On Anger

There is no red, only white. We like to associate anger with the color red, because it is easy. The rush of blood to a person's face, a cartoon bull chasing a red cape, and the comparison to fire are all easy because there is passion. Anger is passionate. There is perhaps no more recognizably intense emotion than anger, but that passion can lead to ruin. While red is that color which evokes feelings of anger as it would evoke imagery of blood and gore, white is the truest representation of that hot emotion. Red stars draw awe and fear at their heat, but the hottest and brightest stars shine a blinding and pulsating white.

Such is also true of anger. The human mind can accelerate to astounding speeds, but when fueled by anger, it can speed out of control, turning one's vision to a blinding white light just before flying off the road and into the abyss. Everything fades to white when true anger comes out, leaving your consciousness as a frightened passenger as it finds itself trapped on this highway to hell. Your accelerator is stuck, the vehicle is roaring down the road, and there is little ability for you to turn away from what lies ahead without risking flipping the ride into a tumbling fireball.

With personality disorders, particularly those of Cluster B, anger is a driving force that helps achieve the individual's needs and wants, regardless of how effective it is. In my own experience, anger has been an unhealthy coping mechanism, even since childhood. As stated in my previous piece, most (if not all) of the persons with personality disorders I have met have not led the happiest of lives, usually starting in adolescence and spiraling out of control from there. This cookie-cutter beginning rings all too true of my own life, so call me crazy, but I think see a pattern starting to form here.

My own beginnings were set into motion by a father on a constant alcoholic binge fueled by his own self-destructive disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and a mother who was preoccupied with work by day and suffering from depression and my father's alcoholic rage by night. My own nights, at least those which I remember, were spent trying to drown out smashes and yelling coming from the rest of my house by blaring the volume on my television until my door was inevitably swung open and I was ordered to turn it down. Later, I found music and (more importantly) headphones which I would push into my ears until they ached and turned up the tunes of Blink-182 and Britney Spears until my brain was echoing with those lyrics and nothing else.

When music was not readily available, I could only escape; running to my grandparents' house, the woods behind my own abode, and anywhere else my little legs would carry me. Friends were a great source of comfort, even though I did not talk about my home life with them. Watching their own families, I was horrified to see people talking about each other's lives peacefully, sharing laughs, helping each other through hardships, and probably most horrifying of all...consistency. What was this new world I had walked into? This was not the maddening life I knew, and that is when I began to realize I had been dealt a shit hand.

I grew angry. I was angry at life (which I held as having some meaning or purpose), angry at my father for making my life a living nightmare, angry at my mother for seemingly doing nothing to help me (though I later found out she had been trying all along), and as time passed, I grew angry at every happy person I encountered. Why were my friends all leading these happy lives while I lived in constant misery? Sure, they had their problems from time to time, but their families always supported them and cared for them when they were down, never in an authoritarian way of demanding to know while offering little support in return.

This angry manifested itself in sadistic ways, leaving me yearning to see suffering in the world. Misery loves company, and I wanted to see others in pain such as I was in. I found myself attracted to stories of tragedy in the news, cheering on the villains in horror movies, and while I wanted to hear how people were hurting there was little I offered in return that could be misconstrued as warm or compassionate. Despite this hunger for the pain of others, there was no consolation to myself. I felt no companionship, no happiness, and there was no peace in sight for my still developing mind. I was surrounded by dozens of friends, but was essentially alone.

Above all else, I was angry at myself, constantly. There was anger for not growing from the trauma I experienced in childhood, anger for not being the best at my many endeavors, anger for not being able to keep or develop relationships, and anger for not being dead. While my friends were only ten or twelve, they had still started thinking of ideas of what to become in adulthood. There were wanna-be doctors, wanna-be police officers, and wanna-be beauticians. I, on the other hand, had never considered a future beyond an early death, because it was all I wanted most of all. I was never actively suicidal, always viewing that as something which made me seem like a quitter, and I was already enough of that in my waking life; best not to let that pattern get too metaphysical.

Understand, this anger never manifested itself into a physical sense against anyone. The only person I ever laid hands on was a bully, and that was more of a kick to the throat than use of my hands. Technicalities aside, I viewed such altercations as beneath me. I was not about to become my father, and that alone has probably been the best motivation he ever gave me. My anger was bottled up inside, allowing itself to fester into unchained narcissism and an intense fear of failure and abandonment. Anger still dwells within me, and my ego still yearns for bad things to happen to others. It claws at the back of my skull, wanting to crawl back to where I began, but I cannot let it.

My anger aches and moans and cries out for sustenance through proxy of seeing the pain in others and feeding off of it, but I do not let it. I channel my anger and push myself, instead, to feel pain, but not the kind one would expect of a damaged mind. I find where the pain is trying to escape from, and filter it. I exhaust my reserve of screams, singing until the skin on my face starts to peel back and reveal the inferno underneath. I push myself physically through exercise, riding my bike for tens of miles until my lungs are crawling out of my ribs and my stomach is about to collapse.

Even with these channels for my rage, I still cannot permanently banish these harmful emotions entirely. They will probably always be with me, roaring inside my mind like an abused circus lion who has had enough and wants to tear its "trainers" apart, bathing its face in their blood. I feel molten rage pumping through my veins when I am denied what I feel I am owed, even though deep down, I know I am owed nothing for my suffering. I hold back that anger, unable to channel it in most social settings, swallowing that toxic bomb in my throat, letting it detonate inside of me, and then, I recoil.

Emotion and color flees from my face, my voice grows somber and weak, and I cannot bear the weight of my own skin on my bones. I look for escape from this nuclear winter inside my flesh, but all the exits are cut off, and I am forced to bath in the waste of my weapons until I can either excuse myself from the situation or I accidentally breath noxious flames on some unsuspecting victim. In the heat of it all, I hear a ringing inside my head, I dissociate to escape the world around me, a white fog envelops me as I recluse, and I am, for one very rare instance in my life, at peace.

On Personality Disorders

Greetings and salutations to you, one and all. Your search for a deeper understanding into the world of personality disorders and those who live with them has reached its climax. Unless you were actually here because you wanted this blog name, were upset, and wanted to make sure the space was not just being occupied by some cretin who wrote a single post in the early 2000s and left it largely unused. If so, yeah. You are kind of out of luck. If the prior is your intention, then you are in substantially better standing. I digress, though. Sleepwalking.

I frequently pose the suggestion to myself, "Perhaps none of this is real. Perhaps I am merely sleepwalking," but, each time, I find myself unable to wake up. That haunting state of the conscious mind being in one realm while the unconscious self being on another plane in another reality is a tantalizing possibility, though entirely improbable. There is a sensation of euphoria elegantly prepared with increasingly paralyzing anxiety and rage. To put it mildly, it can be complicated for even one such as I, with a fractured personality, to explain the state I am in most of the time. Even as these words flow down my nerves and out of my fingertips through the clicking and clacking of keys, I feel my soul detaching from my body.

My consciousness is loosely attached to my flesh by invisible strings, swaying to and fro like a kite with every movement, never keeping in sync with my actions. The only places it feels truly connected are my hands and my chest, where it has burrowed deep under my skin, irritating me to the core, tempting me to claw through my skin and rip it loose. We can be engaged in an hour-long conversation, and yet, to my dismay, I will not have been there for much of it. For those fleeting moments where I drift into this fray of words, I will react in ways you may not be expecting. My tone can shift suddenly from inappropriately giddy to venomous and cold at a moment's notice. It is also fair to expect that while part of my speech is carefully calculated to elicit certain reactions from you, other times, there is little filter over my words, making my half of the conversation hardly G-rated.

In clinical terms, a personality disorder is an enduring pattern of dysfunctional thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that cause significant levels of distress in a person's lifetime. This problematic deviancy can manifest in four (but no less than two) major areas of a person's life: cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control. These areas being so crucial for day-to-day function, such a disorder can make work, education, love, and friendships an uphill battle in the rain. What makes personality disorders also particularly tricky is in how the individual views their own psychological state.

To put it another way, disorders like Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder are considered ego-dystonic, or the person recognizes they have a problem and are looking for treatment for the problematic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Personality Disorders, on the other hand, are ego-syntonic meaning that the person may not recognize those faulty patterns in their lives as the problem, but rather may view those in their life who attempt to block or interfere with those patterns as the real problem. For instance, a person with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder may see a need for their time-consuming lists and excessive planning, despite the fact that everyone else around them views these methods as hindrances to the work process rather than boons.

To go a step further, personality disorders can be thought of existing in three "clusters," with each one having common traits shared by the personality disorders within it. For instance, Cluster A, the odd and eccentric disorders, consists of Paranoid Personality Disorder, Schizoid Personality Disorder, and Schizotypal Personality Disorder. Likewise, Cluster C, the anxious and fearful disorders, consists of Avoidant Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder, and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder. The focus of my venture here, though, shall be Cluster B, the dramatic and erratic disorders, as this is where my own disorders lie. Cluster B consists of Antisocial Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

By their names alone, you may be developing some ideas about what the disorders entail while others you may need a moment to do a Google search for. Either way, stop. Skimming through a list of criteria on the internet no more gives you an understanding about personality disorders than taking a "personality disorder test" will tell you which fictional "psychopath" you are (What the actual, ever-loving fuck, Buzzfeed?). Likewise, even for a group of disorders labelled as "dramatic and erratic," they are still portrayed in outlandish and caricature-like fashion by films and television, often played off as marks of the devil and signs of a dangerous person. Let me assure you, having a personality disorder is no more likely to make you the next Eileen Wuornos than having depression is going to make you crash a plane into the Alps.

Inversely, it is important to realize, personality disorders are not the attractive and quirky disorders that Tumblr makes them out to be. Before you give any credence to the argument that people with these disorders are "precious cinnamon buns who are too pure for this world and need to be protected at any cost," let me put the brakes on that crazy train and tell you, we are human, and humans are neither good nor bad, but rather, the decisions they make are right or wrong, and every human is a sum of right and wrong actions, never being all of one or the other.

Still though, there is a dichotomy of infantilizing certain disorders such as depression and anxiety while others like personality disorders are demonized as being "evil." In truth, this lumps disordered persons together with worst case scenarios or with misinformation, maligning an entire group before they have a chance to make their case. This is a common practice with Narcissistic Personality Disorder wherein the sufferers of this disorder are thought to be innately sadistic because of society's fixation with using the term, "narcissist," as a synonym for "abuser."

Like anyone else, perhaps even more so, we with personality disorders have the capacity to be proper assholes. This does not mean you should ever put up with it, should you find yourself on the receiving end of our hordes of mismanaged emotions or venomous words. What I propose is simply the offer of a chance. In my time of getting to know myself and meeting others like myself, I have come across few, if any, who grew up with a happy childhood, let alone a sense of direction in adolescence. Quite often, in my own life, I dreamed of the sweet release of death far more than I ever considered a career in adulthood. Give us direction, give us patience, and give understanding as we struggle to be human, but never sacrifice your own sanity to do so.

We, as a species, are far more complex than the childish notion of being either all "good" or all "evil." "Good" and "Evil" in their shared context are nothing more than the labels of those who insist upon living in a fantasy world with predetermined roles and destiny. Humans are given a toolbox in life, their brains. The average brain comes with a hammer, nails, screwdrivers, and measures. Looking into the brain of one with a personality disorder, one might only see duct tape, saran wrap, and a hack saw. While not a pretty picture, it is important to realize that tools are just that: tools. What anyone else sees means nothing, and it is up to you and you alone to determine how to use those tools, whether to create or destroy.

A passing glance at the criteria of any particular personality disorder would lead the reader to determine the person carrying this affliction was no one to associate with, and that is fair. Any form of relationship with a person of a disordered personality has the potential to be intense and tiresome, but let me add this. While it can be exhausting to be around these individuals, imagine what it must be like to live with a disorder which disguises your troublesome behaviors seem like necessities. A lack of impulse control can wreak havoc on one's financial stability, and a fear of abandonment can diminish one's pool of friends and cut romantic endeavors short. Behind the masks of confidence, adventurousness, and careful consideration lay the battered faces of doubt, fear, and anxiety.

Now, while it is important to cover these disorders substantively, it is equally important to cover them phonetically, because while people may have an idea of what personality disorders are, that idea is usually either incomplete or completely wrong. For starters, and most obviously, having a personality disorder does not mean you have multiple personalities. Rather, this is descriptive of what is known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. A personality disorder on the other hand refers to having one personality, which acts like your lens for life, but in this case, that lens is cracked.

Individual personality disorders, too, have misconceptions within their names such as Borderline Personality Disorder which sound almost as though the individual is somewhere between mentally well and mentally unwell, when in actuality, the name is in reference to the individual's tendency for splitting, or their perception that life is constant dichotomy of all good or all bad. Likewise, Antisocial Personality Disorder is not a marker of a person who fears crowds or shies away from social interaction. Instead, individuals with this disorder have a disregard for the norms and rules of society.

Other times, we view the words associated with personality disorders through our cultural vernaculars rather than by closely examining the disorders themselves. The most common example in psychology is depression where the public treats the subject with a lack of enthusiasm, saying such things as, "Oh, come on. Everyone feels depressed sometimes." This statement and others like it show the ignorance of the speaker and how they refuse to look past a word to examine the symptoms of the disorder at hand. Everyone feels depressed sometimes, but not everyone develops a depressive disorder.

The very elaboration I have made on each of these points is my way of telling you that while certain psychological disorders have made progress in clearing the fog of stigma from around them, personality disorders are still very much shrouded from clarity and civil discussion. Many of these, especially those in Cluster B, evoke strong and often times unwarranted negative emotions from those who are prepared to argue against those with these afflictions. While there is much to be dispelled around this hotly contested realm of psychopathology, the focus of this blog shall deal with the three disorders in my own life.

The professional diagnosis given to me has been one of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, and traits (an important distinction) of Borderline Personality Disorder. My aim is to educate those who are curious about the disorders as well as to hopefully provide some advice to those with the disorders on how to cope with some of the nastier aspects of their afflictions. Hopefully, this shall be as much a learning experience for myself as it will be for you, as we explore the depths of my experience, both positive and negative. I will be your personal guide into the darker reaches of the human psyche, but know this: I am just as much a passenger on this bizarre cruise as you are.