Trigger warning – this post contains discussion of suicidal ideation and self harm.
I have BPD (borderline personality disorder) and have struggled with self-harm for a number of years. This is no secret, I have scars all over my arms which I make no effort to hide, and to a lesser extent on my legs and torso. I’ve also written posts about it before. What I haven’t posted about before is recovery, mainly because I felt like it was so tenuous that I might jinx myself if I said it out loud. Trying to recover from self harm is what I imagine recovering from any addiction is like, there are so many backslides and the urges are overwhelming to start with. Even when you feel like you’ve been better for a while and the urges are decreasing, something can come along and upset things and you are back at square one again.
In the last year or so I’ve done a lot of thinking about self harm. I had cut myself a bit as a teenager but not regularly or deeply. I had one particularly memorable occasion when I had a huge fight with my sisters and afterwards I was so overwhelmed by emotion that I took a box cutter and cut my arms to ribbons. But mostly as a teenager I was deep in my depression and consumed by suicidal thought and/or running around doing all the things so I didn’t have to feel anything.
I had been pondering why I had started self harming by cutting as a teen and then been able to stop, without really experiencing any of the major addiction type issues that have plagued me in the last few years. And I realised that “busyness” was the key to it all. It was a way to keep myself moving so that the bad stuff couldn’t touch me, but also a way to punish myself. The more tired I got the more I did. I was a chronic over-committer. If I was busy I would sign myself up to another thing, and then be angry at myself but do all the things anyway.
Over the years I have also used food as a way to punish myself. I have had brief flirtations with bulimia, but my main obession for a while was to eat as little food as possible. I did this for about 3 years and while I was never seriously anorexic, I was obsessed with every last calorie, writing down every last thing that went in my mouth and exercising twice or more a day to make sure I worked it all off.
I’ve always had a problem with sleep. One of my memories age 7 or 8 is of reading in the light of the hallway and hurredly putting the book down if one of my parents came to check on me. They knew I was doing it but I don’t remember getting in trouble for it. It would have been rare for me to go to sleep much before 10pm and usually was more like 11pm. Later this became a bad pattern where I would forcibly keep myself awake or not go to bed even when I was really tired. I knew I would feel awful the next day, often I felt awful at the time. But I don’t like myself very much so taking care of myself has never been high on my priority list.
Then I went from training for half marathons, to training for triathlons, to half ironman, and into training for a full ironman. Only just over a year after I did my first half ironman I did a full Ironman, despite working full time and studying for my professional exams at the same time. I had a full work load and I was grumpy all the time and I just kept forcing myself out there. It wasn’t unusual for me to get up on Sunday morning and cycle 6am – 10.30am, shower and change and study from 11am till 6pm, after a 2-3 hour run on Saturday and a 40+ hour work week, and 1-2 training sessions per day (3 squad swims, 3 runs and 2-3 cycles per week on top of my long run & ride at the weekend). Plus I often had other study or work comittments during the week. Mentally and physically it was tough but while I was out there punishing my body I could fool myself into thinking I was being healthy. In reality I was in my deep dark hole of depression and using the exercise to make myself hurt, and the busyness to ensure I didn’t have time to stop and think.
5 years later, as a full time working solo parent of a autistic 4 year old I decided it was a great idea to run a marathon. I had a flat mate who would get up to go to the gym at 6am, so my deal with her is that she would stay home until 6 and listen out in case Miss G woke up. The longer I wanted to run the earlier I had to get up as she was uncompromising about leaving for the gym at 6am. As it got closer to the marathon I would get up around 4am finish my longer runs in before 6am, though there were a few times I needed to do 30km or so and got up around 3am. I was getting no where near enough sleep and often working evenings from home as well.
I know this sounds crazy now but at the time all this made perfect sense to me. I got mad anytime anyone dared to suggest I might be doing too much because to me, I had a goal and I was just doing what I needed to do to reach it. The fact that I was harming myself in the process by exhausting myself and stretching beyond any reasonable limit didn’t even enter my head. In my mind I didn’t deserve any care or love so I was unable to show any to myself. I was unable to process how or why I would practice self care, though I knew it was a thing that other people claimed to do.
To me now, I can see the mix of autism, sensory issues, depression, BPD and deep self loathing that led to this pattern of behavior. I had a goal and a plan on how to achieve that goal and I was not able to be flexible enough to deviate from that plan or the routine I’d put in place. I’m also often single minded and can be focused on something (ie my ‘special interest’) to the extent that I can ignore almost everything else going on around me. Large volumes of physical exercise enabled me to punish myself for not being good enough, or understanding what was going on in my social life or workplace, or being able to cope with my sensory issues in the office. It also allowed me to fool myself that I was doing something to help my depression (because everyone knows regular exercise helps with depression, right?…) and simultaneously punish myself because if it wasn’t making the depression go away I wasn’t trying hard enough, pushing hard enough, going long enough.
When I had a breakdown in late 2013 my body stopped being able to run anymore, for no physical reason. I think my body was sick of my mind telling it to just keep going even though things were really bad, so it decided to stop me. My legs felt like lead and my head swam and I couldn’t breathe – and this is after years of half to full marathon distance training. I tried to stop running but I was addicted. It took a long time to break the habit of dreaming of the next run, the next race. I signed up for a number of races and then pulled out before the start when I realised that physically my body was refusing to train any more. I believe my mind was so burnt out that it shut everything down so it could recover.
Not long after finally breaking the running addiction the self harm started in earnest. Suddenly I had these feelings and I didn’t know what to do with them. I had used running as my way of burning energy and making these feelings go away, and punishing myself physically for things I felt I had done wrong. And now my go-to coping strategy was gone and I still didn’t want to feel the feelings.
I don’t actually remember the day I picked up the knife and cut myself. I do remember all three suicide attempts, and the first one which was right around that time also happens to be the most vivid in my mind. But I have no recollection of picking up the knife or why, or even which month that was.
I would like to think, 6 years later, that I have learnt enough to recognise when I’m in danger of harming myself and put my crisis strategies in place early enough. However, I’m still learning and at this stage I have not been able to go longer than 6 months without a self harm episode. I am aiming to start running again soon but with a mindful awareness of my tendency to take it to far, to push myself and punish myself. I want to use it to add to my life in a healthy way rather than as an unhealthy coping skill.
Take care out there.
Ka Kite
ASD, BPD and Me 