Did you know that vinegar dissolves/ erodes cement?
I found that out while I was an alter server - *PAUSE* no homo - at St Peter Claver: the old Catholic Church I grew up in, back in my hometown of Soweto, South Africa. There were renovations and an extension of the building underway and the door of the sacristy needed to be removed in order to create more space within the church... I didn't even realise it until my younger sister (generally the brighter of us two) pointed it out to me. I think I'll never forget that day.
Who would've thought that something as bitter and relatively useless as vinegar could in theory send an entire brick and mortar stucture tumbling? It was quite an epiphany for me.
My brother, the one about whom I wrote in my previous post, titled Homesick: Bad dreams, hot tears and cold sweats, a few day ago sent me a message that has melted my heart and flooded both my eyes with tears and my heart with emotion. I feel like that old Catholic Church and I can't be sure whether my brother, Hilario is the vinegar or the ebb and flow of my illness is.
Some of the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder are black and white thinking, splitting and (most relevantly to this post in particular,) a frequent manifestation in idealization and devaluation episodes. Wikepedia defines this last concept as follows:
When an individual is unable to integrate difficult feelings, specific defenses are
mobilized to overcome what the individual perceives as an unbearable situation.
The defense that helps in this process is called splitting. Splitting is the tendency
to view events or people as either all bad or all good.[1] When viewing people as
all good, the individual is said to be using the defense mechanism idealization: a
mental mechanism in which the person attributes exaggeratedly positive qualities
to the self or others. When viewing people as all bad, the individual employs
devaluation: attributing exaggeratedly negative qualities to the self or others.
My brother expressed a great deal of concern and love for me. Feeling that, although I knew were present, I had stop being able to recognise from him. Well, at least, not at all in a meaningful and positively affective way at all. I felt a weird rush of emotion. It's weird because I have become very distant and detached from feeling and emotion in general. This feeling that I felt was familiar. Nostalgic. For the period of that rush of emotion, I felt like I had my big brother back again.
In his view, he probably never left at all. In mine, the emptiness he left behind was almost tangible. I feel neglected and abandoned for the most part. By most people. That's another perk of the illness. My perception of reality is never really real. That's scary in a very numbing "learn to live with it" kind of way. Everything I think and feel is like looking at one's image through rippling water. Its never clear. Never precise.
I have gone through a period when I have hated most people in my life. I can't think of someone who actually matters in my life, whom I haven't hated profusely at some point in time. My interpersonal relationships are and have always been pretty shitty. And that's a euphamism...
I don't know how to deal with this or what the appropriate course of action in this whole rippling lake is, but I do know that my mental erection of cement has been dissolved away. Right not, I love and miss my big brother. I don't know how long that will last, but right now, he might as well get a cape and super powers because he is my hero!
Confused much? The story of my life...
XXX
The Black Sheep.
No comments:
Post a Comment