Invisible: Sometimes You Miss the Forest Through the Trees

By Kim Lemke

Growing up in a large family, it is easy to get lost in the shuffle. Invisible takes you on a retrospective journey through life as seen through the distorted eyes of Samantha Wilton, a woman who struggles with Borderline Personality Disorder. What happens when a person with BPD is constantly challenged or disrespected? How much is too much, and what will the conniving mind of this deranged, seemingly normal person decide is justified? The book is a roller coaster of emotion and erratic thinking that will touch you in a way no other character ever has.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524657482

Kim Lemke

no ATA

Book preview

Chapter 1

TORMENTED

I recently watched Anderson Cooper do an experiment to see what it’s like to be schizophrenic. He spent his day with ear buds filling his head with comments and suggestions – yelling at him, encouraging him, berating him, praising him and hating him. I know I’m not schizophrenic because the voices in my head are my own. I guess it helps that they have been there my entire life – or maybe it’s more of a hindrance. Turning them off makes things confusing and far more difficult to deal with. For 20 odd years I have been back and forth on and off medications trying to get my depression, bi-polar disorder, mania, anxiety, panic attacks and any and every other problem that solely exist in my head, under control; only to find myself preferring the symptoms to the side effects of the drugs.

My name is Samantha Wilton I am fifty years old and still alive - for now. Actually, this is quite the accomplishment for me; all things considered. Over the last 20 some years I have learned that I can only handle being off of my medication for two years at the most. After which time, as a rule of thumb, I become unemployed – this seems to happen a lot, generally with no good explanation in my mind. I suppose there is the little issue of my mental instability due to the lack of medication when am gainfully employed and the fact that my body cannot handle stress and my brain doesn’t process criticism well. The worst part is the extreme and uncontrollable emotions. I can say that, but even when I am employed and medicated within two years my body seems to overpower the medications. My mind begins to unravel and I start to lose control of myself. This usually means I suddenly walk out, have a major meltdown, (complete with self-inflicted injury) or I just plain lose it on the job and get fired. This unemployment always means excellent and affordable insurance coverage: Including the ability to afford the psychiatrist, counselor, behavioral therapy and the list of medications the doctors want me to take to turn off my ‘imaginary self’. Not to mention a mental vacation to get my mind back under control. It’s a vicious cycle.

No offense but psychiatrists and the healthcare system are a joke – Can someone tell me how a person who sees me for twenty minutes every four to six weeks could possibly know what kind of medications I need to be on? I don’t believe that mental illnesses are cookie cutter sort of ailments like strep throat – swab the throat, simple test, here are your antibiotics, have a great day, you will get better. For crazies, like me, it’s more like try this medication for the next two months – if it makes you want to hurt yourself or someone else, then call me and we will wean you off of it for a few weeks then start you on something else that won’t be effective for another six to eight weeks. If you were counting we are almost up to five months of no hope in sight.

I find it funny how the government just wants to take guns away from everybody instead of treating the mental illnesses that create the instabilities and cause seemingly ‘normal’ people to be easily influenced by terrorist propaganda. Mental illness is in no way like strep throat which causes your throat to swell and hurt. Mental illness causes your thoughts and emotions to swell out of control and hurt. It causes a person to hate themselves because they feel insignificant, unloved and unimportant; you become completely disconnected from yourself and the world. So, months of side effects; waiting, switching pills, spending months loading and unloading while trying to keep the intense thoughts and emotions under enough control to function while trying to ‘be normal’ and balance the side effects of a new drug - seems like mockery.

I believe that there are several factors involved in order to turn out as screwed up as me. I consider myself ‘high-functioning’. At least I used to like to think I fell under this category of people who are crazy and they know it and think they can control it. Needless to say, there is no doubt something is wrong with me mentally – I’m not sure it was there before the medications started but somewhere around 17 things got out of control, I can see that now.

I have had so many bad experiences with psychologists and counselors I don’t even know where to begin. Should I start with my first psychologist? The one who told me at fifteen it looked like the burn mark I was self-inflicting looked like I had a big penis on my arm? Or maybe the one who I saw in college that tried to convince me that I was a lesbian and all my problems would go away once I just came out of the closet and accepted myself for who I really was? Or the numerous ones over the years that have told me I just need to find a way to get over it and move on with my life? Better still the most recent one that told me she couldn’t see me anymore until I cut my family out of my life entirely.

All I can do is sigh and shake my head. These people sit back and look at what they perceive as my life but have no clue who I even am. They of course feel they can fix what’s taken decades to create with their ingenious ideas (how come I’ve never tried that before?) and their crackpot advice. If another medical professional suggests I try DBT, or CBT or any other ‘behavior therapy’, I might honestly lose it. After 20 years don’t you think I have tried every form of therapy and drug combination that are out there? I even apply the lessons daily. It doesn’t change who I am or how my mind works.

I don’t mean to offend anyone who struggles with a real disability, but my mental illness is difficult to handle most times because I KNOW I’m crazy – even though I don’t want to be. I use the word crazy because it is appropriate in my case. Some days the voices are positive, some days they want me to kill myself or watch myself bleed. Other days they go on about the dirty laundry or the weeds in the cracks of the driveway. We can add every kind of comment positive, negative, angry, self-loathing and so on to this list. On very rare occasions I will have a day when my head tells me I can take on the world and do great things. That doesn’t happen often and when it does I find that the following days are filled with hateful, doubt filled, self-loathing questions about how stupid I could have been to believe I could succeed or how stupid I could have been to believe someone liked me or why I didn’t get that job or why I lost a job.

Mania? Bi-Polar Disorder? Who knows? Apparently none of the doctors or psychologists that have seen me over the last 20 some years because here I sit again wanting to bite myself or tear more chunks of my hair out of my head. Most recently I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder – but there is no pill for that. I’ve done the research and I would like to add that I am also a sociopath. This however, is based on information about my life that I can never disclose to any doctor.

I would imagine this is what it must feel like to be born without the use of your legs. You just make adjustments to your life to accommodate your needs – you don’t realize just how different you really are because this is your normal. Sometimes you fall or can’t reach due to the limitations on your body, and just like my illness, there is nothing you can do to fix it. I just can’t sit at home staring at the wall or hiding under my blankets waiting for a positive day. Unfortunately sometimes out in the real world I just can’t compensate no matter how hard I try. At least paraplegics’ are obvious about their disability and people will generally try to accommodate or are at the very least understanding and most times happy to try and help them as best they can.

I don’t wear a badge or a bracelet that says WARNING: Borderline Personality Disorder – I hear mean people and feel things amplified by 100% and I may lose my fucking shit and literally go crazy on you at any moment. My disorder doesn’t come with instructions because it is a cluster-fuck of diagnoses. The National Institute for Mental Health characterizes borderline personality disorder as a serious mental illness marked by unstable moods, unstable behavior, and unstable relationships. Come on now – isn’t everybody’s life totally unstable? I guess I’ve always believed that it was just all in my head and I should ignore the constant dialog and do as everyone says and just get over it. Even the voices have told me that. They remind me that I am stupid for thinking there is something that just isn’t right about me and I’m just lazy for letting it get in the way of my life. I really just need to stop all the attention seeking.

‘Most people who have borderline personality disorder suffer from problems regulating emotions and thoughts, impulsive and reckless behavior and unstable relationships with other people. People with this disorder also have high rates of co-occurring disorders, such as depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and eating disorders, along with self-harm, suicidal behaviors, and completed suicides.’ -National Institute of Mental Health website. (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/borderline-personality-disorder)

Okay we can check off all of these except the last one – for the moment. No matter how many times I hear voices telling me to cross the center line and hit that semi head on, or leave the car running with the garage door closed, (recently found out I’d have to leave the car running for a LONG time without getting caught to make that work with newer model cars) easier still I could just down a bottle of pills with some alcohol - but I know better. Even though it would be better for society to remove me as a threat, but I just have to get over it and things will be fine.

I do not completely lack empathy for others – but I do lack when it comes to myself. After my first foiled suicide attempt, I realized I would never want any of my family members to have to find my lifeless body or identify my mangled remains. That is just hurtful and wrong. I could never do that to the people I love – no matter how intense the voices get some days. No matter how much I want to get away from my damaged mind. It truly is hard for me to accept that none of this is normal because it has been my normal as far back as I can remember.

Tonight is a big night for me. As I sit here, in the back of my closet, tears flowing uncontrollably and the desire to keep fighting, gone, things seem to make more sense than ever. I had stolen one of my sister’s handguns the last time we visited. Her husband left the gun safe unlocked and noticeably open with me in the room. Another one of my beautiful flaws – I love to steal things and I’m really good at it.

This particular theft was an important one though. I never touched the safe. I used a blanket and opened the latches on the case, careful not to leave any prints…they will find the gun soon enough. Probably even before they notice it’s missing. I slipped the gun in my purse and grabbed its loaded clip from the shelf breathing a huge sigh of relief as I returned to the living room and sat back down, casually taking a drink of my soda.

I was trying so hard to get myself under control so I could steady my hand. The gun felt like it weighed ten pounds and I just had nothing left in me. I didn’t want to pass out or fall asleep. I wanted all of the constant internal battle to end. I needed to finish this. I couldn’t let myself chicken out again. I had been planning and preparing for this day for almost a year.

It was my turn to be selfish. The last 50 years of my life had been torture and over that time I had lost my way, tested and fail my morals, lost my mind and fought to keep my life under control every day. Some days I won, more days I lost. I was so sick of making terrible choices and blowing up everything in my life and the lives of countless other people I didn’t even know. I would work so hard for months, even years, to get my life on track and with one bad choice, set a landmine and jump on it, blowing up my employment/income, my credit, my home, my relationships and even my family… over and over again. It was a vicious cycle and there was only one way to stop the torment.

That’s just it, I couldn’t justify continuing to put any and every member of them as my ‘family’ through it any more. I dropped the gun out of disappointment in myself. This was supposed to be for me and here I sit telling myself it’s the best thing for everybody else. NO! I could feel the anger and pure rage emanating throughout my body. My breathing was becoming deep, heavy. My forehead sloped as the rage engulfed my head and face. I grabbed the gun and dug my way out of the back of my closet. I could feel the fire in my blood as I began to walk through the house, gun in hand. I was looking for someone but my mind was blank. I could feel the beads of sweat beginning to form on the back of my neck. I was hot and everything felt red. Not just mentally and emotionally, but even physically.

The ridiculous mood swings are so hard to keep under control. When the mood swings it does just that – it sends my feelings and emotion into what I can best describe as a freefall until the bottom hits. For me these are generally anger, rage, disappointment, self-loathing or deep sadness. I can go from laughing, calm and happy to angry, physically heated and enraged in a split second and vice versa. I can be elated about something one minute and in the next the voices repeatedly tell me that I am an idiot for being excited and remind me that I am a failure and nothing more. Things will never actually happen the way I think they will or want them to. The voices tell me what I believe is happening isn’t real and there’s something else going on.

People are always out to trick me or make a fool out of me in front of everyone; this is a learned response. The voices remind me constantly that I don’t deserve anything good in my life, I am a bad person, and I do stupid things and make bad choices. I usually believe this sudden snap is without a good reason, but when I look back I can usually pinpoint the exact WORD or phrase that turned the volume on my voices up. The voices set off feelings in my body that I can’t control. It makes it really hard to just get over it most days. I carry on like this is a normal but I am completely distracted by it all the time. My self-loathing and paranoia consume me most days.

I will randomly burst into tears even when in the middle of a conversation because I have this dialogue in my head telling me how much this person dislikes me and how fat and stupid they think I am. I could be driving in the car seemingly having a great time but inside trying to fight back the negative comments and the tears the self-loathing try to generate. I have tried so hard to ‘just get over it’ and I am always successful for little while but inevitably suppressing it creates other health problems like my major stomach acid issue that eats through my intestines forcing me to have colonoscopies and esophagogastroduodenoscopy about ever six to eight months.

That shit is HARD to keep under control. The extreme physiological difference between calm and enraged is physically, mentally and emotionally draining which makes it even harder to control. It takes a ‘normal’ person quite a few triggers and a good amount of time to go from calm to brutally angry – ready to tear someone’s head off. I can hit that in two seconds flat; including the emotional rush of feelings that go with it. This is just who I am. I do my best to keep it under control, but sometimes I lose it. I try to excuse myself so I can express these emotions, let them out – if you will. I have found that biting myself or quickly hurting myself physically in some way, like slamming my hand in a drawer at work or stabbing myself quickly help to quell the emotionally anger I feel and keep it under control. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the dialogue in my head but it does release the physical aspect that fills my body and redirects it to the single location of the pain. I can be a physically violent person – especially toward myself - if pushed too far. My goal always starts directed at hurting myself.

Unfortunately, I unintentionally tend to leave a number of casualties in my wake. People who witness these things are left speechless because they are unaware that there is this side of me I keep cloaked in darkness. I am forced to hide, avoid situations that include other people or face the consequences when I get home. It’s not easy to be with my daughter’s peers and their parents especially when all you can think is; what are they whispering about me?

About six months after my first psychiatric ‘day group’ session; which was basically two weeks of ten hour days where 12 people devoted to group therapy with me sat around judging each other and playing ‘I’m crazier than you.’ Eight of the 12 people were either alcoholics or drug addicts and one lady who had depression. One night after group therapy, I confided in a parent who was also a cousin of mine – not hard to find in this area. We had been discussing the history of mental illness in our bloodline and sitting next to each other at our kid’s basketball game. I felt comfortable telling her of my BPD and even though she was a psychiatrist, she looked me square in the eye and with complete conviction, she grabbed my arm and told me never to share that information with anyone again. I suddenly felt dirty.

Talk about feeling bad about yourself. I had made so much progress over those six months. I was attending functions without a parent or close friend to basically hold my hand so I wouldn’t have a panic attack. I was finally able to talk to other parents and watch a game sitting with my own team. Cheering with ‘the people of my tribe’. I was finally feeling normal and feeling like I fit in with other people. It was like a dream come true.

Then all in one fell swoop, BAM! What?

I lost my breath for a moment. I honestly felt like I couldn’t breathe. I turned away and watched the game. Recording every shot so I wouldn’t have to speak or look at this woman. I knew if I did, I would panic and burst into tears. I steadied my breathing and was finally able to muster up a full breath to cleanse my lungs. I later watched some of the videos I took as I was losing my mind. I could hear my breathing pattern and it crushed me. After the game I took my daughter out to eat because I needed to spend time with her while I still had some semblance of my sanity left.

I literally felt like I was hanging on to a ledge by one hand, below me a great abyss, just darkness. I was not afraid, because I am selfish. I would simply let go and fall slowly into the darkness then wait and see what happens. I’ve been here before. Not in a very long time, but I had been here. It was all part of a cycle that always took a very long time for me to come back from.

My little girl and I had a great night together. The hour long drive home turned into an entire afternoon and evening of fun; just the two of us. Grandpa, my dad, had recently been released from the hospital and he came home nearly immobile. This had been really hard on my daughter. She loved her grandpa like a father. He didn’t want her to see him that way, thus it became more and more difficult for her to cope with what was happening. I was watching her shut down the way I did when I didn’t know what the correct response to a situation was.

My father had prepared her for his passing on many occasions in her ten years with him. He gave her advice and knowledge she may have for gotten for now, but in years to come she would be amazed at how many things she ‘inherently’ knew how to do. She was also about to be sucked into the shit storm of emotional outbursts, detachment and isolation that would come with my mental breakdown. My goal would be to get it fixed and get back to where I had been just hours before.

The question is why? Why does it have to happen? If I know it’s coming - why does it have to happen? Why can’t I stop it? Because I’m selfish.

Anxiety, ugh! Tell me, if you had to listen to the chatter of multiple voices in your head at one time or worry about when one of these mood swings were coming you wouldn’t have constant anxiety too? The anxiety is livable just like all the rest of it – at least that’s what I have told myself for many years. For a while I was having these crazy panic attacks where my blood pressure would just suddenly drop and I would literally drop to the floor passed out. This happened a lot when I was pregnant with my daughter and again when I moved close to my hometown spending ten years living more than an hour and a half away. I learned to try not to suppress the anxiety because eventually, if I did not give it attention it would MAKE me pay attention by physically creating non-existent health problems – and sometime real ones.

It’s difficult to appease my anxiety. Most of the time I find if I just give in to the anxiety by redirecting the feelings to self-inflicted pain or crawl into my shell and cry, or avoid situations that set me off, avoid crowds, keep people out of my home and stop whatever behavior it is that the voices say I will fail at or am making a fool out of myself by doing- the anxiety lessens. A good long slobbery cry in the back of the dark closet in the fetal position works great but I was seldom lucky enough to have that kind of time as a mom – so the bathroom shower was my best friend. My best days were when I got up and had a good heart-wrenching cry, washing all the self-hatred down the drain for the moment.

I am constantly at odds with several aspects of this disorder at any given time. Every conversation or trip out of the house is like rolling the dice - I never know exactly what combination of wonderment I will have to keep under control while trying to act like a normal human being. I never know if someone is going to say the wrong thing, throwing gasoline on the already raging fire that is my emotional state. My struggle to keep things under control had been completely lost on those around me because they never understood the amount of energy that it took to ‘act normal’. Most aren’t even aware how much I struggle with all of it.

Why am I always so tired? I worked constantly to keep my emotions under control – fighting an internal battle to quell my emotions minute by minute. The experience was exhausting.

It is these feelings, the emotional swings that I am forced to internalize, that truly get to me. The voices - I can handle, the constant self-hatred - I can handle, it’s the constant internal desire to just go ape-shit crazy along with voices and self-loathing – that I cannot handle. Cutting and burning used to be my release, but I am not allowed to use these techniques anymore for fear of hospitalization. My brain is a giant cyst, so littered with infection that it feels like it could burst at any moment. That is what has put me here, holding my baby sister’s gun, ready to just be done with all of this - just done.

My family worries about me a lot. Seeing me is a difficult thing because they too never know which version of me is about to show up or how long it will take before I lose my mind – triggered by someone or something that is happening. This disorder takes a toll on all those around me as well. It sounds so easy when people say ‘Just get over it’ or ‘Grow up’. I just don’t know why it isn’t that easy in real life.

Every time I see the scene from Men in Black, when the alien bug awkwardly climbs into the farmer’s skin and twists and cracks and turns the limbs until it has assumed the man’s identity, I can completely understand how this must feel. Most days that is how I feel, like the outside of my mind doesn’t fit the inside. Watching the farmer’s wife yell and go on while he stands there just trying to comprehend what her deal is, feels like conversations I have during the day – like why the hell are you yelling at me? I’m a customer at your store or I’m just doing my job. Of course no one is yelling at me but people’s reactions affect me that way.

I take everything personally. I just can’t seem to process these things without becoming either extremely angry or completely withdrawn. Like trying get someone to help me at Wal-Mart – I try not to attempt this feat because all Wal-Mart employees are too busy to help me and their body language and tone of voice often make me want to run from the store panicking or leave me completely enraged. This leads to the severe emotional swing and generally some sort of self-inflicted pain to reduce the internal drama that is tearing me apart. Or better yet having my own employees unload on me…I’m your BOSS! I mean seriously! Why do people think they can talk to me anyway they want to then come back and apologize…Like that is going to undo the emotional damage I have already internalized.

Trying to keep things under control is awkward and sometimes physically and emotionally impossible. This is the hand I’ve been dealt in life; I am an intelligent and sane person trapped in the mind and body of an insane person. I feel as though some of the voices in my head are intelligent, wise, witty and well put together but I am not – I am crazy, with moods all over the map that I spend all my energy trying to keep under control.

Some days that craziness, in and of itself, gives me enough anxiety want to stay in bed all day because I am not sure I can keep it under control. Most days I pretend to be somebody else, someone intelligent and witty who can multi-task and take control of the situation. When I am alone I bite into the butt of my hand as hard as I can to release the nerves, tension and anxiety I feel inside. It’s a juggling match that I usually lose. But I am the only one that is aware of my winning or losing these battles because I learned long ago to keep these feelings and self-inflicted pain to myself.

Sharing these things, truly letting people know how I think – how I feel, is dangerous. I am not a safe person to be around. I have never snapped and injured anybody. Any pain that I have inflicted was purely premeditated and well planned. I have snapped and injured myself - which is grounds for a 51/50 resulting in a 72 hour hold in the mental facility of the court’s choosing…strapped to a bed and drugged… You thought I was screwed up before this; imagine how my emotional state will bare this storm of anxiety. There is an easy solution.

They say your whole life flashes before your eyes just before you die. As I walk down the stairs and into the kitchen, watching this is the only fear that has kept me from actually pulling the trigger. Today is different though. Today I just don’t care anymore. So before I pull the trigger I want to take you on the journey that created this monster.

Chapter 2

LOST

W hen I was about 13 or 14 I started burning myself, I didn’t realize at the time what I was doing or why I just knew that the intense pain felt like something. I got caught once and my mother thought using good ole Catholic guilt would make me quit and left it at that. She shamed me for using the ‘Blue Bird of Happiness’ votive holder for such a thing. I promised not to do it again and that was that. No one really understood what was going on with me and the easiest way for my family to deal with it was to ignore it in the hopes that it would go away. I guess I understood it least of all. I knew this wasn’t how everyone lived their lives.

I would sit in my room on the bed with my ‘Blue Bird of Happiness’ votive, candle lit, holding a darning needle over the flame until the metal became red hot. Then I would slowly press the red hot needle across my forearm searing the flesh over and over, leaving charred black remnants behind. I would make sure to crack the burnt flesh so it would bleed. I would do this night after night, ripping off the previous night’s scab and starting fresh on raw flesh. I obsessed over the pain. Sometimes there was a lot of blood but as time went on I learned how to use pressure for long periods of time to suppress the bleeding making the raw open wound more painful with each new burn. I was so hard to re-burn that spot if there was too much blood.

I knew immediately from day one that I had to hide all evidence of what I was doing every day. I would collect the bloody tissues and used Band-Aids in a paper bag and keep it in a hole in my bedroom floor. My Mom would regularly burn garbage in a large barrel out back and I would make sure to drop the bag in the fire to insure there was no sign of what I had been doing.

I knew what I was doing was wrong, but it felt so good to me. I would at some point come to my senses, having had a good day or two in a row and stop doing it for a few days or weeks and my arm would heal. Then for whatever reason – and there were many of them being voiced not only in my head, but everywhere in my day to day life - I would begin the process all over again.

I would get frustrated when I let my arm heal for too long because the scar tissue didn’t hurt when it burned. It took so much more time to achieve the pain I needed to feel to be ‘ok’. After a while I just wouldn’t let it heal because the scar tissue just kept getting thicker and thicker. If I wasn’t burning I was at least tearing the scab off daily to keep the wound fresh. I always stuck to burning the same spot because it was easy to hide – plus no one ever asked about the Band-Aid that covered that spot for years. I certainly wasn’t doing it for attention, and the internal pain and shame I felt as my first psychiatrist and psychologist told me I was just seeking attention, devastated me. I know now that this self-inflicted torture was a symptom of something far worse going on inside of me and these crack diagnosis’ were likely the worst way to write off what was happening with me. I wasn’t cutting myself to leave marks for people to see and I never told anybody what I had done to myself.

I already had plenty of negative attention in my life and that candle and needle were the only things in life I had any control over. Those so-called experts were trying to take my power away and give it to other people again. I loved the pain I would feel from tearing the Band-Aid off, the pad, smaller than my burn, meant tearing it off would also rip some of the newly formed scab with it and my wound would bleed and begin to bring me solace right from the start of this ritual. It always hurt when it bled but the pain and the bright red blood just comforted me. Maybe it made me feel human or normal or maybe it was just a way to distract me from the pain I was experiencing daily in the real world. Whatever it was, it was a rush for me. It was a rush for ME - not for others.

Don’t get me wrong, there were other spots on my body that I cut and carved. I don’t want to hear any crap about how I am not a true cutter because I burned myself. Not that I have anything to prove but I have plenty of scars from cuts, stabs and intricate carvings with X-acto knives all over my body – I did that too in very inconspicuous locations.

Nothing was as fulfilling to me as burning my arm. I can say the release I felt from the sizzling of my flesh was equivalent to the absolute release of an orgasm. That is a painful thing to even think about – not physically but emotionally. I look back at the teenager that I was and I just wish she hadn’t been so good at hiding how disturbed she had become about herself. It is truly upsetting as the parent of a teenager to know that my best memories from my teens were the feelings I had when I mutilated my own body and bled my own dark and bright red blood. The worst part is that I can still remember just how good it felt.

Some days I still struggle to stop myself when I find a darning needle or razor knife in the house that my daughter is using on one of her craft or sewing projects. I cannot have them in the house. It’s like an alcoholic having a bottle of vodka in the freezer knowing that he can touch it and smell it … one sip won’t hurt right? I have found myself standing in the kitchen holding a metal darning needle to my scar, pressing it hard and deep, thinking of how good it would feel just to bleed. Fortunately I know that this is crazy and I usually snap out of it at some point.

I am pretty sure I know how I got to this point as a teenager. Let me tell you a little story my mom told the day we buried my dad.

My sister Mabel looked at me with a glimmer in her eye, she had been looking at the picture of my pregnant Mom, with Dad behind her smiling from ear to ear, holding her sturgeon up for photo the night before I was born. Mabel said with genuine love in her voice I still remember Dad coming out onto the lake that day and announcing over the CB that we had another little sweetheart! He was so proud and excited when you were born. These were comforting words, even on a day that my medication wouldn’t let me feel.

I was Anne that first day. My parents had been spearing Sturgeon through 6 x 3 foot holes on the frozen lake the month of February inside pitch black ice shanties for at least 25 years (if not more) at that point and communicated by CB. This was our family tradition. My mother had speared her sturgeon on opening day – Valentine’s Day - and proceeded to go into labor later that evening. I had always known how important sturgeon fishing was to ‘the family’ (in quotes just as it had appeared in my father’s obituary - we’ll get to that much later) but I guess until my father died I didn’t fully realize how important sturgeon fishing was to being part of ‘the family’.

In the years following my birth I would find out that sturgeon fishing was far more important to ‘the family’ than anything else in the world. Being born in the middle of sturgeon fishing season was more of a curse for me than the blessing Dad had made it seem. My birthday was often a burden the family had to work in and if someone had speared a sturgeon on that day my birthday would be a quick song blow out candles and everybody grab a piece of cake so they could watch Dad clean the sturgeon and watch Mom cut the meat and prep it for dinner, the freezer and the smoker. There were years when my birthday would get pushed back because no one had time or had forgotten to make a cake so we would just celebrate after fishing was over at the end of the month.

This constant anticipation and disappointment made me hate my birthday. By the time I was six I felt like my birthday was too much of a burden. I stopped caring when it was forgotten and even told people I didn’t really care that we missed it. We celebrated everyone else’s birthday for the entire day. Family would come and play football in the yard or go to the beach swimming or play softball in the yard. Andy was the only other person with a cold weather birthday but the family always got together and played board games and had fun as a family. I guess I had the wrong attitude because I usually spent my birthday at my grandma’s house and not with ‘the family’. They all spent my birthday together doing something they loved. So in their eyes my birthday was being celebrated – I just wasn’t there to celebrate with them.

My brother Andy was a skinny little ten year old with dishwater blond hair cut in a shaggy bowl style. He was overly sensitive about the birth of his new baby sister. When I was born my parent were set on naming me Anne – Andy was not having a sister named Anne and he let everyone know it! How could they do this to him? He was convinced that he would be teased about being Raggedy Anne’s brother.

This would be the first of many horrible things I did to Andy throughout his life. In the days following my birth it had been decided that the birth certificate would be changed and filled out with my current name to appease my brother who had already despised me - likely from the moment he found out I was going to be born. This would be a point of contention for me in my adolescence. I felt my name somehow excluded me from ‘the family’. Unfortunately, as a person with a borderline personality disorder it didn’t take much to make me feel excluded. I was convinced my name had to have been an intentional move since my younger sister was named Miley. Why wasn’t I Miley, she certainly could have been Anne. My brother was a sophomore in high school at that point.

Oh yes my mother’s story the day we buried dad; I remember having that baby home the first morning after being in the hospital for a whole week of fishing – no fishing for a whole week! I was helping get everyone packed for the lake until that baby started crying. I’ll never forget standing in the dining room window watching everyone pack up the truck and the sleds, holding that little red crying baby. I was just bawling because I couldn’t go along. I had to stay home all day and take care of the baby. That year was the longest I ever missed of a season. As she finished her story I just shook my head and smiled, thankful for Lithium, I quietly got up and left the room.

This is what my mother remembers or at least chooses to share with me and everyone else about my birth on the day we put my dad’s body in the ground. This is how my life has been with my family since the day I was born. I have felt rejected, despised and seen as a nuisance - at least since I came home from the hospital. Now I’m not sure when a borderline personality sets in but if mine set in at birth like I suspect, I was probably not the wonderful baby the other four children had been – so here I go again making excuses and giving passes to people who should have protected me and probably thought they were by writing off certain behaviors that today, would be seen as red flags of mental disorder but instead no one realized anything was truly wrong.

Did I mention we had literally JUST buried my dad hours earlier? Thankfully, I guess, I had just finished a two week partial hospitalization program for the mentally unstable six days earlier, and was on Lithium during this entire timeframe prior to and long past my father’s death or I likely would have just lost my shit then and there. I guess I am thankful my complete mental breakdown came when it did. I cannot imagine the judgment I would have felt having to ascertain the appropriate response to my father’s death.

My response to his death probably didn’t seem appropriate to everyone else but I was so doped up on meds I could only see the positive in the whole situation. Dad wasn’t suffering anymore, Mom wasn’t suffering anymore, everyone could get back to their lives – I was happy. I smiled as my father’s bloated lifeless body lay in the hospital room. He was already gone when I had gotten there. They think I didn’t know, but I did – contrary to my family’s general consensus – I am not stupid. I whispered in his ear anyway, I will always love you for everything you’ve taught me Daddy and that was the end of my Dad.

My father’s distorted body lay on the hospital bed as the nine of us held hands encircling his bed and prayed with the chaplain. His soft jet black hair now reduced to grey and white buzz cut – his bright eyes closed and gone forever. He lay silent and still. The only thing missing were his glasses – his thick silver framed glasses with the huge lenses that rested on the cheeks of his ever smiling face. I smiled as the priest administered his Last Rights.

I was too heavily medicated to even understand that I had just lost my Daddy. The man who danced me around the kitchen, singing polka songs to me as a little girl was gone. This was the same man who had been there to help raise my daughter when her father didn’t. I just stood there and smiled at the priest and my emotionally crushed and sobbing siblings as we all stood with Mom who was still in total disbelief. I smiled as they covered his body completely with a white sheet. I smiled as all of his things, from those glasses he wore every day to the tennis shoes he no longer had a use for, were collected and placed in white plastic bags with block letters that stated ‘Personal Belongings’. I smiled and remained chipper, joking as I walked through the hospital corridors and road the elevator with my baby sister and her husband, both of whom were visibly shaken. That was my defense with her. When things got heavy I would do whatever I could to make her laugh.

I want to be clear about one fact – I do not blame my parents or my family for the way I am most days. I am not this way because of one single factor but a toxic mixture of genetics, a personality disorder that makes difficult things irrational and intolerable, a big Catholic family where guilt and a wooden spoon pretty much took care of everything and multiple siblings who were in and out of the house going off to college and living at home during the summers, the first six years of my life. These were the people who took care of me early on in life. Looking back it is obvious to me that my problems had begun early on, but if anyone else knew the problems were there, the signs were either ignored or written off as normal by my mom in an attempt to protect me from being ‘different’.

When my brother Mikey graduated from high school, I had been blamed for something I didn’t understand let alone do. He was the middle child of my three oldest siblings and the first son my parents had. He was a tall lanky young man with thick brown wavy hair cut to show off just enough waves yet still look like the presentable young Catholic man my parents were so proud of. My memories of the situation and what transpired that graduation day are very vivid for having only been two and a half – they say traumatic events stay with you – and when you are born with a mental disorder such as mine, they stay with your and shape the way you look at life.

I was a quiet withdrawn child with curly strawberry blond hair and a sad, empty look in my big clear blue eyes. When I remember that day I can still feel how mad everyone was at me, my mom was yelling and upset, crying about Mikey’s graduation suit being ruined. Ruined! She was disappointed, I remember being able to feel her disappointment.

My brother Andy told her he had seen me spill oil paint on Mikey’s suit - I couldn’t remember spilling any paint. I was two, where did I get paint? How did I get in the boys’ room to spill it? I had no idea at the time what was happening. I was so completely confused. Needless to say, emotions outweighed logic on this particularly stressful graduation day. This was the ‘Number One Son’ after all; my parent’s future engineer and I had just RUINED his entire High School Graduation. I remember how angry mom was and how she just kept spanking me with that wooden spoon and yelling at me until the handle finally broke. I was still in diapers so I cannot remember it hurting but that was when I learned that everything was my fault and I couldn’t do anything right.

When I was four, my Uncle Fritz died. This was another profound incident in my very young life. He got sick – I believe with cancer - so it wasn’t an entirely unexpected event for everyone else. I remember everyone telling me that I was his favorite but once he got sick I was afraid to go near him. He had lost so much weight and his eyes were dark and sunken in – to this day in my memories he still looks like Lon Chaney from the old black and white Dracula movies. I know there was a time when I was his favorite. When he (my dad’s best friend and Aunt’s husband) would hold me in his arms and dance me around the room as I giggled with delight, my long curly blonde hair waving in the wind when he spun me. I remember giggling with laughter and hearing him tell me I had the bluest eyes he had ever seen.

As scared of him as I was he WAS my favorite Uncle. I remember being really little in the Kmart with my mom and always begging to buy Andes mints for my Uncle Fritz because they were his favorite – and they were always at the checkout stand. I saw my Uncle Fritz often but when he got sick everything changed for me.

I will never forget that warm summer day and the way everyone flew into a panic racing and running. I was visiting my grandmother who lived just up the hill and across the road from Fritz. My great grandmother, a tall skinny German woman of clearly over six and a half feet, lived at the top of the hill and Uncle Fritz and Aunt Karen lived at the bottom of the hill in a cozy trailer home. I watched my great grandmother’s lanky frame and curly grey hair bounce as she ran down that steep hill – it reminded me of Olive Oil, from the Popeye cartoons, rushing to get Popeye his spinach. I was already at the door of Fritz’s house with my Grandma watching her as she ran down that hill. ’t remember what happened after that. I am pretty sure my Dad came and picked me up in his old blue and white pick-up truck after work and we ate peanuts in the shell on the three mile drive home. I just couldn’t process any of what had