Debilitating loneliness.

In 2020 I lost my mind. It fell off somewhere in an alley and I never really found it. This was a time where I tried being medicated, but of course in Quebec there is no such thing as a proper evaluation or follow-up. At least not for me. I don’t know if it’s because I live in a very busy borough (Petite-Patrie) or it’s because I had “plague” tattooed on my forehead (or as they call in the medical world, a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder), but my journey into the medical world was shameful to my country. A quick resumé would sounds like this : I was first hospitalized for suicidal depression at the age of 29 when my boyfriend at the time found a suicide letter. At that time, I was diagnosed with BPD after a single 45 minutes session with an emergency psychiatrist. In the following 10 years I was : hospitalized for suicide attempts 4 times one of which landed me in the ICU for an entire week, hospitalized for suicidal depression half a dozen times, internalized twice in psychiatric emergency centers. And what help did I get? Over that entire decade of being in and out of hospitals, I received 11 weeks of therapy and that’s it.
I remember once I met with (yet another) emergency psychiatrist and she told me “what do you want to take?”. I said I had read people with similar issues to mine tried a combination of Vyvanse and Abilify. She wrote the script, I left without any follow-up appointment.
Back to where I was going with this… I took Vyvanse for 3 years. Little did I know it was slowly destroying my brain. As I would only learn in 2024, I am bipolar. 10 years of being in and out of hospitals and no one ever caught it. At 40 years old I was still experiencing suicidal ideation chronically, wondering why every other aspect of my BPD had been “managed”, until a therapist, from Better Help of all places, diagnosed me with Cyclothymia. It was a massive light bulb moment. I had never even heard of it, but reading on it, it all made so much sense. After receiving this diagnosis, I was able to start building a core personality that I could hold on to in my mood swings and I’ve been improving since.
I digressed again. Back to 35 years old, experiencing psychotic mood swings every morning before the Vyvanse kicks in and every evening when it wears off. Paranoia, delusions, self harm… it wasn’t pretty, but the worst thing about having a mental illness is that people expect you to act as if you don’t. I was ostracised by friends who did not know how to deal with me and I don’t blame them; I didn’t know how to deal with me either.
In October of 2020 I moved in an appartement alone and the pandemic began and I experienced true, profound, debilitating loneliness. At that time my spiritual narcissist mother had gone full-on conspiracy theorist, so I had cut contact, I still wasn’t talking to my dad and I had lost all of my friends. I felt truly alone. Of all the things that negatively impacted my mental health thorough my life, the feeling that not a single soul cared if I lived or died was the absolute worst. I know incels have terrible coping mechanisms and are often agents of hatred, but I feel so much sympathy for them, because I understand what true loneliness does to a brain. Looking back, I don’t even know how I made it through.
Actually I do… I held on to the belief that if I find a way out, I can help other little BPD girls find a way out too. It was my life line, to do it for others.

I’ve read the following quote once “All evil in the world comes from the belief that some lives are worth more than others” and I resonate profoundly with this. However, I could write a thousand words essay on the meaning of “worth”. Do we mean literally? As in; everyone has a right to live? Or do we mean worthy of love? Worthy of comfort? Worthy of safety? Worthy of being seen?
I hold no grudges against the people who did not have the tools to help me in my time of need, but it is absolutely symbolic of something extremely wrong with the current zeitgeist : the de-responsabilisation we have for one another’s happiness and well being. Sadly, I see this echoing in spiritual and personal growth circles; people taking too much responsibility for their own emotions and becoming detached from others’ because of it. The message becomes “if I can heal myself, why can’t you”, without capturing how privileged we are to find healing and growth, on ANY level.

Maybe it’s because my life was far more colored by pain than it was by pleasure, that I have this ability to see how even the worse of us are just doing their best… Maybe it’s just the way it is and there’s nothing that can be done; there will always be varying degrees of privilege and nothing can change it, it’s the cosmic balance.

I know the only thing you can change is yourself, but it doesn’t mean you get to stop trying to make the world a better place.