fighting

Anyone who actually knows me knows that I have borderline personality disorder.  When I was first diagnosed with having a mental health disability in 1993, I decided then that I would be open about having a mental health disability.  I didn't give this careful thought. I guess I could say that it came to me to be open. Since then, I have given this choice a lot of thought.

There is quite a lot of stigma associated with having a mental health disability or, as many would say, a mental illness. Being trained as a lawyer, or maybe just because I am me, and maybe because I am a borderline, I tend to see things in black and white, rigidly contrasted terms.  I don't see gray very well. This might be comparable to being colorblind only I am emotional contrast blind or something. Whatever.  I am pretty sick right now of all the navel gazing I've been doing lately but navel gazing, ruminating on what it is like to be me, is part of the package of having a mental health disability.

I am not even willing to concede that many so-called mental health professionals understand mental health disabilities. I think the whole field of mental health is hunches, bias, hokum and bullshit.  People come in all kinds of bents, male and female, gay and straight, transgendered. Race. Intelligence. Developmentally disabled. Geniuses. We tend to label folks who don't fit in as mentally ill.

I don't understand what I am trying to write about.

But I do understand, unfortunately, unconscious and unexamined bigotry.  I also understand some conscious bigotry.  I am fat so I know that for many people, fat people are vilified for being fat.  You can't hide being fat like you can hide, or try to hide, being crazy.

My disability, borderline personality disorder, is one of the worst ones.  Until Dr. Marsha Li