let's celebrate - 208

The average life expectancy for those afflicted with borderline personality disorder is 27 years of age. This is due to things like cardiovascular disease and other things. I suspect the cardiovascular disease is not just due to increased risk-taking behaviors but the heightened state of anxiety and increased heart rate. Risk factors that make this worse are sedentary lifestyle, obesity, and smoking. I was a smoker for 18 years of my life and I still use nicotine currently which I'm sure has equally harmful effects. I am 37 years old. I am 10 years past the life expectancy that would have been given to me with this diagnosis and I made it past that without any professional help until the age of 32 or 33.

 Today I'm proud of myself. There's lots of times that I didn't even know how to continue into the next day or how to take one step forward on what I needed to accomplish. By sitting with my feelings and trying to understand them I've grown. 

My motto for going on could be summed up as grow through what you go through, no matter what. Succinct as that is put the true struggle behind it has been anything but wrapped up in a neat package. It's been grueling. Blood... Wounds torn open over and over and callousing up into nearly bone. Sweat... Dripping from my brow like a metronome counting away the seconds of toiling the earth. And tears... Emotions inside seeping out... Like the weight of all that work squeezing you like a lemon 🍋.

Through any of it, there are beautiful things I've learned and not just that I find cool or neat... But things that have saved my life from certain destruction. I've painstakingly built every part of where I'm at intentionally, and carefully so as to have my own foundation that isn't starting from the needs of others. I had to unlearn a lot of coping mechanics that were not serving me anymore. Like turning to sexual gratification for emotional comfort because I didn't possess the language to describe what was going on.

I knew there had to be something more in the lowest moments. It didn't satisfy my desire to live when I felt like dying... So I continued. I used the battles to learn how to hurt less and improve my position by avoiding conflict that was not needed and handling swiftly and effectively what did need to be combative.

I stand now not the trembling boy that emerged from my mother's home those many years ago, he's inside now. He has his hand held by me now, the father he didn't have careful to guide his growth forward and through the hard things. Fathers do that, the call to adventure and the pull to risk to strain rewards greater than the risk free nurturing love of the mother.

I finally feel as if I'm balanced better than I was and I don't carry so much shame about myself. Thank you, me. For every time you continued when you could have quit.