BPD

This was, originally, a blog entry about something else, but I like to recycle, so it's being purged and rewritten.

I got a raise this week. Not a big raise, but it was still a raise. This is both good, and a huge deal, because I haven't had a raise in over three years.

It's not an economy thing; my company is financially healthy and reasonably well managed. No, the problem is me, and my brain. It's a repeating pattern of failure that pretty much defined my 20's; get a job, learn fast, impress bosses, lose interest, ADHD sets in, fuck up too many times, get written up or worse, and eventually leave the job before they get the chance to fire me for incompetence or insubordination or whatever. I saw the same god damn pattern starting up again, so I finally went to a competent shrink, figured out that I have ADHD, got on meds, etc, etc.

That's all been in the last four months. Those were a rough handful of months too, between getting doses right, rethinking my sense of identity, neurotically reviewing my entire past from the framework of my new knowledge, and just general life stress of work and animal rescue and trying to keep my shit together.

So when it came time for my annual review I went in braced for bad shit, just like always. I had some hope and some feedback that I was doing better, but you never really know. But it was good, and my bosses were impressed. Not just impressed, but actually really shocked and happy at the sudden cessation of me being a terminal fuckup.

They had to take the whole year into account, which is fair, so the review wasn't great, but the end of the year improvement was so dramatic that they pushed to get me a raise, even if I probably didn't warrant one all things considered.

So that was cool, and I was sort of happy, but there's always that little voice back there in your brain (asshole) that says shit like 'well, it should have been like this all along, loser. Try harder.'

So I was thinking I should be happy and stuff, but still felt shitty and weird and sort of shell shocked, and then it just hit me: this ridiculous, raging ball of emotion, like right in the pit of my stomach, and I started to cry at my desk.

"What... what the fuck, holy shit! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME!!" I said to myself, as I scurried off to the bathroom to hid my nervous breakdown and, possibly, drown myself in the toilet to save face. It took about fifteen minutes for me to get a grip.

It's worth describing myself physically at this point: I look like a skinny viking. My nickname among my friends (well, one of the nicknames) is, I shit you not, 'Walking Swedish Murder Machine', in reference to Brock Samson, and it's not ironic either. I say that not to brag about being Swedish, or way taller than this world is built for, or a Murder Machine (of what? I don't know. My own sperm, I guess). I say it to illustrate how ball-crushingly ridiculous my blubbering all the way to the cripple bathroom must have looked.

Fortunately, no one saw me (I hope?), so I was able to fake having some dignity once I dried my eyes and composed myself.

That was some heavy shit. That was some seriously repressed stress and fear and worry and anxiety and all that after this ADHD mess, that just spilled right the fuck out without so much as a friendly acknowledgement of my social anxiety and sense of shame.

The last four months of finally being able to think clearly, to keep track of things, to stay interested or at least fake being interested in something for longer than five minutes... has been stressful. Really, really stressful.

I realize that after ten years of fail, I had pretty much stopped trying anymore. I mean, why bother? Although as I type this, it occurs to me that this has gone all the way back to my childhood, with my D+ average grades and three years of summer school to barely get out of high school on time and with a diploma.

So really, this is more like... 25 years of fail. I mean, I've had some successes in spite of it, but that's the pattern. It sucks.

For the past four months of actually doing things well, of not fucking up, I built up a bowling ball sized know of stress I didn't even know was there. So bad that I've got neck pain and I sleep like shit, and maybe it's the meds, who knows... But a big part of it is that I have no fucking idea how to handle success. This isn't even big success, this is tiny every day shit, like holding down a job or remembering to take out the trash. I am actually overwhelmed by being less of a screw up. It's a lot of pressure. I'm so used to being a disappointment to family and authority figures that I don't know how to handle being something different.

I'm going to try to just roll with it, because I don't know what the hell else to do.

That mini melt down was good though. I needed it. I feel like an asshole, but it still had to happen. I've barely drawn in months, been withdrawing from everyone I know, just trying to keep it together and sort out shit in my head.

So after crying like a wuss for a while I feel better. I know that bottling up emotions is a bad thing, and we're supposed to express ourselves, and it's okay for men to cry in this day and age and all that, but there's a big difference between knowing these things conceptually and going through it for real. It feels bloody emasculating, whether it should be or not.

Well, I have a bunch of puppy-drunk women yelling at me to get food, so I'll end this for now. Next up: New Years Resolution Bullshit, or maybe more mental issues. Or maybe both.