Just Rambling

So...I've been a little busy lately. Wait...scratch that...I've been A LOT busy lately. I have so much on my plate right now I feel like I’m eating for two (which is impossible as I am currently celibate). The focus of my life at the moment is getting my first research paper out the door. It's a lot of reading, writing, and trying to decide if there are any more experiments I should have done (or should be doing). I'm not going to lie to you...this terrifies me. I am terrified that my work is "not good enough". I am terrified that I've missed something, confused something, or simply don’t know enough to call myself a "scientist". In short...I am terrified that I am going to put this out into the world and it will all be found to be false. This is a completely retarded mind-set. I've presented this work to people that know what they are talking about and it has been well received, but that does nothing to make me feel right about putting my name on a paper as though I know what I’m talking about. But I have to. I have to because if I can't get my paper accepted I can’t graduate and I really want to graduate.

The other newsworthy item in my life is that I've been put on a vascular biology training grant. This is great but...and there is always a but...I’m not a vascular biologist. What does this mean? It means that I have to become a vascular biologist. I now have to publish in that field in addition to my work on bone development. This is extremely exciting as I absolutely love learning new things and hey...I've been immersed in bone for a few years now…so the change is likely to galvanize me and get me excited about research again. However...this is also stressful because it makes me wonder if the one year target to graduation is actually going to happen. I really need to start making more than the grad student stipend. I am tired of working my butt off and being poor. I don't know if I can handle two more years of this and that is likely what it will take to get any sort of publication in a field I know relatively little about.

If only I had a long lost rich relative that would die and leave me a fabulous inheritance.

In other news…I am officially one year older since my last post. I had a most excellent birthday...probably the best birthday I've had in 10 years. It was the kind of birthday that makes you realize how many wonderful people you have in your life. In fact...it's been the kind of week that makes me feel like a fool for ever doubting that there are people in this world that care about me not because they want something from me but just because I’m me. I’m sure much of these revelations have a little something to do with the fact that Leila, the woman who went to great lengths to make me feel as though no one cares, is gone from my life. And its not so much that she was trying to make me feel bad it’s simply that one of her many tweaked views about people and relationships in general is that "no one cares about anyone but themselves", and of course…I had to believe as she does or I’m “crazy”. She honestly believes that people don’t actually care about other people and that all actions are inherently selfish. And really...this is just another example how she projects who she is onto everyone around her. It’s OK for her to be selfish because…hey…everyone is selfish. Those of us that do go out of our way for our friends and loved ones simply because they are our friends and loved ones know that this isn’t true. Try telling that to her.

And what about William? Hmmm. William. Well...he is neither in my life nor out of my life. There is much I could say about him. Many thoughts in my head and stories I could write but I can’t. I see him around. He doesn’t run out of the pub the minute I walk in anymore and he isn’t exactly keeping his distance as he joined (and I use the word joined loosely as he was not really with us but was actually in his head) the group I was with last night. He is still not talking to me. I know he wants to, but he won’t. Not right now anyway…maybe someday. I just can’t bring myself to write about how I feel about all of this in any great detail as my feelings are so conflicted. I don’t even really like talking about it. I still love him and I probably always will. I read the blogs of people that are struggling to recover from the same disorder that William has currently given up the fight against. I want to learn more about it. I want to understand. I want to believe that people with this disorder are not...as they say..."untreatable". I keep hoping for some kind of miracle. I keep hoping that he will wake up and decide its time to change, that being with me is worth doing the work that would need to be done, though I know that it is not likely. Then again, stranger things have happened in L.A.

And some days I think this is all for the best. I’ll get over him eventually and I won’t miss him as much or as often. Like I said…my feelings about all of this are fairly conflicted. For the time being I don’t have to do anything to resolve this conflict as he has walked away. It's a little like the situation with my father. For a long time I didn’t have to feel bad or guilty about not having or even trying to have a relationship with my father as he wasn’t speaking to me. All of that changed when I got a call on my birthday. After 18 months he calls me as though he hasn’t deigned to speak to me for all this time. I still haven’t called him back and I’m pretty conflicted about that decision too.

Try again? Try one more time to have some kind of relationship with my father? He is my father after all…

And all of this has made me want to know everything I possibly can about BPD so I have been doing a fair bit of reading on this. “Stop walking on Eggshells” was a fairly decent read and it is certainly a good place to start if you know little about BPD but it was more about learning techniques to deal with the behavior of the person in your life with BPD than an examination of what BPD is. It doesn’t ask the reader to understand the disorder…it simply says leave the relationship or learn to depersonalize the behavior. “Surviving a Borderline Parent” was decent. It was nice to read that other people have had similar experiences with a parent that I have had with my father. It allowed me to forgive myself for being a “bad daughter” as I now realize I actually wasn’t. A pub med search for “Borderline Personality Disorder” nets 3,809 papers on this subject. Everything from treatment of BPD to structural differences in the brain of people with BPD to single nucleotide polymorphisms in genes that may account for these changes (helloooo gene therapy!). But none of these things really help you understand the person that you care about. I can depersonalize behavior; I am…in fact…a master at depersonalization but I’m also a scientist. I am a person cursed with an analytical mind so I can not just accept what is…I need to understand.

Do I need to understand for Leila? No. She and I don’t have enough in common for me to find it worthwhile to try to have a friendship with her. We have radically different opinions and completely divergent ways of seeing the world and while I don’t feel a strong desire to convince someone that my viewpoint is correct I also don’t have a strong desire to defend it either.

Do I need to understand for my father? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. Though…enough time has passed since he called me that I would guess I’m on his shit list again (if I was ever really off it).

What about my brother? Does he have BPD? He certainly acts like it…I mean…he is a lot like my father and if the disorder has a genetic component it might explain why my brother acts the way he does sometimes. The mood swings, the anger, the irrational thinking that he has about certain events and people. For my brother I need to understand. Not only is he a good, kind, and caring man, he is my baby brother and I really don’t want to ever say the words “I haven’t spoken to my brother in X number of years” again.

Do I need to understand for William? No. For William I want to understand. Even if he never speaks to me again I want to understand what he is going through. What was he trying so hard to fight when we were together? Was he trying to fight? Was he, as he said on the phone one night “trying to change for me?” I didn’t understand what he meant then, but maybe I do now. Furthermore…did he/does he care about me? Is my therapist right in his assertion that people with BPD can’t care about others? I might believe that about Leila…hell she is pretty up front about her lack of concern for anyone but herself. I might believe that about my father though I can’t really say that I know my father all that well. But can I believe that about my brother? No. Can I believe that about William? No.

I can’t. I won’t. I refuse.

So…in my quest to understand I have added a few blogs to my daily read list and I’ll give them a shout-out here in case any of you are as interested in this disorder as I am.

Untreatable's Blog: This blog is great if you want some insight into how the mind of a person with BPD works. If you have ever known someone with BPD, gotten into a confrontation with them, or been enmeshed with them it can explain some of the confusion surrounding “Why does he/she act that way”.

BPD in OKC : A personal blog and the girl has a great sense of humor. It was here that I learned that May is to be "BPD Awareness Month". If you want to see what celebrities would look like if they moved to Oklahoma click here. A bit rude to the state of Oklahoma but funny nonetheless.

Borderline Crazy : She doesn’t have BPD herself, but is the child of a borderline. This one I read because I can commiserate and it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one that grew up dealing with the same kind of shit I dealt with. I’m not the only one that grew up feeling like they were “bad”. Unfortunately it seems that there are a lot of us out there…

And…so we don’t end this on a somber note I would like to inform you all that if I were a dog I’d be a golden retriever.



You are a Golden Retriever!
Laid-back, sociable and well-groomed, you've got your own hip little pack of groupies who just love to be around you. You have a brain inside that adorable little head of yours, though you use it mostly to organize your hectic social calendar. You never poop out at parties, and since you're popular with ladies and men, as well as children and adults, you dish out your wit, charm and luck to whomever is close enough to bask in it. The top dog likes you and wants to be your best friend, despite the fact that he doesn't really know what the heck you do. No one does, in fact, but everyone loves you all the same. A true foodie, you’ve got your keen ears fine-tuned to make sure you don't miss out on the opening of a trendy new place to nosh. But your youthful days of being able to wolf down food 24-7 are wagging behind you, meaning you've got to watch what you eat so you don’t pull a Brando and outgrow your coats.

And if that last line isn’t the gospel truth…I don’t know what is!