poesia: esquina
here’s the english version of this poem:
Poetry: Strange
me tienes en la esquina de confusión y desilusión como un animal
tratando de entenderte, siempre persiguiendote,
Viviendo de los trozos de atención y afección que me tiras
cuando te da la gana
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poetry: panic attack at work
I wrote this poem in October of 2022.
The wild elephant visits me and threatens my sanity and I can’t breathe-
Waves of trauma hit and overwhelmed my mind and body
It’s time for fight or flight and I choose flight-
A few minutes in the bathroom when I count my breaths and calm my inner child
who is screaming internally because she feels unsafe, helpless, and scared
And middle age me quells her-puts on a blanket of strength and resilience
Tells her, it will be okay and she’s safe-and I’ll protect her-
And within minutes I’m back to my normal self-
go back to work and take out any remnants of my panic driven energy
on the product I have left to stock
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poetry: that extra shift
I wrote this poem in October of 2022.
I don’t want to work that extra shift but my discover statement
tells me otherwise-
it tells me that once again I’m falling into a world of debt-
for daring to live a life above my means, above my class
and if I’m not careful I can slip back into poverty status
so I’ll work that extra shift and stop trying to live
a higher class life that’s not meant for me yet-
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Song of the Day 😪 “and I got this rubberband on my wrist “😪
Song of the Day 😘 “fuck your confession”😘
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poetry: tsunami
Aqui esta la version en espanol:
Poesia: El Pasado
a tsunami of trauma washes over me and I regress to being 16-
as I walk on the beach where I first fell in love
as I stand on the bridge where I lost my shit and almost jumped off-
regret and guilt sit at the bottom of my stomach
and I want to vomit
Instead, I pause and count to ten and breathe
and I’m transported back to my present
I’m safe again in my body-
as I come to accept and love
the immature and impulsive girl I once was
who carelessly gave herself to others
who never thought about the consequences
and took risks
she wasn’t the atrocity I made her out to be-
she was just in a rush to live her life
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poesía: hecha y derecha
Here’s the English Version of this poem:
Poetry: Home
llegó al sitio de mi juventud y recorro en mi mente todo lo sucedido
días de mi felicidad, días de mi amargura
y todo me aloca al llenarme sentimientos encontrados
que se habían perdido en la esquina oscura de mi mente
pero poco a poco regreso a mi presente
y se que ya no soy la niña ingenua e engreída de ayer
ahora soy una mujer hecha y derecha
lista para enfrentar mi pasado lleno de heridas emocionales
que todavia sangran
lista para sanar todo lo que ignore alguna vez
es una necesidad para seguir adelante con mi vida
sin que los fantasmas de mi pasado mi sigan persiguiendo
y haciendo un desmadre de mi presente y futuro
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Song of the Day 🔥 “I’m fixing my karma”🔥
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A Year Since My Diagnosis: The Middle-Therapy Works
Around September,I started to logically understand how out of control my behavior was at times. The strange thing about it is it doesn’t feel like me when I’m acting that way. I’m a person who has always tried to have control over all aspects of my life. For example, when I was first diagnosed, I was naive enough to think that I could somehow “fast-track my healing” . I quickly learned that’s not how healing or therapy works. It didn’t matter how quickly I read my DBT workbook or did the exercises from there, how many poems I wrote about grief in one day, or how many healthy coping mechanisms I picked up along the way; healing and changing my behavior was going to take time and patience. I couldn’t speed up the process if I truly wanted to get better.
I needed to learn to sit with my grief, anger, mania, self-hatred, and any other uncomfortable and painful emotions and learn a healthy way to process and cope with them instead of chasing it away with booze, sex, or binge shopping. It’s been hard to do, and I’ve stumbled along the way and have made many mistakes. One thing I’ve learned this year is that changing unhealthy patterns in my behavior had to be the most arduous and difficult work I’ve ever done. For example, maybe one day I’m feeling fat and ugly, the old me would have gone binge shopping on Amazon for a pretty dress or reached out to one of the casual Joes in my life for validation; the new and healthy version of me had to ask myself the whys of why I’m feeling fat and ugly and what triggered this reaction in me, do I need to write about it, what can I do to make myself feel better that doesn’t involved shopping or the validation from others? It’s way harder to face my insecurities head on than chase them away with a quick and temporary adrenaline rush or serotonin fix. Throughout all this it helped to have an incredible support system who gave me what I needed emotionally to process, grow and move forward in my journey. Part of that support system was my therapist who was kind, compassionate, knowledgeable, and patient with me. I was really tough to deal with at times and I wanted to break up with her at times cause she pushed me a lot when it came to my driving phobia. I remember having a panic attack in front of her because of a driving exposure but she calmed me down enough so I could do it. I got paranoid after thinking she would leave me but she didn’t. She stuck by me through the end of our therapy sessions in January of this year. The few times I’d missed a session, she would call me to check in and talk to me for at least 10 minutes to make sure I was okay. She was also respectful of me and my experiences. I’ve had therapists in the past who talked down to me and were condescending and she wasn’t one of them. People talk about finding “the one” at the “right time”; well in my case, I found the “right therapist” at the “right time” in my life. Here is a poem I wrote about her:
From September to January, there was so much progress in my healing and mental health journey thanks to having the adequate resources and tools because of my therapist. I did beat a driving phobia (but that’s a story I’ll tell in depth later on) and I was free from suicidal ideation until May of this year. What was strange to me during these months was how I was learning to really live and enjoy my life. I remember that before my diagnosis, I’d get annoyed sometimes at having to spend time with my kids. During the months of September to December, something switched in me to have this new appreciation for motherhood and spending time with my children. My relationship with my three sons got better and I grew closer to them. I feel like I’m finally the mom my children deserve.
Here is a poem I wrote about them:
My Three Kings
My first king, I met at 17
when the nurse placed
an alien like being in my arms
She was like “feed him”
and I was like “how do I do that?”
What should I do with him?
Eventually I figured it out
My second king, I met at 24
as a birthday present, just like me
he had to make a dramatic entrance
but it was love at first sight
No one could take him from my arms
I knew what to do
My third king, I met at 30
He was a dream delivered
After a dream lost the previous year
He was planned, he was awaited, he was loved
He was welcome by everyone
with him, I felt a completion of love
1/24/2022
As I’ve also mentioned, my therapy sessions ended in January and after that I was on my own with my maintenance plan making sure I didn’t do anything to sabotage the progress I had made.
to be continued…
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A Year Since My BPD Diagnosis: The Beginning was Tough
6/30/2022
It’s been a year since I received my life changing diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and so much in my life has changed because of it. I started therapy sometime around late June and I had to do a 3-hour mental health assessment in two separate sessions where my therapists asked me questions about past trauma and past patterns of behavior. It was a really, rough week emotionally for me because of that and other personal stuff going on in my life. I sat down across from my therapist as she explained how Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis ended up on my concept map.
My reaction was one of numbness and shock. And then I made the mistake of going to the internet and looking it up and well BPD gets a bad rap for good reason. After reading all the bad things about BPD, I thought “I knew I had issues and was kind of messed up, but I didn’t expect to be this fucked up, this broken”. It doesn’t help that a couple of things that stand out on the internet about BPD are “BPD is the most painful mental disorder “Or “BPD people are manipulative” or “Some people with BPD are incapable of love”. It didn’t help that at the time I was diagnosed, I was also having a mental breakdown and my relationship at the time was on the rocks. When I told my friends and family about my diagnosis, most of them were supportive and encouraging but some were in denial and didn’t fully accept it. I was told “I couldn’t have BPD because I’m not so awful” or that “it’s not a big deal”.
A couple of weeks after my diagnosis, I was broken up with. While I don’t want to go into the details about the events that led up to the demise of that relationship; I will say that the last day I saw my ex, there were a couple of things he said to me that really impacted me and made me really look at my life. I won’t say what they were, but it was useful for the next part of my journey. The breakup validated my worst fears about myself, “I’m unlovable”, I’m hard to love”, “I’m always going to be too emotionally unstable to be in a relationship” “I don’t deserve love” “I always fuck up everything good in my life” “I’m too fucked up and broken to be loved” etc., etc. Y’all have read the poetry and stories about how I don’t handle breakups well-ever. So, I’m lying-in bed crying and thinking all these things and don’t want to get up. I was on vacation when this happened so I could’ve stayed in bed all day and it would have been fine. However, something told me to keep going and getting up. The rest of the month of July is a blur to me at this point. I did document through video and journaling what I did so I know what I did, however there are parts of that month I don’t remember living.
I know I kept up with my therapy appointments and worked every day and wrote. Something I had to do for therapy was keep a daily diary card monitoring my emotions and any situations that brought out strong emotions in me. The main emotions I felt the months of July, August, and September were anger, sadness, and despair so filling out my diary card was a task but also necessary for me to get better at coping with life.
Something my current therapist said in group therapy was how grief makes one take a stock of life and how you’re living it. After the breakup, while yes, I felt this immense grief over that situation, I also felt grief and anger over other traumatic events in my life I hadn’t healed from. It was like I had this closet full of unprocessed trauma that was about to burst open at any time and in July, the door busted wide open and out came well, almost everything I kept inside of me well hidden. Shame, guilt, anger, fury, despair, sadness over past trauma were feelings I became well acquainted with for those first three months. I felt stuck at times in this emotional fog but somehow kept going. I continually asked myself what the purpose of all my hard work was and at first it was so that I don’t ever “split” on my kids like I had on other people in my past. I also had to learn a new language with my BPD diagnosis. I know that sounds weird but with all the new vocabulary words thrown at me, it’s what it felt like. In June and July, I learned real quick what dissociation, masking, and splitting was because that’s basically what I did those months. I also learned the term hypersexuality which I’ve addressed in some of my posts and poetry in this blog. Reflecting on everything that I’ve learned I can understand how my behavior can seem scary and unsafe to some people. I’ve finally had a deep understanding of how much of my erratic and impulsive behavior has greatly impacted my life.
To be continued to part two…
Resources:
BPD Terminology:
https://shitborderlinesdo.freeforums.net/thread/37/important-bpd-terminology
Here is an episode from my favorite podcast “Back From the Borderline” about breakups that resonated with me: https://open.spotify.com/episode/19fVPtpfy8bsO2qEKQueWv?si=8NWz6oVVQ52coU1g-Bcwyg&utm_source=copy-link
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Poetry: Art
I wrote this poem in August of 2022.
Sex is a work of art if you are in love-
Two bodies entwined in a collaborative rhythm
Two bodies matching energies that derive
a great pleasure
It presents a beautiful picture of ecstasy
Anything else is just a mediocre sketch
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Poetry: Halfway through 41
I wrote this poem in August of 2022.
Halfway through 41, I am truly alone
no potential love candidates
and sometimes the loneliness threatens to kill my soul-
But I know better than to suffer through another deception
so I process all of my feelings through poetry
Hoping it’s enough to keep the romantic in me
from making another mistake
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Poetry: 5 AM
I wrote this poem in August of 2022.
At 5 am, I woke up and wrote a 4 page poem
about how I wasn’t enough and proceeded to crash my car
and my therapist asked if I wanted to die-
And I was like “nah, I just couldn’t reign my impulsivity in”
at least this time I got control of the car and didn’t fuck
anyone else up
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Poetry: Insecure
Aqui esta la version en español :
Poesia: Demaciado Sencilla
you told me I’m not wife material
so you dropped me like I was nothing
but not before you took me to your bed a few times
but not before filling my head with the illusion
that you wanted a future with me-
Are you sick in the head?
Is this how you always operate?
Finding an insecure girl to get your primal needs met
and later on dropping them like a bad habit
Life on the BPD 