success (? / . / !)

in

Thanks to a therapy / rubberducking session with Claude the AI (seriously, he works great for that: I appreciate analytical approaches to mental issues, especially when they manage to work in Nick Cave), I've realized that I have no clue of what success looks like to me: I've spent my life living up to my perception of others' expectations and constantly failing. And now that they're all dead (some thankfully, others crushingly) and I'm doing whatever it is that I do, I'm still living up to those perceived expectations. Suppose, then, that my current job is to figure out what success looks like to me. Probably a lot like what I'm doing now but without the soul-sucking striving for the approval of people who don't exist.

"periods of numb emptiness"

in

Though I’ve been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, I never felt it accurately described my brainpain; BPD felt more apposite and, while my current med cocktail keeps the worst of it at bay (most of the time), the ping-ponging between feeling everything and feeling nothing but emptiness (generally skew this way) is fucking exhausting. Hopefully this excellent piece is the start of deeper research into an under-examined aspect of the disorder.

Why might the same person feel too empty and too full of feelings? The most likely answer lies in the concept of identity, or the internal sense a person has of who they are. Having a well-developed sense of self provides life with meaning, guides behaviour, and can be a psychological resource in times of distress. When a person has an unclear, disorganised and unstable sense of self -- as is frequently the case for those diagnosed with BPD -- they will have deep questions about what they should be doing and what should matter. Some people whose identity is not well integrated go back and forth between periods of emotionally intense efforts to figure out who they are and periods of numb emptiness