Ten Things I Hate About Me

by Joe Tracini

But being alone with yourself shouldn’t be the worst thing you can think of.

‘You’re fine. It’s all in your head.’ I’ve heard that a lot. It’s often used to minimise the severity of mental illness. Yes. It is literally all in my head. That’s the bloody problem. I don’t know about you, but I live in my head. My experience of everything – love, sandwiches, music, limericks, dogs – they all come to me through my brain, which is in my head. So something only being in my head isn’t comforting, it’s terrifying.

There’s no best-case scenario, and the only thing you feel you can amputate is yourself.

On top of all that is the guilt you carry for, what you see as, ruining the lives of the people around you that care about you.

You love them too much. You can see the hurt you cause, the pain you put them through, and you want to take that away. For you and everybody else.

You know they love you, and you’re ashamed of the fact you’ve not been capable of returning that love, and that you’ve abused it, and them.

You genuinely believe that everybody close to you would be better off without you in their lives. Because you keep being like this and doing these things and you can’t stop.

None of this is true. It feels real to you. It is your reality, but this is your...

There is underlying shame and fear within any moment of happiness. As if the thoughts are asleep, and I’m scared that it’ll wake them up.

But I didn’t stop. It’s a survival instinct even though what you’re doing is killing you. Your brain tells you, ‘Well, you’re not dead yet so something must be all right with this; keep going, you don’t have another option.’

At this point, of course, Mick didn’t exist in a fully formed state; it was more a general internal dialogue saying, ‘Why don’t you have more drink and drugs?’

and clawing at my face, which even a brain like mine couldn’t fabricate a rational excuse for doing.

waiiiit. this counts as self-harm???

I was genuinely sorry, but the next day it would happen again and that just made it even harder to continue to deal with. The disconnect between knowing this thing is harming you and those around you and knowing you’re going to do it anyway. Those were the moments that got harder to live with

One reason Dad didn’t understand what was happening was that I would pretend things were fine when I was back home.

Jumping off the bridge wasn’t to stop how I was feeling. Not the main thing anyway – it was more of an added bonus to the decision to know I wouldn’t have to be me any more.

I can see now that my behaviour up to the night in that casino was a succession of ways to hurt myself in order to feel something.

I didn’t want to be me any more. I had no tools to improve my life. All I had was the last three months of hard evidence that all the help in the world wasn’t enough. I was hopeless. Looking back, I’m more surprised that I didn’t actually jump off that bridge. Given where my brain was at that point, all the odds were that I would do it. But somehow I didn’t.

Wherever you are, I know that the hardest thing you do every day is breathe.

I also know that everybody who’s ever cared about me would rather I told them I was thinking about killing myself than try to do it. The same is true for you.

So, please don’t kill yourself.

Feelings aren’t a choice. We don’t choose how we feel. The only choice we have is whether or not to tell someone about it.

A succession of intensely felt feelings that threaten to overwhelm them, that aren’t subject to logic or experience, that can’t be reasoned with. Each one the worst thing ever. A tiny boat tossed on the storm of their emotions.

That’s me. That’s my day every day.

‘Have I upset you?’ It turns out I never have. My brain just has an exhausting habit of painting angry faces onto people that aren’t actually angry at me.

My threshold for things that make me feel upset is very low.

If I then tell them I’m feeling happy, it makes me worry they won’t believe me when I’m unhappy once more. It makes me wonder if they’ll think I’m lying about being unhappy. And it’s even worse if someone tells me something I have said or done has made them happy. At that point my default thought is how shit it’s going to feel for both of us when I’m at my very worst again.

Saying you shouldn’t be sad because people have it worse is like saying you shouldn’t be happy because somebody has it better.

If you’re feeling something, feel it. Don’t apologize for it. Your feelings aren’t a mistake, and neither are you.

How to make it convincing enough to fool the therapist. I knew deep down that this was what I was actually doing.

my emotional swings are one of the most destructive elements of my experience with BPD. I feel things wrong. I am in charge of my facts, Mick is in charge of my feelings.

I have to remember that Mick also always wants my relationships with people to fail because they’re a barrier between me and loneliness. The end game is me on my own.

Relationships are Mick’s kryptonite, especially if I tell people he exists. If people know he’s there he can’t do anything.

Is it?

I can’t bear the thought of having sex because I can’t bear the thought of being naked, even when I’m alone.

Penis enlargements should be a more common thing. Nobody talks about getting their dick enlarged. Yet boob jobs are fine. Why is that?

Thats a good point! And hairtransplant! Or wigs whatever! U do u, do whatever makes you feel good

I didn’t cry. I still haven’t cried.

Yet I’ve always had copious amounts of shame around it, while at the same time never really felt that it was a problem, because it falls into the dissociation category. I didn’t feel it, and I don’t feel it, in order to cope with it.

sex is very difficult because I don’t want to have sex where somebody like me is involved. So somebody else’s willingness to join in is baffling. It’s got worse as I’ve got older because I’ve become more self-aware and therefore more aware of how much this bothers me.

Anger is far easier to recognise when it’s being used against somebody else, rather than inwardly as part of an ongoing dialogue of self-loathing.

I go through life desperately trying not to get angry. It’s a primal, childlike state where we’re unable to process the anger rationally. You’ve seen a toddler when they’re in a temper tantrum. A tiny boat tossed on a sea of rage. Completely unable to control the enormous feeling – there is nothing there but anger. And then it passes.

Because then in the aftermath of the anger comes the recrimination, the self-loathing and the guilt.

But BPD is an illness that tries to convince you you’ve not got it. Ironically, Mick doesn’t believe in mental health problems. He tells me I do stuff for attention. With the anger, it doesn’t sit well with me, it never has.

BPD. I had BPD. There we go, all the chaos in my head had three letters to explain what caused it. He showed me the main symptoms and they were essentially a clinical diary of my life.

Eventually she told me that what she loved about me was my personality so if my personality was wrong, what did that mean? Did she know who I was? At the time, I was disappointed by this reaction, but over the years, I have come to see what a fundamental question this is. If you can’t work out where the symptoms end and the person begins, how can you know if you’re loving a person, or enabling a symptom.

Living in my head, not examining those thoughts, inhabiting emotions, not telling others what I was thinking, no forward planning, wanting to be liked, no impulse control, being solitary, looking for something that would make it worth being me.

Firstly you’re feeling an absence. Which is tricky to begin with. And not just the normal fleeting feelings of emptiness that presumably everyone feels. Chronic feelings are the problem. You’re feeling them for too long, too often.

Sometimes, though, my memory box goes awry. I wake up for one day, or three days, or three weeks or three hours, and I just feel nothing. It makes memories difficult. It makes days slow and painful and challenging, because I’m not feeling the usual emotions in response to what’s happening, and it makes me more of a struggle to be around.

So I started learning how to pretend to have emotions in situations where those emotions were appropriate. I also learned to feel a deep sense of guilt that I had to pretend at all. Chronic emptiness with BPD isn’t the absence of a particular emotion in a particular circumstance. It’s just not feeling anything at all.

It doesn’t matter if your worst thing is worse than my worst thing or better: if you can’t stop thinking about it, everything else is irrelevant.

I have to start believing that I am not the sum of my worst days, but I spend every good day thinking about the worst one, and that has to change.

Would I have done the thing if I didn’t have Mick? Fuck no. But I’ve always known right from wrong, and I knew this was wrong, I just couldn’t feel it at the time, because knowing something is awful but doing it anyway is a symptom.