Ten Things I Hate About Me

by Joe Tracini

It’s so common for people with BPD to take their own lives that it’s the only mental health problem that lists suicide as a symptom.

You know how, on DVDs, you sometimes get the director’s commentary? My brain with BPD is like that, except the director hates the film. HATES it.

When I say ‘a voice in my head’, you might be imagining disembodied voices telling me to do this stuff but it’s not that. What’s so terrifying is that it’s my voice.

is terrifying, because I believe my voice and I think they’re my ideas.

I have learnt to survive every day by dissociating from my BPD. I call it Mick,

interesting...

It’s exhausting to constantly find a way of differentiating between the things that I’m actually thinking, and the things that he’s telling me.

I live with the love of my life and have learned to talk openly about my illness.

goddamn... im proud of you

because I realised I’d spent my whole life lying about it. I had kept trying to fix myself, but everything I did seemed to make it worse.

with Mick telling me that every single word, sentence and chapter was shit and would make everyone I love hate me and strangers walk up to me in the street and punch me in the face.

I’m scared. Terrified, really. I’m scared of what you’ll think of me, because even though I don’t know you, I don’t want to disappoint you, and I am desperate to be liked by EVERYBODY AT ALL TIMES.

I’ve spent a big chunk of my adult life trying to work out where the edges of my symptoms end and I begin, the borderline between me and Mick, and at those edges, I think I’ve come up against some important things that we all feel. There are ten things I hate about me – and nine of them are him.

I’m not doing this for attention.

I’m not pretending to be sad; I’m pretending to be OK.

I’ve just got a broken brain combined with trauma and invalidation.

Well, hi, I’m me, and I don’t like hurting people, but it kept happening and I thought I’d never stop. (I have stopped. If you’re like me and think you can’t stop doing awful things, I’ve gone from doing seven awful things a week, to no awful things in four years. Please don’t stop reading the book.)

Imagine all of the people who will ever read this sentence. None of us want you to do it.

Imagine being so unsure of who you are that you can’t predict what you might do in the future because you’ve never felt like the same person for long enough to be able to guess. So, planning for the future? Impossible.

Every time I feel good, Mick tells me that this is the best I will ever feel and everything is downhill from here. Every time I look at something I’ve done, it feels as if it was done by someone else.

I know on one level that my everyday life problems are no more complicated than anyone else’s. But they feel like they are.

I’m a parcel with the wrong address on it, stuck in customs and nobody is coming to collect me because the name doesn’t belong to a real person. And even if someone did open it, instead of a letter inside there’d just be a massive shit.

If you’d asked me then, I wouldn’t have known I was lonely. But looking back now, I absolutely was.

They even put ‘Pasquale’ on the back of the shirt. I was over the moon. I loved it.

oh no... i need a break before reading whats next

I thought wearing the football kit would cause the feeling of belonging I was looking for.

I hadn’t, and even if I had I’d still suggest using a kid’s head as a trampoline is a disproportionate reaction.

‘boys will be boys’.

oh hell nah

I’d tried being me in primary school and that hadn’t worked so I tried lying instead. Lying would come to damage me in my life just as much, if not more, than the bullying ever did, as the lies kept hurting me long after I’d left school. Throughout my life, I have used lies to make who I am feel like the sort of person someone else will want to be around.

In the end, my parents’ tactic of constantly telling me I definitely wouldn’t get it turned out to be the right one.

On the day that it happened, I still didn’t tell anybody. History had taught me there was no point anyway.

Her previous advice to stop bullying had been to tell bullies we had a swimming pool.

This is one of the things that I think kills people with BPD. If you’re a person who isn’t bad, doesn’t want to be bad, doesn’t intend to do bad things but does them anyway and finds it virtually impossible to explain why, then that disjunction can make you want to kill yourself. You can’t reconcile your sense of who you are with all of the available evidence.

I often find I’m impulsive as a way of fixing how I’m feeling that day, or what I’ve been doing wrong. So if I’m feeling bad, I’ll go: ‘OK, I’ll fix that by doing something that feels like I’ve made a choice. That’ll end well.’

Every single time, if you asked me in the moment, I would be absolutely convinced that the thing that I buy will be the thing that fixes me; one week it’s a coffee machine, the next week an iPad, the next a designer footstool. Every time: the last thing wasn’t enough, it’s the next thing that will work.

it was the same impulsive decision set within the same framework of the same action thousands of times; but it was like things just reset.

I wouldn’t have people round to my flat because it was harder to control when I could be on my own again.

just different routes to that feeling of oblivion that stemmed from wanting to minimise the amount of time I had to spend on my own, with me.

But I’m aware that no matter how many times I say it, you won’t know what being in my head is like.

Just like with magic, practice made perfect, and the more time I spent with me, the better I got at hating myself.

I’ve been telling people I’m fine for too long when I’ve been very not-fine, so maybe I need to follow their example.

I’m alive. I’ve got a job. I’ve got my friends, and I’ve got my family.

‘She doesn’t love you. That’s it. She’s never coming back. You’re not enough. She hates you, of course she hates you, everybody hates you. The only reason she’s not left you already is because she’s scared that if she does, you’ll kill yourself for attention.

You’re worthless, kill yourself. Shit, if there’s a fly you might have mice – did you leave that banana out? You’re not enough for her, she’s ashamed to be around you. No, that’s too big to be a fly. Might be a bee? She’s on the phone to her ex, she’s still in love with him and she’s not even at the shop, she’s just hiding behind the bins telling him how much she wishes she was with him not you, because you’re disgusting. It can’t be a bee, of course it can’t be a bee, it’s February. What kind of an idiot sees bees in winter? You should kill yourself.

Ironically the main reason I’m likely to be abandoned is because I’ve kept telling someone who isn’t leaving me that they’re going to.

Now imagine that fear when the future is a chaotic and unpredictable wasteland, you hate yourself all of the time, find it hard to judge social interaction and are intensely paranoid.

Mick tries to convince me that everyone is pretending to like me.

If I’m with somebody, I have a reason to exist, because they’re there and I have to do the things expected of me as a human when I’m in the company of others.

‘How are you feeling?’ ‘I want to die.’ (Brings a tiny horse into your room) ‘How about now?’

The first thing that I learnt when I got to rock bottom is that it’s got a basement.

it was strongly advised I move back with my family to see if this would change things. I’ll let you guess if it did.

What a terrible idea…

On top of the general toll on mental health a habit will take, I now also had guilt. Guilt that people had gone out of their way to help me and I had failed them and failed myself.

I’ve always felt that I have more love to give someone else because I don’t have any love for me.