Miss Misery #7: My Emotions Are Trying
failing, but trying
Mental Health
I wrote the following letter at one a.m. a couple nights ago, after a particularly bad bout of premenstrual mood symptoms got the best of me and I picked a wholly avoidable fight with my boyfriend. He thought these words were helpful, so I’m sharing them with you.
I’m sorry, Brian. I adore you.
Emotions always come with a message: that’s their evolutionary purpose. Joy is supposed to attract us to the things that make us healthier, and fear tells us when we’re in danger. Negative emotions are especially useful for survival, because they help us avoid threats and unnecessary risks. That’s why when we’re in a bad mood, we can usually discern the reason. If we couldn’t tell where unpleasant emotions were coming from, they would be useless.
Therefore, the human brain has evolved not to emote in a vacuum. At a very deep and visceral level, it’s built to interpret the way it feels. When a brain is healthy, this is a really useful function. However, it creates the potential for neural activity to go disastrously wrong if the way we feel stops reflecting reality.
This is a key part of borderline personality disorder. BPD makes me feel really big emotions that my brain, in all its innocent natural instincts, assigns meaning. So when I’m depressed, angry, anxious, or entrenched in any other huge and unhappy mood state, my mind tries really hard to understand why.
But because of BPD, the bigger my mood, the less likely it’s caused by something that’s actually around me, and the more likely it’s because of something in me–namely, that my brain malfunctions and my emotions natively spiral out of hand. But my mind isn’t built to understand that something within it is broken. (If it could, it wouldn’t be broken.) So, in a panic of cognitive dissonance, it tries even more desperately to understand what’s wrong. When it can’t find anything, it invents something.
And then it screams at me about what it believes is causing my unhappiness. I feel miserable? Life must be pointless and unfair. I feel rage? Someone must have done me so, so wrong. I feel crippling fear? I have to leave this room right now.
None of that is ever really true, though. BPD just feeds my brain overwhelming feelings that it tries really hard to interpret. However, the feelings are inherently uncalled for, so my brain has to invent fantastic realities to accommodate them.
Most of the time, I can sort truth from panic. I have a mental catalog of many of the unrealistic mantras my mind tells me, like “everyone here knows you’re a fraud,” “you should quit all your commitments and start your life over,” or the old standby, “you should just kill yourself”. I’ve flagged these thoughts as inaccurate assessments of reality, and I can ignore them most of the time. When I’m tired, stressed, or suffering from my monthly bouts of premenstrual depression, it gets much harder to turn the volume down on this constant stream of panicked thoughts–but what happens then is its own discussion.
I try to cut my brain some slack. It’s not trying to lie to me. It just doesn’t know how else to stay afloat in an ocean of painful feelings. I’m still learning how to conceptualize my brain as a victim of its own emotions, not an evil villain creating them on purpose. It’s a lifelong process.
Knitting
Making my own patterns is one of my great joys in knitting. (It’s also my worst enemy, because counting stitches is math, and my relationship with numbers is hateful fraught, to say the least.) I discovered a site called Chart Minder, where it’s free and pretty easy to design custom knitting charts. I used it to put together patterns for a knit book I made as my final project for an art class, where each page features the name of one of my friends from work.
Euan wanted a shrimp design. He just really likes shrimp.
I’m super proud of the final project, which I named Grapes in reference to our office’s mascot, Mr. Grape.
Long story.
Shameless Self-Promotion
If you send me three dollars on Patreon, I’ll send you the first bit of my novel, which is the loving and painstaking result of three years of drafting. A dollar a year is a great deal, y’all.
If you want to contact me, I find your comments life-giving. If you’re interested in a custom knit, my email is littleknittingmachine@gmail.com.
Thanks for reading another edition of the Miss Misery Newsletter, folx. Remember to be compassionate today.