I wish I knew less, actually
deconstructing the tornado
The say knowledge is power. I call bullshit.
I’m not here to write about a ~mental health journey~ or tell you how much I’ve grown or how much better I feel or any of that shit. The process isn’t fun and progress brings with it its own set of glaring downsides. The worst one, by far, is gaining awareness to what is actually going on, understanding it better - and still being unable to fix any of the shit things about yourself that you hate.
If I think back to 2020, mid-way through a full nervous breakdown that ended up being 16 months long, still stung from a shitty break-up with a man so uninteresting and unattractive, I still feel embarrassed thinking about how many tears I cried over that idiot. I’d made quite a bit of progress in therapy, but not the sort that makes you feel better. No, I had made some horrifying realisations about myself, my history, my dead mother who I never knew, my family, my place in it all. It was a huge tornado of sadness, anger, confusion, disappointment, and abandonment that overwhelmed everything. I just couldn’t fucking handle it. Not helped, of course, by trying to reach out to my parents and being called a selfish piece of shit for having the nerve to ask for some love and affection during what I sincerely hope was rock bottom. We didn’t speak for fifteen months after that.
The tornado inside my head of course had moments of joy in it. I wasn’t suicidal. I had temporary respite from the numbness where I could live a little. I would go to the market with my best friend Lena, we’d buy some halloumi, cook up a divinely beige veggie breakfast and watch reality TV. I lived in a big house with 20 of my friends and I was never alone. I tried to give a fuck about my research masters that I absolutely hated and tried to bond with my cohort over zoom. I did actually make one very good friend in zoom class, who is one of my biggest cheerleaders when it comes to my creative output and helping me overcome the huge embarrassment that comes with every published newsletter. COVID rumbled on in the background, and it didn’t really have much of an impact on me other than marooning me at home - which is what I’d probably have been doing anyway. When you’re that depressed a global pandemic barely registers. In fact, it’s when I started to be annoyed about COVID restrictions that I realised I was feeling a bit better. The outside world concerning me was a sign that my inside world was calming down enough for me to notice something, anything else.
The beauty of the tornado, I now see looking back at someone who has bitterly embraced clarity, is that it didn’t really make much sense. It was just chaos, and chaos can be strangely comforting when it’s what you’re used to. Not understanding something can be the easiest way forward; ignorance is bliss, right? I didn’t have the cognitive ability to figure any of it out in the moment. I focused on getting up every day, feeding myself, being around people, going to zoom therapy, going to zoom university. I tried to not be angry all the time.
Then things got better. But that doesn’t mean it got easier.
I started doing the actual work. And not in the sense that I pulled my socks up and became disciplined or any of that #girlboss #grindset #manifesting bullshit. I just had to be patient and let my brain stop screaming so I could hear a little better. I got a BPD diagnosis. I saw patterns, I learned that the ways I acted weren’t just random, but that they could be labelled and identified, that certain triggers (god how I hate that word) might lead to certain outcomes. Everything seemed so much more manageable. I know people have their own issues about modern psychiatry and the pathologising of natural reactions to adversity, both the local (my life sucks) and the global (we’re living under fascism and we’re all going to die from climate change). But I have to side with the man on this one. Finding the vocabulary to describe how I felt and acted was the first step in understanding. Breaking everything into tasty digestible morsels means you’re less likely to choke to death.
What I didn’t realise in my arduous slog to startling clarity was that viewing everything clearly doesn’t actually make things better. Actually, I felt worse. I could draw a through line from childhood/adolescent/young adult/recent trauma and connect it succinctly to how I was feeling in the present. What I couldn’t do with this information was to start behaving like I knew better.
Gaining the knowledge brought with it little more than total embarrassment and self-awareness that I couldn’t handle. I felt so stupid. I had the tools to make it better and I still couldn’t do it. I knew what was wrong and I still didn’t know how to fix it. My instincts didn’t change. They stayed the same while I watched myself act like a bull in a china shop, wearing my “I am enlightened about my own condition” hat and thinking ah yes, she is splitting. Look at that black and white thinking. What an extreme reaction to a small trigger. How she panics about abandonment. How interesting that this objectively intelligent woman who is considered a success story, someone who has “turned out alright despite everything”, can’t apply anything a single fucking thing she’s learned to help herself feel better.
So while I beat myself up about how I couldn’t find a way to make life easier with all this shiny new knowledge I’d acquired, I began the long and painful process of realising that beating myself up about how I felt was actually my default setting and I needed to stop doing that before anything else. I looked up terms like “identified patient” and threw up in my mouth a little bit at the fact that I ever thought I was unique in my suffering. I’m not special, guys!
The realisation that just assuming there was something wildly wrong with me was, in fact, learned behaviour rather than the truth was not exactly pleasant. Teaching yourself grace and forgiveness in your 30s is hard. Learning that my needs were valid and that it was wrong to have been made to feel that I was just being dramatic/needy/selfish is all well and good but how do you change it? How do you apply those changes? Can I actually change?
The whirlwind dissipated sometime in 2021. I started to ride my bike again and met someone who is now my closest and dearest friend. I reconnected with my family in 2022. That’s also the year I met my current, supportive, loving, patient partner. I switched masters degrees to one I was actually interested in and graduated in 2023 with amazing grades. In 2024 I got my first full time job and my partner moved over to Amsterdam with me. I also started hardcore BPD specific therapy. In 2025 we moved into our first home together.
I’ll probably be in therapy for the rest of my life to figure out stuff that happened when I was too young to comprehend anything, but also things that happened when I was old enough to have that niggling feeling that something was wrong, without the vocabulary to figure it out. I just need to keep telling myself that it’s not a personal failure on my part that I can’t figure it all out at once, by myself, flawlessly, right now. It’s crazy how I expect myself to be so very capable of this while also assuming that I am incapable at the first stumble.
Embarrassment and shame have controlled my life for so long and I’m getting a bit sick of it. Every time I write something like this and fire it out into the world I hate how it makes me feel. Even when someone says something nice about it, I don’t believe them. And that’s why I have to keep on writing. Until one day, I don’t feel ashamed about how I feel any more. One day.
for Lena, who kept me going
This is brilliant