Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) ๐
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- Author: Terri White
Read book online ยซComing Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) ๐ยป. Author - Terri White
I let my shame take the lead. I run my insurance details and โproblemโ through a website that gives me a short โ very short โ list of doctors whom I can see. However, if Iโm willing to go outside my insurance and pay, I can see almost three times as many doctors. Each one describes a specialism: PTSD, eating disorders, sexual trauma, self-harm, addiction issues. I try to rank my problems in order of importance. The most pressing one + my insurance + a doctor on the island of Manhattan = the answer.
I end up choosing by the next available appointment, convinced if I have to wait a week, I wonโt make it. The next day, I have an appointment with a fifty-something male doctor on the Upper East Side. I step out of the elevator onto the floor of his office, where a thin-lipped secretary sits tucked tight into the corner. Her job seems to be equal parts charging your credit card and welcoming you to the office. A brown and beige office on the outside and inside. I sit on a chair against the wall, one of just two, waiting to be called through the door thatโs touching my left shoulder. I run through what I should say in my head. How much of the truth should I tell? Do I tell him how I feel right now? Or how Iโve felt my entire life? Where do I begin? Where would I even end?
Iโm called inside his airless office. Itโs tiny and tight, little to no light streaming through the blinds that cover both windows. One is almost entirely obscured by the churning, chugging AC unit, covered in dust, spitting out lukewarm air. The other looks out onto another brick building. He looks at me through his wide glasses, weary but ready to hear what I have to say. The words that come out of my mouth are jumbled, jangling. Later I struggle to remember exactly what I told him in my five-or-so-minute speech but I think I talk about my drinking, my shame, my pain, my abuse, my self-harm, my bloodied arms and black insides, how everything goes bad, goes wrong. I think I cry.
He nods, writing down as I speak. He pauses when I eventually stop, spent, and says, โIt sounds to me like you have borderline personality disorder.โ He says that my trauma wired my brain differently. He prescribes mood stabilisers and anti-depressants. I forget to ask any questions, take my prescriptions from his hands and Iโm back in the hall, confused and relieved. Relieved that after all these years, I have a name for whatโs wrong with me. I have pills that will make it better. Maybe theyโll even make me not want to die, I think. Or feel a little bit more like living.
I Google as soon as Iโve offered up my credit card, been dispatched in the lift and am back out on the street. There are generally accepted to be nine symptoms of borderline personality disorder:
1) Fear of abandonment
2) Unstable relationships
3) Unclear or unstable self-image
4) Impulsive, self-destructive behaviours
5) Self-harm
6) Extreme emotional mood swings
7) Chronic feelings of emptiness
8) Explosive anger
9) Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality
I think of the blades Iโve snapped out of my plastic razors and taken to my skin. I think of the moments too many to count โ when Iโve felt hollowed out, like at my very core is nothing but air and space. I think of the rage that makes my vision blur. I think of the heart-stopping desperation when Iโm left or in fear of being left. I think of the minutes when the feelings and emotions I canโt separate out reverberate off the walls.
I go to the pharmacy a couple of blocks away to get my prescriptions. Two orange bottles containing my hope. I take them home and put them on the white bedside table unopened. I choose not to take one that day. I donโt ask why. The next day, the same. By the third day I know that Iโm saving them. Two full pill bottles could be the answer to a different question. Knowing theyโre there makes me feel safe, makes me feel that itโll all be OK. Theyโre the way out when the time comes. And I know, instinctively, that the time is coming.
CHAPTER 23
At the same time that my mind is breaking, my body begins to buckle. I stop eating. I lose half a stone, finally arriving at the weight Iโve always wanted to be. My legs spasm. My brain feels like cotton wool. My skull fuzzes from the inside as what feels like volts of electricity run between the left ear and the right. I have pins and needles in my hands, my feet. I fall over in the street. I feel anxious and absent and out of sorts. Something is wrong, I know it. Iโm coming undone, bone by bone, muscle by muscle, organ by organ, cell by cell.
The doctor bangs a small hammer against my knees and elbows, shines a light in my eyes, asks me to grip her arm, hard. Due to the luck of my insurance, Iโm sent for an MRI the next day. I tell the doctor that Iโm claustrophobic, canโt breathe in small spaces, wonโt be able to spend what Iโm told will be forty-five minutes lying in a tube in a machine. She reassures me that theyโll give me
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