Whistling my Whims

Now that the weather has dipped back into winter for a day...it snowed yesterday in this small corner of the world, the unicorn meat eating cats are back in hibernation. Which is quite all right with me. I love having them around this early in the morning, even if they are asleep. Of course the dog, Max, is asleep. He is so over rolling out of bed when I wake up.

Let's see how the new Vicar of Christ shapes up. Really, the Congress and Catholicism both need purging at the highest levels...their adherents deserve it.

Yesterday was a challenge in so many ways. Still exhausted from this syndrome I associate as a physical manifestation of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), it was group therapy day for Borderline Personality Disorder. I personally love this group of women. The first thing we do is Now time. Sometimes we play games, but yesterday we colored mandalas with crayons. I am moved enough by the design that I picked that I plan to finish it with pencils.

It seems silly, doesn't it? A group of grown women, with a host of life problems, coloring as therapy. It's not silly though. Most always, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is acquired through molestation, or abandonment, in childhood. These women are subsequently challenged, their entire lives, to find and have normal relations with other people.

So, while we color, we are in the here and now, and we are also all children together again. I cannot tell you how deeply I care for these women. Or how much stigma we face because of our diagnoses. I have seen even health care professionals recoil when I filled them in.

I know when I was first diagnosed, my reaction was, "What, something else to deal with?" and "O, my god, am I that monstrous?" Now that I have done my research on the disorder, I realize it is not such a bad thing to be. There are so many other diagnoses and disorders that I could be, but am not. And those are the ones I fear now: sociopath, narcissist, etc.

I have yet to master the swing of bi-polar disorder, with the PTSD, and the BPD...I can't tell where one ends and the next one begins.

All I know is that they can be managed, theoretically, with the help of this group and a sterling support network. I am so very fortunate that way, in my support. I have an AA sponsor, who is well-read and thoughtful. She is a rock. My best friend Dark Star, of Dark Star and Schrodinger fame, is startlingly intelligent and compassionate: she will drop everything to talk for a bit when I am at my worst. I have my groups, AA and BPD, at my back. And then my therapist, who has gone to the trouble to take hundreds of hours of classes, and to specialize in the treatment of, BPD.

There is also a man who does not get enough praise from me: my psychiatrist, my shrink; although he is certainly not looking for praise or credit. I have felt and spoken bitterly about and to this man...we'll call him G2. But he has a marvelous sense of humor, and I am grateful that he lets my sometimes unendurable criticism roll off of him, like water off of a duck's back. I am lucky that he is patient and kind, in a world where so many aren't.

I don't know from where all this gratitude has come this morning. Really, I am much more hard-bitten, and bitter when one meets me in person. A cynic, in all her glory. But perhaps the spring rains are softening more than my flower beds.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone."

Sara Teasdale

Bah humbug.
Tomorrow.