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E is for a rant on EUPD #atozchallenge

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I’ll be honest – you may want to avoid this post if you’re not interested in a rant on various things, and my perspective (which is both personal and anecdotal) on EUPD, aka borderline personality disorder.

This post is under a read more because it’s got triggering topics.

A history of being a person with a border

I was first diagnosed as depressed in 1997/98. Even back then though, there was an odd one or two days of the year where I was totally out of control. I wasn’t sleeping for days at a time, I was taking stupid risks and I was not the person everyone knew. I did a couple of really stupid things back then – the biggest one of course was leaving the military. I was diagnosed as depressed because the periods of depression were far longer than the mania, and that continued until I had my son. Then, there was a bit of a shift, and some of those caring for me thought I might be bipolar. Which made sense, but I resisted meds for as long as I could. I took the positive as far as I could with it, obviously, because part of it was this site.

But, after being on antipsychotics in 2011, and then going back at the end of 2014, and discovering all support has changed, and slowly but surely, I started encountering psychiatrists I just didn’t agree with.

I have to say from the outset, I respect the professional effort, education and care that goes into becoming a psychaitrist or psych nurse or anyone with care of people with mental health. I just had a run of really bad luck. So, while I’m criticising the people that cared for me between 2014-2018/19

And this is where the rant starts.
I do want to say though, there is a happy ending to this story. Firstly, I was taught CFT, at least, the beginning of it, and that and the people caring for me now have made a *massive* difference to my outlook. I still struggle, but I’m doing better than I was, for the most part. My current team are amazing. We work well together, and though this year has been a challenge with Lockdown in the UK and CV-19, and trying to avoid making more work for them, we’ve managed. And I now also understand some more of the motivation of why I was labelled as I was.

I’m sorry to say, I still don’t agree.

I don’t live on the borderline

Over the following five years, I met one psychiatrist twice. That psychiatrist decided I was borderline, not bipolar, and when asking for opinions, only took them on board when they agreed with him.
Of the psych nurses and psychiatrists, I passed through in this time, advice ranged from ‘practice abstinence to prevent miscarriage, and we didn’t give you permission to have more children anyway’, ‘have a glass of wine before bed’, ‘if you have side effects from meds, it always means you don’t need them’. I was bullied, and at the core of it, was a refusal to reassess or explain the assessment fully of why I was changed from bipolar to borderline personality disorder.

Over the years I’ve tried to work out what diagnosis criteria they were using (the honest answer to that is basically all of them), and how to deal with them, but every time has left us with more confusion. And I gotta be honest, there’s been a tonne of things we’ve had to discuss with them, we’ve not been able to get to the bottom of it. But one thing I did do, is that I had to move to another county, and got to the place I needed to be, and with therapists I’m dealing with, and they’re wonderful.

One change – wide-ranging repercussions

I’m not sure how many other people with mental health problems know the stigma of having issues like mine first hand, but for the three years directly following being diagnosed as borderline, every single time I ended up in A&E, whether I was vomiting blood or had cellulitis, three questions always started most conversations about pain meds, all centring around whether I’d done it to myself, whether I was faking and was I drug-seeking. We discovered in the following few years after having it changed from EUPD to CPTSD, that the difference in how I was handled was stark. I’ve been in hospital within six months of the change, and even my partner was stunned at the differences.

No one asked me if I was attention-seeking when it was mentioned I had CPTSD.
No one took my meds off me that I’d brought with me to stay on schedule, and in fact, because I was badly triggered and wasn’t feeling my best, a nurse went out of her way to help me. Six months before in a similar situation, I was told to stop being a crybaby.

CPTSD isn’t something that everyone agrees is a diagnosis that can co-exist with bipolar disorder. We’ll see.

So…that’s my rant.

Live, Thrive, Survive with Bipolarbears - Live, Thrive, Survive with Bipolarbears - text by Kai

C is for Can do #atozchallenge

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  1. My AtoZ blogging challenge reveal 2021 #AtoZChallenge
  2. A for ‘are we there yet?’ #atozchallenge
  3. B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge
  4. C is for Can do #atozchallenge
  5. A day in the disordered #atozchallenge
  6. E is for “eeek, I overdid it!” #atozchallenge

(backdated, sorry I was late! It does mean I get to use pretty photos I got on Sunday though!)

Do or do not. There is no try.

Yoda, “The Empire Strikes Back”

Well, sort of.
I’m actually more of the ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” which is another truism I believe in.
But, when it comes to my mental health, I can’t make excuses. I have to keep healthy boundaries, and work hard. There is no ‘try’ at living after all.

But it’s not easy…

The thing about trying to have a ‘can do’ attitude, in the context that I use it, is that it’s almost always about protecting myself. And it’s all about protecting, I guess, the spoons that I have. (In case you’re not sure what the spoon theory is, here’s the woman that wrote the base idea, and I am republishing my spoonie’s guide soon). ANd not always having the energy to do something is not the same as ‘there is no try’, and I think that’s the mistake many people make about what I mean.
If I can’t do something, I’ll wait. Unless I have no choice.

Lately though…

One of the things I started noticing about a year and a half ago, when I started having a few of the things explained to me that made no sense in my life while asking questions and hitting issues with my therapy, that I’m very much of the mindset that (probably unfairly) that if I say no, that my friends won’t like me. I’m very much a people pleaser, to the point that I often do things I shouldn’t. And it’s gotten me into a really difficult pattern to break.

So, my ‘do or do not’ is a complete sentence now. I will do, or I won’t. There’s no emotion attached to it if I can’t do the things I’ve had asked of me. I might feel guilty about saying no, but I can’t always do everything I want to (and as I’m actually writing this on my E day, I’ve already talked about planning fails, I know this). And if they don’t like it, I guess that means my friends aren’t actually my friends. And that might make me sad, but I’ve got to accept that. Luckily, it means that I’ll be ok.

The blog of D Kai Wilson - The blog of D Kai Wilson - text by Kai

A day in the disordered #atozchallenge

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  1. My AtoZ blogging challenge reveal 2021 #AtoZChallenge
  2. A for ‘are we there yet?’ #atozchallenge
  3. B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge
  4. C is for Can do #atozchallenge
  5. A day in the disordered #atozchallenge
  6. E is for “eeek, I overdid it!” #atozchallenge

(again, as this is backdated, I’m writing this with the benefit of hindsight).

I did actually have this rather neat post about ‘a day in the life’, but, the last few days led to a bit of an epiphany.

You know there’s an Instagram bubble? I think when we write ‘days in the life’ that we sometimes make ‘blog bubbles’. So, instead of talking about what my ideal day should look like, and what it does when I’ve planned it out, I’m going to write about what my day actually is. And for the first time, I’m even going to include some of the mental health stuff I deal with – so this post could be mildly triggering.
I’ll be possibly alluding to self-harm, definitely talking about psychosis and depression and anxiety and insomnia. And I have a favor to ask at the end of this post.

A day in the disordered

I fell asleep at 11:30pm – a year of training and working with an app called Headspace and other meditation apps (honourable mentions to Digipill and Let’s Mediate (I have them on Android, they may exist on iOs), alongside my partner, which is now 80% of how my sleep works out.

Unfortunately, about 1:30am, I wake up again. I wake up to a voice, that I always hear. She’s my constant companion, and she’s very hurtful. If I’m lucky, I take a sip of water, I go to sleep again, and I might get to stay there for a bit. Most nights lately though, I’ve been waking up and finally falling asleep again at 5am.
The advice is, of course, if you’re not able to sleep in bed, to get up. But if I do that and she starts causing trouble for me. At her worst, she can trap me in the smallest rooms in the house. She’s the reason that I can’t get out of the house alone. She’s the thing I’m fighting back with my favor, but we’ll get there.

If I don’t get to sleep until 5 or 6am, I’ll either stay asleep till 8am, or 11am, or sometimes, I’m asleep till 2pm. And because of that, my day is always harder to plan for. How do I plan to be up at 9am, and exercised and ready to work, if I’m not getting to sleep until 6am? The answer is I don’t.
Insomnia is a difficult and hard to live with disorder – couple it with anxiety and psychosis, and though meditation helps, I’m frequently operating in arrears of sleep.

And that’s why I can’t talk about a day in my life. I have half an hour when I wake up that’s a set routine (get up, unplug and box tech coming downstairs with me, plug in anything, such as my Bluetooth headphones or spare batteries that need charged, wash face, rarely moisturise (I’ll be talking about that in S for skin routine, cause apparently, I’m annoying as all hell about that), meditate for ten minutes after making the bed, then come down. At night, I either go up before Tempus and grab a bath, then make my juice/waterbottle for my bedside, plug everything in, brush my teeth, get my Bluetooth headphones connected so that I can meditate, set up the book we’re listening to on Audible. Depending on how I feel then, I either read for 20 minutes, then meditate, or lately, I’ve just meditated, and used a sleepscape to go to sleep to. And then wake up again at 1:30am.

I can’t talk about this really here, but there is going to be an I for Insomnia over on bi-polarbears (the link won’t work until the post goes live 🙂 )

And that brings me to a favor…

As many of you may or may not know, I’m an author. My major project this year is to talk about the fact that I live with a pretty severe (though not the worst, by a long shot) psychosis. I think I’m probably at the end of the ‘living in the community level of it,’ though, she’s quite hard to deal with. As an author too, it becomes difficult. I ‘hear’ my characters, and I don’t like that I hear and see things as well as part of my mental health.

On my birthday, I’ll be releasing a collection of mental health books. I’m not putting up the pre-orders yet, but I am asking people to subscribe to my newsletter, so I can start talking about the run-up to releasing them.
There may be a Patreon, there may not.

What I want to do though, is to remove some stigma surrounding both hearing voices and other psychosis, but I also want to acknowledge that authors do hear voices, and that *is not* as far as I’m concerned, is a psychosis. But I guess that’s between you and your healthcare team.

What I do know is that she’s stolen five years of my life. I’ll never get them back, and while I’ve done some things in there, I’ve not gotten everything that I wanted to do, done. There are other things, of course, that got in the way, it’s not just been mental health, but if I can remove from the whole concept of ‘we don’t talk about this, we’ll get into trouble’, then I will.
And I hope you’ll help me.

If you’d like to, ALL I need you to do is to sign up for my newsletter and join my mental health street team. That’s it. If you also want to share this post or the post about the project, I’d be delighted.

I’ll be talking about about this at P for Psychosis, because it’s important to me. Here, and at Bi-polarbears. I’ve avoided telling people I have issues such as psychosis for so many years, that it’s a bit uncomfortable for me, but I also know I’m in a good community, that accepts me for who I am, and knows me as I am, psychosis or otherwise. I hope to help others like me – because I think in the coming years, as we come out of lockdowns and the shadows of what we did to deal with the pandemic, that mental health is going to be a major issue – more major than even now, and I want to help people that need help. So I am.


The blog of D Kai Wilson - The blog of D Kai Wilson - text by Kai

E is for Edinburgh (Alt-Edinburgh) #atozchallenge

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I’ve been writing about Edinburgh from my perspective from a very long time, but with some subtle differences.
Some of it is to do with convenience, some of it to do with memory.

Mostly though…

Mostly, I think I change Edinburgh, because if I don’t write it differently, I might write something that’s not – exactly – right anyway.
While the city changes slowly, since I’ve moved away, every time I go back, something massive has changed. And if I’m noticing those things every time I return home, then I can’t imagine that my readers might not notice.
So, I’m when I’m writing about Edinburgh, it’s the alternative version.

I thought I’d share some of the places that are especially precious to me, and I’ve definitely taken liberties with.

Goddess Falls and more…

Colinton Dell has a small grotto, with a waterfall behind it – it’s often referred to in most of my short stories, if I’m not talking about Crickley Hill or the Arboretum locally because I see them more. But, when I talk about a lot of the stories I write about Goddess Falls, I’m talking about there.
Beautiful, and important and sacred to me, I love it there, and try to convey that when I write.

There’s one other place that I write about…

There’s a bit of dual carriageway between Fountain Bridge, and Lothian Road that appeared in Banshee. But it’s not quite the way I describe it (moreso now that they’re building more and more around that area), but for more reasons than just the changes in buildings. As is illustrated in the link above, there’s a tunnel in Colinton Dell – I often use my memories of that tunnel, when it was dark.

There’s so much more about Edinburgh that I’ve written about, but these are two areas that I’ve written on recently.

Do you rewrite parts of the world you live in so you can use it?

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai

E is for “eeek, I overdid it!” #atozchallenge

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So, as a few of you have noticed, I’m already behind.
I’m not sure if it’s something to do with some last minute plans that were thrown in my path, taking time out to support a friend, or that I just don’t have a great grasp of time since the UK entered lockdown (what do you mean we’ve already had Easter? no way… wasn’t it just New Years?), or if I just didn’t practice great time management, but I’m a touch behind.

So, today’s titlted EEEEEK!

And I’m going to share a few tips of how I try to manage it, when…I get it right 😉

Time management 101 – leave room

And I think that’s where I made the mistake. I didn’t leave room this week – at all. And while you can’t plan for emergencies properly, I always have a rule that for every piece of time I have planned, I leave 15 minutes on either side of it.
Got a therapy appointment? Keep thirty minutes spare.
Date night? Thirty minutes.
The thing is, I’m absolutely going to be pushing this to the limit, as today is the first official day of TM112, at my OU degree, for Cyber security. Which means I’m going to be planning more time, and putting in more space.

The other issue I have with this is it’s advice *I* give. I’m terrible at following it.
I was planning yesterday’s post to be ‘a day in the life’, but reading it back, I realised, I really should rewrite that post as ‘a day in dissaray’ because my ideal day in the life isn’t the one I live.

And when all else fails?

Like now? Apologise, work out how to catch up, and go for it. Seriously. Life is too short to punish yourself.
In my case, I’ll be doing my main blogs, and keeping the 26 prompt story to go back to. So bi-polarbears, here, my book blog, and, as Deirdre has injured herself, I’m probably picking up These our Fandoms too. Once I’m caught up, I’ll try and get ahead.

What do you do when life and plans collide? Got any hints?

As to WHY I got a bit behind? Normally I do my catchup on Sunday, but instead, I was in an Arboretum, taking photos, falling down hills (no, really, I’ve twisted my hip and scraped my leg. The camera is fine tho!) and spending time with my family in the spring air. The UK is coming out of lockdown, so we didn’t get to do everything we might have liked, but we did a lot.
(this is Batsford Arboretum, and these are unedited photos – my daughter, Artenapan will be posting some later on her Instagram, and has already!)

The blog of D Kai Wilson - The blog of D Kai Wilson - text by Kai

Five things to try when depressed #atozchallenge

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Depression is a horrible thing – it affects one in four of us, (though I think the statistic is much higher) and often, leads to more serious issues, such as anxiety, and insomnia, or conversely, can be fed by them.

I’ve always been hesitant to offer advice about managing depression, in part because I don’t want people to use my advice and get into more difficult situations, or worse, become even more depressed, so while I’m offering five suggestions, there are of course others.

My top five go-to’s when depressed

I’m not kidding when I say that these are my top five, and in this order. I am trying to take my medication far less, so none of these are ‘take your meds’, which I’ve found is a suggestion that happens quite a lot.

  1. 1.Have a relaxing bath or shower – find your favourite scent (whatever you have accessible) and have a bath or shower. I’ve found a great product on Amazon, called Feather and Down, which is a sleep spray, but their bath oil to milk is just divine. If you’re not a bath person, grab an indulgent shower. Break out your favourite moisturiser, shower gel, whatever you like that makes you feel better. If you’ve been less than great about brushing your hair, put it under a shower cap, you can deal with that after your bath, when you feel up to it, or if you want, give it a wash too.
  2. 2.Indulge in something just for you – my partner often brings me home ice cream or chocolate, but actually, what I like doing is having five minutes just to myself in the forest, which is why we go out to local forestry parks, or Arboretums. (yes, it’s called Forest Bathing, which is something recommended for depression)
  3. 3.Indulge in one of your hobbies – I know it’s hard to feel comfortable doing something only for yourself, but it’s important to try to relax into a hobby. And you deserve time to yourself.
  4. 4.Spend time with your pets – spending time with my cats is some of the best therapy for me.
  5. 5. If all else fails, if you have one, curl up with an anxiety blanket. If you don’t, I recommend getting one – they’re well worth it. Again, there are some available on Amazon (UK link – US link). I’ve had several anxiety blankets, and I’ve found that I sleep better, and I calm down faster.
    The research based on anxiety blankets is extensive, but my own experience (anecdotal as it is) is that it’s a great aid.

    While these suggestions work for me, the biggest recommendation I can make if you are depressed is seek help. Go talk to a doctor.

Do you have any suggestions for people to help them relax or find space when depressed.

Live, Thrive, Survive with Bipolarbears - Live, Thrive, Survive with Bipolarbears - text by Kai

D is for Darkness PD

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I guess my AtoZ of books couldn’t be complete without a mention of D for Darkness PD. It is a huge part of the worlds that I write in.

The place

Darkness PD is the main police station that Elliot, Harper and Morrigan are all based at. Darkness itself is a city of four districts, and Elliot works for district 1.

Most of Darkness PD is technologically connected, but Elliot, Harper and Morri have different difficulties with it – Elliot doesn’t like tech, Harper can’t use it due to the fact that he’s a technomage, and Morri is working undercover to expose the corruption in the police itself.

Technomage

Harper’s status is mostly explained later in the storyline, but technological mages in Darkness itself is a bit of a mystery, which I’ll be talking about in M for Magic – another area where I’ll be talking about all three book types.
You can read more about DarknessPD on the website.

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai

C is for CPTSD #atozchallenge

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CPTSD has been a persistent part of my diagnosis for a few years now, in part because we just refused to accept that I had EUPD. And while many survivors of childhood abuse have CPTSD, I’m one of the few that don’t have it due to what happened to me at home, as a child. There’s a theory it could have been – in part – to do with the meds I had as a child for epilepsy, or it could have been because I was bullied, but what I do know was that unlike some, I wasn’t as unlucky as others I’ve met, and that I wasn’t abused as a child by my family. This seems to be one of the key areas people focus on – if you have CPTSD, you were obviously abused as a child. And I have to say, it’s not that simple.
And as it’s an emerging label, I guess we just need to keep an eye on it.

How did I end up there?

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times on various blogs, about two yearas ago, around about the time a unit decided that there was nothing more they could do to treat me, my diagnosis was re-evaluated and changed to CPTSD. I could give a list of historical reasons why this is the case, and why most bipolars end up being reclassified as EUPD/borderline, but instead I’ll just link to this article.

I’m just a really passionate person

What got me ‘into trouble’ and the unit absolutely obsessed with the idea that I wasn’t bipolar was that I was always angry. There was no accounting for the reason *why* I was angry (I don’t do any other reaction in flight, fight, freeze), nor did they listen to me about specific things that made me feel as if y only protection was to be protective of myself.
The line though with the first team came when we had to complain about them and they said ‘everything in her record is completely accurate and justified, and we had didfferent letters, so…that was fun.

At the end of that road

I try not to focus too much now on what went on back then, but it wasn’t the best of times. And due to the way I’d been handled before being passed to the new unit, I’d basically had six months treatment in five years, something I’m still working towards fixing now.
One of the first things I had explained to me at the new unit though was that though he couldn’t say- for sure – whether I was bipolar – he was pretty sure that I wasn’t borderline, for the reasons I gave (I have little difficulty with long term relationships, and I’m angry all the time, it’s got nothing to do with my mental health, I’m just…feisty and will argue for what I believe in. In fact, at the end of the process with the complaints team, I showed the head of the unit this table from this article and he was in agreement with me. I didn’t fit BPD, I fit CPTSD, but it still took moving to a new team to be taken seriously.

CPTSD – here to stay?

In the last ten years, the definitions on mental health have changed so often that it’s hard to tell whether we’re dealing with one classification or another, whether we’re talking to someone who uses one set of terminology or another. Whether we’re even using the same definitional syste that they are. What is clear that if you find one that’s in one of the accepted systems and it works for you, it’s ok to want to use that one, and hopefully those that care for you are open to it.

*As is the common notice on Bi-polarbears, please do not self diagnose. While we appreciate, especially now, that healthcare is limited and difficult to come by mental health is important enough that you should work hard on ensuring that you’re supported and have an accurate, unbiassed diagnosis from a third party. Take a family member with you to advocate for you, but it’s important to have an official level of support and/or recognition for your mental health status. If you self diagnose, you could choose the wrong one, and as many of the items chosen when self diagnosing require medication only accessible from a professional, self-dx defeats the purpose of getting help for things, that way. And you don’t need to have a ‘formal diagnosis’ to practice mindfulness and self-care. Which I’ll be talking about later this month.

Live, Thrive, Survive with Bipolarbears - Live, Thrive, Survive with Bipolarbears - text by Kai

C is for Cantrips

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I thought today, I’d introduce you to Shula, my changeling mage. She’s quite a lot of fun, and though I can’t see what the link she has to Elliot, yet, she does link through the rest of my IP’s via the latter part of AMFAR, and she is brilliant fun, meet my changeling, Shula.

Shula is a late teenage changeling, running away from her ‘destiny’ – as a elemental fire hag’s daughter. But when her questing companions each discover they need to return home to deal with various issues, she realises a more powerful force is moving against them, and has to deal with all of the issues that are building to a change that cannot be.

I’ll be talking about her more, in a post called H for Houses, where I introduce her first trilogy.

Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - Books by D Kai Wilson-Viola - text by Kai