Before I begin, let me just say that within the last several days, I have become acutely aware of a deep triggering system that I use with others: the one where I display my vulnerability and need and they are triggered to respond with empathy and nurturing or protection and provision.  It's how human beings inter-connect and survive.  At low levels of development, it is absolutely necessary.  And when my survival is threatened, it's a very irritating dilemma trying to transcend that system.  Developmentally, I'm ready to move on.  But not physically.  So, I'm stuck with a puzzle of practicality.  I won't be able to get anyone else's help with this, I don't think, because I don't know of anyone else who really sees the entire dilemma.  And certainly there is no one else with my exact limitations and triggering tolerance levels.  So, I will have to make this up as I go along - and all alone. 

Crap!

I'm looking out from the window of my Mother's house where I'm staying and seeing the beautiful sunflowers in the guy's yard across the street.  That's free, ya know: looking at someone else's sunflowers.  There are many beautiful gardens in this town that cost nothing to look at.  I have a feeling I'll be getting alot more free stuff like that soon.  When I had a car I never got free stuff like that.  And even when I'm on my bike, I always have someplace important to go (otherwise I wouldn't be out there on my bike) so I'm too focused on my destination to get it.  Now that I will have hours of time on my bike without a destination... 

I have a mental illness.  The guy who comes up from the city to do profiles for the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation gave me the gift of a diagnosis that is sure to get me alot of financial assistance.  Borderline Personality Disorder.  It's enigmatic, destructive, persistent, and unlikely to get better any time soon.  Thanks, man.  So, I'm plugging into all the housing and public assistance systems I can right now in preparation for becoming homeless, and it's working pretty good. 

However.

BPD is such a scary label to some people that it's almost impossible to build fulfilling relationships with others.  As soon as they hear it, many turn tail and run.  And if they don't, they simply put you in a category and there you'll stay in their minds from that day forth.  They will always watch your behavior with an eye for the symptoms, and judge every move you make.  They'll never trust you with their vulnerabilities or important work.  You've been taxonomized.

And again, however.

My own personal assessment is that I do not have BPD.  I have an Attachment Disorder.  The difference at my age, may seem negligible.  But it isn't to me.  Because I'm not really in my 40's inside.  I have several Personas who are still about 4 years old.  And 4-year-olds do not have Borderline Personality Disorder.  They have Attachment Disorders, which if left untreated, eventually get labeled other things like several of the various "Personality Disorders".  I can't find the list at the moment.  Maybe later. 

Once again, however, not believing the diagnosis is listed as one of the symptoms of BPD.  So how is that not a Catch 22?  Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean....

So!  Here I sit in this room.  Typing on my pc which will soon be going into storage indefinitely.  And this room will become empty.  I have spoken of it as "My Room" for a year now.  But I don't feel like doing that anymore.  I'm trying to empower myself for making this transition by running headlong into the oncoming train of "Homelessness".  It's gonna get me regardless.  I might as well make as big a dent in the front end as I can.

I have so much to say about all this.  But I have to get ready for work. 

Thank you, zaadz, for letting me chronicle this season in my life.  I hope it will pass quickly.  The homelessness part, that is. 

Today I sat and listened to a Client/friend give me tons of advice about being homeless.  She has a temporary place now, until March, but she's been out there for long periods of time.  She wasn't just a shopping-cart type homeless person, she was a real mountaineer type.  A survivalist.  Her stories are amazing.  She told me that she tried to write them down once but it was too traumatizing to remember some of it.  Her adventures are priceless.  I wish her stories could be preserved.  At any rate, her advice was priceless.  It makes me wanna pack my bag and go right now.  Leave all this crap behind...

But I guess I won't.  Someday I'll need my crap again.  Especially since I have two kids who need me to have my crap for the sake of feeling grounded.  This is going to be traumatizing enough for them.  It would be too much to just jettison everything.  Don't worry, they're living with their Dad.  They're safe. 

So, she says I can get away with carrying only one change of clothes.  I'm having trouble believing that, but maybe it's true.  I just can't see washing socks and undies every day and not having hot water sometimes.  That would not be good for me.  But, I guess she knows her stuff.  I gotta get some things like wool socks and a decent rain cover. 

Yeah, I just tried to put a few things in the pack I have now and it's woefully inadequate.  And that's just with one change of clothes.  I have to get a real backpack with a hip-strap.  And I have to work out. 

Thinking about all this gives me more of a feeling of control.  I plan to live in the local homeless shelter.  However, if I find myself locked out for whatever reason, I need to know I can handle what comes next.  I do have a strong hyper-vigilant streak in me, so this is very satisfying for that part of myself.  Worst-case scenario type thing. 

I have a few more friends I can hit up for advice.  I'll have to ask some of the men too, although it will be quite a different experience for them. 

I have alot of work to do.

I need another pair of jeans because I only have one pair that doesn't have a hole in an immodest place.  Since I ride my bike, the friction on the bikeseat wears my pants out fast.  So, yeah, ROSS. 

And I bought stuff for Trail Mix like my Client friend told me to.  And some new socks.  That was Wal*Mart.  The high cost of low income. 

And I've been doing some reading.  Check out this statistic from Wikipedia:

"A 1960 survey by Temple University of Philadelphia's poor neighborhoods found that 75% of the homeless were over 45 years old, and 87% were white. In 1986, 86% were under age 45, and 87% were minorities."

Holy crap! 

And the incidence of women and children emerging into homelessness is also sharply increasing.  22% are considered to be Mentally Ill.  That became a big deal after they stopped locking up the crazies, and just booted them out on the street.  That was in the 60's.  In Susanna Kaysen's day, they still had residential facilities. 

Statistics can be like a black-hole if you look too long at them.  They suck out your brain until you think you're ignorant about something unless you have a statistic on it.  So, I better stop.

I like this guy/chick:
Survival Guide to Homelessness

The 13th Juror
has a great blogroll

One Bag
will be indispensible!

... 

but wait!  My interweb service is down, so I can't post anymore!

Crap!

Oh, well.  Those are great starting places.  I love the idea of spending the night at cyber-cafes.  If I didn't have to work during the day, that would rock. 

The blog-post on lying is going to challenge me.  I suck at lying.  I hate lying.  I'm a crappy liar.  Oh, that's gonna hurt.  But I know I'll have to do it.  And he's right.  Lying for evil is one thing.  Lying to survive is totally different.  It's a low level developmental skill that I must have repressed early.  I have to retrain myself.  Go back to one of those caught-with-my-hand-in-the-cookie-jar moments from my childhood and rescue my little misled self from those who brainwashed me into believing that everything will be alright if I'm honest and hard-working. 

I'm starting to get this funny feeling that there will be many a moment during this adventure when I won't be able to stifle rude laughter at the expense of rich and comfortable people.  At the moment, I am one, so it's not that I think they're a bad class of people.  It's just that I'll feel so good to finally be free from the fears that lurk in their dark dreams.  I might have all my belongings stolen.  I might get raped.  I might die.  I might get lost.  I might lose my housing because I lose my temper at just the wrong moment.  I might forget to send in my quarterly report right when I need to buy my meds.  I might survive all these things that I have had to disassociate from in order to not run screaming into the night.  I will see the terror in their eyes, watch them look away from me because they don't want those terrors to arise and choke them.  But I will be free.  I will feel so free of it.  Like my Client/friend seems to be sometimes. 

It occurs to me that this may not sound like I want to make the world a better place.  But I do.  I really do.  It's not gonna look like the Utopian dreamer version or the overamped Randian version, but it's gonna come from where many will least expect it. 

I am aware of how sleepy I am right now, and how vulnerable I will feel if I am this sleepy and I cannot find a safe place to lay my head. 

I'm listening to this cd set loaned to me by a friend about what the brain is doing when we're busy socializing.  I have to listen to this one section again before I go on because it is so critical!  So, pardon me if I get a few details wrong.

The part of the brain that is wired to navigate through instant emotional climate change is an EXTREMELY sensitive and delicate instrument.  The slightest look or movement can trigger a powerful readiness to act before the higher reasoning is even ready to engage.  This has advantages and disadvantages, as we all know well. 

The reason I started this profile (my second, here on zaadz) is because when I tell people who know me that I'm going to be homeless in a few weeks, it is like dropping a bomb.  A shock-wave of triggering goes through the room faster than a blink and people usually don't think before they react.  Their reactions, in turn, trigger me to react - and I am trying to become more mindful about all this and more careful about what my part is in the traumatizing human drama that is poverty and mental illness. 

So, even if I tell one person at a time, I have no guarantee that they will contain their emotional response enough to give me room to really explore what is going on for me.  They usually cannot tolerate anything that sounds like defeat or negativity or hopelessness.  My guess is that that's because it triggers their own impulse to protect in a way that is overwhelming and their higher reasoning knows that they cannot afford to protect me as much as I "need" it.  So, instead of being able to contain their own impulse to protect and not react, they put the burden off onto me to not sound so needy.  This happens too fast for me to compensate for and regain my ground so I react to protect them from their own fear of their own impulse, and I start to pretend not to be so "negative".  The result is no one is being authentic, and everyone is pretending that it's not that bad.  This solves nothing.  When you put that scenario into a group context, then the reactions multiply at breakneck speed and I become totally overwhelmed. 

Lobotomies were performed on people who could not control or contain their emotional reactions and were so enslaved by them that they could not function in ordinary life - or, as was the case more than once - on people who's emotional reactions were simply inconvenient to the people around them who had power.  It is a surgery that separates parts of the brain in such a way that the part that detects and directs one through emotional spaces can no longer communicate with the part that does the higher reasoning.  Emotional reactivity disappeared.  But so did the detection of emotional interaction and the consideration of appropriate response.  Oops.  Sorry.

The guy who wrote this book on cd is saying that before technology got in the way, people always related to one another face to face and within hearing distance.  The emotional triggering system in the brain is set up to work within that environment.  So, ever since we've been interacting via the various technologies - all the way from smoke signals to Internet bulletin boards - our reactions to emotionally charged situations have been variously delayed or deleted.  We have become sheltered from or numb to news which previously had rallied people to protect, provide, nurture and care.  Television has taken advantage of this technological lobotomy by stepping in to trigger us only in ways that are convenient to their advertizers.  So, the same machine keeps triggering us to go get fast-food while it prevents us from being triggered to care about or feed a hungry stranger.  And eating a bacon cheezeburger is so much more satisfying than trying to figure out how much one can help vs. how much one can't help.  I know this by experience. 

So, while in one way this is a shame, in another way, this could actually be helpful.  I don't necessarily want my presence or story to trigger people.  I would prefer that we all slow down a minute and think about this more carefully so that we don't wreck the economy by trying to force it to carry a weight that it can't necessarily carry.  It really can't feed and house all the homeless.  I saw a website last night that said that there would be no homeless in New York (New York!!) if they were all allowed to live in the vacant buildings that exist in that city.  Wow!  That's alot of vacant buildings!  But slow down a minute and do the math. 

1 building owned privately can potentially bring in X amount of income. 
Each living unit given to a homeless person to live in reduces that potential exponentially because people capable of paying for living space will not want to be triggered by homeless people every time they walk to their front door and they will take their money elsewhere.
Very soon, that entire building will become a financial disaster for a private owner.

Okay, so the city buys the building. 
The govt. pays the cost of letting people live their rent free, or at a fraction of their meager income, and the cost of govt. goes up so high that normal infrastructure is no longer affordable. 
Such things as police, fire and emergency medical response systems, roads, sewage and waste management start to suffer from lack of funding. 
The quality of life goes down for everyone, while people who are not used to or are incapable of caring for their own property are letting the buildings deteriorate into a dangerous trap.
These same people buy TV's and their ability to care for their neighbors decreases even more. 

Is my little rough calculation too much high reasoning for our comfort?  Would some of us prefer that I not "do the math" but grow a heart instead?  Has choosing one over the other either way solved any problems at all?

Is anyone ready to try something else?  Explore different possibilities?  I need the help of this technology and this extra buffer of anonymity to slow things down and give everyone the chance to do just that.  Can you be mindful of your reactions and impulses when you read this?  Does the time delay give you more of a chance to bring in your higher thinking to solve problems?  Or are you using it simply to cut yourself off from people like me so you can focus on your own personal preferences and comforts? 

A month from now, I may be lying in order to eat.  Like an animal, I may be unwilling (or unable due to low blood sugar and/or lack of proper sleep and/or medication) to apply higher reasoning but instead resort to out and out emotional manipulation of anyone I think might possibly help me.  I wourld rather that not happen.  But it might.  And if this happens enough, my brain will set this as an automatic pattern which is rewarded by food and survival.  Will I be able to recover my higher standards once this level has been stooped to and reinforced?  Will those who prey on the weak, sense my internal divide, take advantage of it and manipulate me to feed their appetites? 

This morning I saw a zaadz quote from Emerson stating something about how we are created for wealth and property is a product of higher thought.  But now, as I'm searching through his quotes, I'm finding many which contradict that. 

"The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be."

Then back again:

"Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and prosperity and you need not give alms."

lol  And again:

"Nature hates calculators."

And again:

"Commerce is a game of skill which everyone cannot play and few can play well."

Ah!  Here it is:

"Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor."

Maybe I didn't have that quite right.  I guess he's saying that an integration of high reasoning with low impulses is what works.  But how is that an "intellectual production"?  Maybe that's what intellectual means to him.  And maybe this guess is too subtle, but maybe his idea of "brute labor" is not the joy that comes with putting his spade in the ground and working a vegetable bed, but forcing and being forced to do so by harsh manipulation or desperation. 

I guess you have to read all of him and keep him in the context of his day to keep it all straight, but I find this sort of division between views to be a huge problem. 

So maybe this one covers it all eventually:

"It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'"

• Learn how to slow down reactions and contain your intense emotions.
• Learn how to do those things you suspect you can't do.
• Learn how to integrate those lower impulses into your whole being so that their existance doesn't terrorize you - either in yourself or others.
• Learn what it takes to survive in a nasty and brutish world so you know how to more effectively help the wretched.
• Learn where to help and where to stop helping.
• Learn to live without your TV (or its equivallent) and engage with real humans instead.
  

It's a new game.  Wanna play?  Yeah, me neither.  But I have to in order to proceed with my recovery.  I have to gain some mindfulness ground over this crap, or I'm sunk.

So, this happened yesterday and just now when I was reading about what is done to people who's symptoms go beyond the limits of other people's tolerance.  Yesterday it was the Lobotomy page in Wikipedia.  Today it's the Haldol page.

I can feel it in my body as a tightening of the muscles in my chest and around my throat.  I feel pressure in my ears.  I feel the impulse to go hide in my closet and cry.  I'm starting to shake. 

The book on cd that I'm listening to was talking about "Mirror Neurons", and how they fire when we see someone else having an experience, even though they are the same ones that fire when we ourselves are having the experience.  In that portion of the brain, neurologically, there is little difference.  These are mostly located in parts of the brain that assign the right language or signs to things and also that connect emotions with higher functioning.  Alot of synthesis and processing is going on there. 

If I grok what that poor boy is going through on that lobotomy page, then I have alot of choices to make.  The sheer number and import of those choices overwhelms me.  I have to take my emotional and physical reaction into consideration when deciding how to speak about it.  I have to decide what to do in order to prevent such a thing for me or others or how to treat someone who has had this experience.  I have to reconcile that this doesn't happen much anymore and my impulse is driven by the pictures which are present right now and right here.  I have to choose what I'm going to do with my present - let this experience flood me and go through my processing or repress it all and do daily tasks.  The impulse is too powerful to redirect or suppress, so I have to disassociate in order to behave in a socially valuable way.

Yesterday I also read that the amygdala is usually larger in people with BPD.  I'm assuming that this means there is too much incoming and I can't defend my higher processing from the onslaught.  And since this is not really a disorder that one is born with, that means my life experience and the coping I"ve used in response actually built that portion of my brain bigger than yours.  It's considered part of the limbic system, so it's holding all that repressed emotional angst plus the impulse patterns and hormonal triggers that go with it. 

I once asked my boss why he didn't just get a bigger file cabinet for his hundreds of files, and he said that if he did that he'd just fill them up.  This way he is forced to "Just say no!" to more files.  Hm. 

I wish I could do that.  As it is I feel like I'm living inside a building made of file cabinets the size of an airplane hanger. 

So, I think what is happening is that my emotional responses to things are much bigger than normal people's and that I have to work extra hard to contain them and not repress them. 

Or I could take the chemical lobotomy route and take meds.  I don't take brain meds, by the way.  I've tried the SRIs and they took away so much of my emotional response that I couldn't figure out how to respond to situations that were bad for me.  I knew something bad was happening, but my warning system wasn't showing me where to go or what to do.  That created a whole new kind of anxiety that only complicated things. 

The reason I was reading about Haldol was because one of my clients was telling me about how they shot him up with that a few times and how horrible it was for him.  He too was interested in the neurotransmitters and reactions to things like that, so we had a good convo.  But I was curios.  So I looked it up.  It totally takes away the psychosis symptom of things.  It does alot of stuff, actually, that seems unrelated, but apparently isn't.  Its fascinating.  But when I got to the part where they sometimes used it on people with personality disorders such as BPD, my chest started to tighten and I started to go down.  All his descriptions of how he felt came to me, and his contagious fear and humiliation. 

It feels as though I could save the world with the amount of empathic energy that I have.  It's totally overwhelming.  And there is only two directions that I can point it in.  Inside to care for myself, or outside to care for others.  I guess I go back and forth.  But it freaks people out when I go inside.  My intense neediness creates this vortex that really scares people.  And when they're scared, they can't help me.  This is where my anger comes from. 

It was indifference which started this whole thing.  Indifference to my appropriate needs and desires as a small person for connection and attachment.  When I'm inside the state of need and someone is indifferent towards me, I cannot contain my reaction.  It feels like a mortal attack and I whip into a fierce attack mode.  The size of my attacker seems gigantic and I adjust my reaction appropriately.  The power differential is mostly a perception leftover from infancy.  But no matter how much logic is applied to this problem, the reaction is unaffected.  Infants do not respond to logic. 

But that is a whole other post.

I visited them tonight with a coworker.  I'm much too weary to say anything very intelligent, so I'll just stick this out there.  I'm gonna be fine.  They're just people.  Jesus, what was I so freaked out about!?  Boogie-men!  Phantoms!  One of the clients who comes to our work is prolly more dangerous than the folks there!  He takes things.  And now my things are at work.  I know he heard me talking about me moving my things in. 

It starts.

I woke up with headaches for the last 3 days and slept fitfully dreaming of getting into fights with men and women.  Not waking up in the middle of the night sweating or breathing hard, but waking up in the morning after a "full" night's sleep remembering what I dreamt.  I'm repressing my fear. 

I have more fear coming my way too.  I've been doing some work with my anger and one particular incident that I'm really ashamed of is going to come out in the open.  I'm going to get caught.  It's going to be bad.  The original plan was to fix what I broke so they would never know.  And it was going to work.  But it didn't get fixed.  He fixed his own worthless ball and chain instead.  He told me that he'd fix it.  But he didn't.  It's a really long story.  And it sounds like I did something really bad, I know.  But that's not how it really was.  It was an accident.  I was playing with fire.  And it burnt me.  Or it will burn me...  soon.  I guess I'll save up money to have it fixed, but damaged trust will never mend.  That's the price of being me right now. 

So.  What have I learned?  When I play with the fire of my anger, things can easily go wrong.  I'm pretty prudent, actually.  More so than many.  But I don't have as much experience as many others, so my learning curve puts me a little behind for a while.  I'm gonna make mistakes.  But repressing doesn't fix things either.  Either way stuff breaks.  I guess I'll have to be more precise from now on.  It's not like I won't need my anger any longer.  Now's when I'll need it the most.  It's going to make sure that the bleeding stops and I stop letting other people hurt me.  I need it to save my life instead of letting it take my life one ulcer or infection at a time.

So, yeah.  I'm tired.  Too tired to think of anything else to say.  I am just grateful that I went to the Shelter and met the people and talked to them.  I feel so much better.  I like many of them and I remember why I love to work with people.  I can handle alot of different types of personalities.  The pushy ones don't worry me.  The angry ones don't phase me.  The only ones I don't do well with is beligerant Authority Figures.  But they seemed to be okay with me while my coworker was there.  I hope they make the connection come Wednesday that I'm one of the "good guys".  But that may be one of the last illusions about myself that I get to let go of.  We'll see what life deals out.