Attachment issues
When I was a little girl, I was playing with a bright yellow, sponge ball in the road nearby my house. My dad had found it in the garage that morning and given it me to play with - I didn’t even know it existed before then. As I rolled it up and down the hill, faster and faster, I was eventually beaten by its speed and it rolled down into the open drain at the side of the road. I was heartbroken. I frantically tried to reach it but couldn’t. I burst into tears and ran home to make my dad come and try to rescue it but it wasn’t to be - the ball was lost.
I have been thinking about this episode recently because it was the first time I can remember feeling really attached to an inanimate object. I was distraught when the ball disappeared, not just because I’d lost my play thing but because it felt like I’d lost a part of me.
A couple of weeks back I lost a sock somewhere between the laundry basket and the washer and spent a good five minutes looking for it. It suddenly became my favourite sock, I remembered the day I’d last worn it and was almost composing a eulogy in my head. Again, it felt like a part of me, my personality, had vanished.
It sounds ridiculous but I feel somehow like my being exists in things I interact with and losing them is incredibly difficult to bear. Whenever I go to the gym I use the same locker each time - if it’s in use by someone else I am totally thrown off course. In fact, things like this happen all the time - bits of me exist all over the place, it’s just that no one else can see them.
Similarly, I feel that when I make a connection with someone, part of me becomes that connection. This makes leaving them, or not seeing them when planned, really difficult. I have talked before about my tendency to feel abandoned more easily than most people and that is a common feature of BPD. However, this is a different phenomenon, more closely linked to attachment. I make incredibly strong attachments very quickly and absorb the person or object in question into my own being somehow. Yes I do feel abandoned when relationships come to an end altogether but I also feel like a hole develops in me when I just say goodbye to someone who I know I’ll see again soon. This happens with friends, with professionals, even with places I go to. As soon as I make another connection the hole is closed, which is how I don’t fall apart entirely, but it is a constant unravelling and restitching exercise. I guess it is another feature of EUPD - we struggle to maintain a stable ‘sense of self’ but that instability and the strength of attachments created to get that sense of self from other places, add yet more exhaustion to everyday life.
Exhaustion is a common thread generally at this time of year. The Christmas preparations are underway and life gets busier in terms of social commitments and the sheer number of people around all the time. Both of those things combined make the festive season quite stressful for me - social anxiety and Christmas don’t mix well!
Having said that, I have been consciously trying to take some time out for myself over recent weeks. I was re-referred to the local wellbeing house last month as things were bubbling away under the surface and started to impact everyday life. I was lucky in that logistics meant I got an extra six days there on top of the usual two week stay and that really helped. Whilst I did struggle emotionally when I was there, by the end of the stay - through using the extra support, things had evened out and I left feeling better than when I went in so it was definitely worth it.
Much like over the summer, Expert by Experience commitments have quietened down somewhat as the upcoming holidays approach. However, I was approached by two separate people recently and asked if I would consider some peer support opportunities, using my experiences to help others locally with personality disorder. I agreed in the hope that I can indeed use my journey to help other people in similar circumstances see that this diagnosis needn’t be all negative. Both opportunities will see me having to fight my own anxieties in order to facilitate them but maybe that makes it good for me too!
Christmas can be a tricky time of year for those with mental illness so please remember to take breaks and allow yourself time to recharge as and when you can over the next couple of weeks.
P.s. The missing sock eventually turned up...several days later!
