It feels like everyone I know has been to Italy this month—including celebrities. Some have been to France, but it’s mostly Italy. They’ve been posting photos of gorgeous buildings, glistening bodies of water, fresh fruit, and baked pastries, all in the warmth of the glorious sunshine. Women wear floral summer dresses, practical sandals, sunglasses and sunhats, while boasting about the books they’re reading and the life they’re living. (I don’t know what the men are doing, sorry.) This is not just people living their lives, but actively participating in the good parts of life—in joy.
I’ve only just begun dreaming again about going to places like Italy and France. To feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, the sweet taste of strawberries as I wipe their juices from dripping down my chin, the merry yet comforting buzz from drinking white wine, and the feeling of love that emanates from the chest when laughing with friends and lovers. To love and be loved, to desire and be desired. I couldn’t think about any of this for years. I would snap at my boyfriend for even suggesting something hypothetically. It was so unavailable to me, I couldn’t even entertain the thought. Is the fact I’m able to do so now progress? I don’t know if it helps or hinders me, because it’s all still an impossibility.
I can’t relate to the way people talk about summer—or anything, really. The hot weather is oppressive, suffocatingly humid, and I’m hyper-aware of changes in body sensation caused by eating, drinking, thinking, moving. Forget drinking alcohol—it doesn’t calm me, it alerts me. I live in fear thinking that every change could be a panic attack. It doesn’t matter that I know that panic attacks are not harmful and won’t kill me and that I truly believe these things. I find them intolerable, traumatic. I wonder if I somehow experience them more intensely to other people, due to BPD and potential autism.
I exist in a different world to everyone else—my body is unsafe, therefore so is the world. I suppress emotions because I can’t feel them without freaking out, but the price I pay might be worse. I’m detached from the world at large. Dissociated. I desperately want to find joy in the things everyone else does, but I don’t feel it. It’s hard to imagine that people experience good things and feel safe in their own bodies. The idea of the sun as comforting and food as pleasurable is not something I experience– and I haven’t in a long time. In fact, it feels overwhelming to me, often brings a sense of dread, sometimes the kind of terror akin to panic. The idea of going to the beach sounds good in theory but feels stressful. I don’t think I deserve to experience positive things, or maybe it’s that I don’t think I’m capable. I’m not sure how everything got so bad, I often think, but I do know: sensitivity, trauma, emotional suppression. Will I ever feel genuine safety and joy again? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel like it. Even good things are experienced through fear. But what am I so afraid of?