Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

of shame. Shame for what is filling my brain until it feels as though it will burst and shatter. My shame tells me that maybe I should get help, while my brain tells me that I should just get on with it. I realise that all I really know for sure is that this, this daily existence, even with the fantasies, has become unbearable. The pain of limbo – of living a life which is wholly concerned with death – is bending me in half every day.

I let my shame take the lead. I run my insurance details and ‘problem’ through a website that gives me a short – very short – list of doctors whom I can see. However, if I’m willing to go outside my insurance and pay, I can see almost three times as many doctors. Each one describes a specialism: PTSD, eating disorders, sexual trauma, self-harm, addiction issues. I try to rank my problems in order of importance. The most pressing one + my insurance + a doctor on the island of Manhattan = the answer.

I end up choosing by the next available appointment, convinced if I have to wait a week, I won’t make it. The next day, I have an appointment with a fifty-something male doctor on the Upper East Side. I step out of the elevator onto the floor of his office, where a thin-lipped secretary sits tucked tight into the corner. Her job seems to be equal parts charging your credit card and welcoming you to the office. A brown and beige office on the outside and inside. I sit on a chair against the wall, one of just two, waiting to be called through the door that’s touching my left shoulder. I run through what I should say in my head. How much of the truth should I tell? Do I tell him how I feel right now? Or how I’ve felt my entire life? Where do I begin? Where would I even end?

I’m called inside his airless office. It’s tiny and tight, little to no light streaming through the blinds that cover both windows. One is almost entirely obscured by the churning, chugging AC unit, covered in dust, spitting out lukewarm air. The other looks out onto another brick building. He looks at me through his wide glasses, weary but ready to hear what I have to say. The words that come out of my mouth are jumbled, jangling. Later I struggle to remember exactly what I told him in my five-or-so-minute speech but I think I talk about my drinking, my shame, my pain, my abuse, my self-harm, my bloodied arms and black insides, how everything goes bad, goes wrong. I think I cry.

He nods, writing down as I speak. He pauses when I eventually stop, spent, and says, ‘It sounds to me like you have borderline personality disorder.’ He says that my trauma wired my brain differently. He prescribes mood stabilisers and anti-depressants. I forget to ask any questions, take my prescriptions from his hands and I’m back in the hall, confused and relieved. Relieved that after all these years, I have a name for what’s wrong with me. I have pills that will make it better. Maybe they’ll even make me not want to die, I think. Or feel a little bit more like living.

I Google as soon as I’ve offered up my credit card, been dispatched in the lift and am back out on the street. There are generally accepted to be nine symptoms of borderline personality disorder:

1) Fear of abandonment

2) Unstable relationships

3) Unclear or unstable self-image

4) Impulsive, self-destructive behaviours

5) Self-harm

6) Extreme emotional mood swings

7) Chronic feelings of emptiness

8) Explosive anger

9) Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality

I think of the blades I’ve snapped out of my plastic razors and taken to my skin. I think of the moments too many to count – when I’ve felt hollowed out, like at my very core is nothing but air and space. I think of the rage that makes my vision blur. I think of the heart-stopping desperation when I’m left or in fear of being left. I think of the minutes when the feelings and emotions I can’t separate out reverberate off the walls.

I go to the pharmacy a couple of blocks away to get my prescriptions. Two orange bottles containing my hope. I take them home and put them on the white bedside table unopened. I choose not to take one that day. I don’t ask why. The next day, the same. By the third day I know that I’m saving them. Two full pill bottles could be the answer to a different question. Knowing they’re there makes me feel safe, makes me feel that it’ll all be OK. They’re the way out when the time comes. And I know, instinctively, that the time is coming.

CHAPTER 23

At the same time that my mind is breaking, my body begins to buckle. I stop eating. I lose half a stone, finally arriving at the weight I’ve always wanted to be. My legs spasm. My brain feels like cotton wool. My skull fuzzes from the inside as what feels like volts of electricity run between the left ear and the right. I have pins and needles in my hands, my feet. I fall over in the street. I feel anxious and absent and out of sorts. Something is wrong, I know it. I’m coming undone, bone by bone, muscle by muscle, organ by organ, cell by cell.

The doctor bangs a small hammer against my knees and elbows, shines a light in my eyes, asks me to grip her arm, hard. Due to the luck of my insurance, I’m sent for an MRI the next day. I tell the doctor that I’m claustrophobic, can’t breathe in small spaces, won’t be able to spend what I’m told will be forty-five minutes lying in a tube in a machine. She reassures me that they’ll give me