Robin egg blue

TLDR: When someone shares their struggle, give them the room in the conversation to share their feelings. Especially don't try to invalidate them with your thoughts. They're trying to describe to you just how much 'you can never know of someone else'.

Happy Easter, folks! The Lord has risen!

I failed at my intentions to break the year long sleep-in drought three days in a row now. Seems I am getting sufficient rest this long weekend and my body is happily functioning according to natural order; 0900AM. At least, I awoke to a cuddle from the cat. What a beautiful moment. I would highly recommend - great for mental health.

But the moment I really want to share with you is when old high school friends of the cousins' came for a little reunion.

When I meet a complete stranger the last thing I intentionally talk about is my personality disorder. I promise I don't have business cards printed up to flaunt my flaw. BUT, the topic did come up when we began talking about childhoods and the four years of family learning this lady had to go through to adjust to diabetes 1 in her son. Of course mental health, and the topic of sleeplessness and poor eating came up. This is when I mentioned that I 'go to group therapy for a personality disorder.' The reciprocating response was the usual, 'we all have battles, and you just never really know someone else.'

I'm just going to give that a moment to sink in (and to walk away as my anger tightly grips my hummingbird heart).

Though the intention was good, I definitely began to feel pain and immediately zoned out, because in my mind, I completed the conversation based on the same thread EVERYONE else has taken me along; we all have battles, my parents never did this, and though they weren't mean people, I turned out like this.

Again, good intentions, but this is where the lack of mental health education begins to show. My rage can be summarised by: why would you compare the common cold to having autism?

You don't.

Let's keep thinking about this physically. Everyone catches the cold, EVERYONE. And everyone overcomes it with skills and pills. But how many of us end up with OCD? Or tourettes? Or Motor Neurone Disease? Or Diabetes 1? and is able to say that we're recovered?

You suffered the flu and recovered in bed for a week. We caught the flu and had to go back to work where we learnt to resent and protect ourselves. I appreciate that you fought a battle, but you had the tools to. Our intentions may now be wrong because we never effectively learnt the right way to recover, but they were right at getting us this far. We did our best, and we survived without becoming immune to the flu the same way you may have.

Not everyone wins their battle, and that's where we are left forgotten.

Everyone can remember bad, everyone can trace back their motivations from what they were taught, and that makes sense, I can relate. But as a percentage can you truly say you suffered?

Cancer isn't the worse that it gets. Mental Health is. So many of us in therapy identify with the heart breaking statement, 'I wish I had cancer, cause then people would understand.' #BPDthings. There are no foundations raising support or funds for the learning of Dialectical Behavioural Skills, there are no subsidies or considerations when you've lost your job because you couldn't keep up, there is no sympathy or empathy when you tell someone you have a personality disorder, because there is no understanding that we aren't just all psychopaths, or simply misunderstood. There is no understanding that we aren't faking it, there is no understanding that we can't describe it like pain, and there is no forgiveness for when you lose control no matter how many times you say 'sorry' or change your actions.

When something threatens your life, minimising it in conversation isn't going to make it go away. Are you really going to try minimising my experience because you think you've already resolved it in your life? Only sharing pain may help you get through, asking questions is the way to make you think differently about it, and eye contact always goes a long way.