Everybody's got a Story: Hanging in the Balance

Welcome to the first edition of Everybody’s Got A Story

What does someone who has borderline personality disorder look like? What do they act like? What does someone who has tried to commit suicide look like?

We all have a good side and bad side, but what happens when they’re amplified?

When they’re in battle with one another and your body is the landscape for which they fight? In preparation for this segment, I sat down with a beautiful, outgoing, young women, Melissa Blanchard, to talk to her about how her life has changed since she tried to commit suicide one year ago.

Like all of our journeys, whether good or bad, they don’t happen over night. For Melissa, she recollected the distinct age of twelve as a defining time in her story, as this was the first time that she had truly considered taking her own life.

From then and into her teens, at the time when I had first met Melissa, she exhibited a pattern of self-harm and negative thinking, something I couldn’t have picked up on.

Whether the questionable decisions were symptomatic of the feelings or the feelings symptomatic of the decisions; a cycle began. Luckily, Melissa had another side to her, the side I saw, a light, fun-loving, adventurous side, which even sitting down with her to talk about this now was palpable, infectious and, distinct, and it was this side that would draw many people to her corner.

Into her early twenties, she recalled being on her way to work in the mornings and envisioning, sometimes hoping for, a fatal car crash. That no one else would be hurt. But that it would be over. After some changes in her living arrangements and some changes in her ten year long relationship, Melissa found the good Melissa on the losing end of the battle with the bad Melissa, and on the bathroom floor of her friend’s home where she was staying, attempted suicide from an overdose.

She recounted to me that, it wasn’t that anything caused all of this, but that it just was that way, it was just her. No matter her upbringing, her surroundings, or how good of a spot she would get herself into; the bad side would step in.

Melissa was originally diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, which to her made sense given the feelings she’d been experiencing, along with the unexplainable abrupt illnesses. Working through medications, trying to wrap her head around this information, and the fear of what this meant, as well as life still carrying on, Melissa was told that her initial diagnosis was incorrect after her attempted suicide and she was re-diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Which meant getting adjusted on all new medications and a new start to finding herself, again.

In the aftermath, life still goes on, and for Melissa things were going to get worse before they were going to get better, with her ten year long relationship ending in a devastating betrayal and one night while trying to self-medicate the pain with alcohol, attempted suicide again.

One of the most predominant forms of stigma she says she experienced was that nobody really believed she fit the part. You’re so pretty and outgoing though, what have you got to be upset about? This was the general consensus among those that she joined in the psychiatric ward and what she was questioned with once back into her daily life. Even during the first part of our interview I said to her how shocked I was, as my interpretation from the outside was so much different. She expressed that this made her feel worse because she felt as though she didn’t have the right to feel this way, that she should be happy all of the time.

Melissa has been very open on social media about her attempted suicide and about the darkness that she has faced, and faces. When I asked her why, she said that, it didn’t start out that she was trying to be inspirational or even brave by talking about it, but that it was because everyone else around her was telling their own version of her tale and that if they were going to hear about it, that it might as well be her own side they’d hear.

In the year since, Melissa has discovered that hitting her rock-bottom and losing the comfort of her adult-life-long partner, and almost her mind along with it, was in fact the best thing that could’ve happened to her.

Melissa changed jobs, and starting working on herself and using the one word she found extremely valuable in therapy: mindfulness. Melissa says that in discovering the act of being mindful of her thoughts and actions she’s been on a winning side of the battle, not that the battle is over, or will ever really be over, but that she has the tools to fight now. Self-love, she believes, is one of the hard lessons learned from all of this and taking things day-to-day and moment-to-moment when needed.

Over the last year Melissa also stopped taking her medication, she found that the drugs she was taking softened the lows, but also the highs; that she found herself simply not feeling at all, which while feeling down, can help for the short-term, but for the long term, she wants to feel it all and deal with it all.

Melissa finds that for her, good friends, listening to music, singing and being active are good for her soul. And encourages others to own their paths, and to find what feeds their souls too.

We don’t all have the same story, or the same lessons to learn, but we do have to remember that we’re all on our own paths and that those that we cross, we have an opportunity to learn from, to feel for, as the connections that we have, including the one’s we have with ourselves, are crucial. To know that we are not alone, that we are seen, and heard, even within ourselves.

Perhaps we can go forward with the mindful wondering of how well we know ourselves, and the people in our lives, and how can we help, or at least not be harmful.

I want to thank Melissa for sharing her story with me, and with all of us and hope that those reading this take away that people suffering from mental illness are just like you and I, and for those that can relate to this story I hope you know that your are not alone in your battle, and that we are all on your cheering side.

Thank you for joining us in the first edition of Everybody's got a Story. We'll be back next month with another story from another soul.

#EverybodysgotaStory #Interview