’t really for food but I can’t satisfy otherwise.

***
I wrote the above a couple of weeks ago but ironically, didn’t finish the post. Today I have an article to write for an online mental health magazine. I’m writing about my experiences of debt and difficulties controlling my spending with BPD. I’m struggling. I wonder if I’ll find this a bit easier than the feedback I was trying to write, as I might not be so anxious about reflecting on what someone else has written, about what they might feel, about what we’ve discussed and whether I’ve paid attention and remembered correctly.

Ginny xxx

• BPD
• On the borderline
• Working and volunteering