The book White Fragility blew up a few years back and got everyone investigating “Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”

But here’s the kick, it was by a white person.

It didn’t take long for people to start to critique the book, the premise, the author. I’ll be honest I didn’t read it…I don’t read books on racism by white people ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But here’s what I want to talk about today, while the book was popular among who you would think it would be….the phrase seems to have become popular with everyone.

I wanted to share my diagnosis story, my borderline diagnosis story.

I do want to share a few content warnings for this one: I will be discussing emotional ab*se, emotional n*gl*ct, self h*rm, and su*c*dal ideation and actions (not in any great detail). Please care for yourself however you need, take breaks or skip this one entirely if you need to!

I guess in some ways, due to the nature of BPD and the attachment traumas we so often see at the base of them, my diagnosis is a little bit of my life story. Don’t worry reader, I won’t take you through every grueling detail (I don’t even remember them all lol), but I promise it will pay off. I’ll give you a little teaser.

Language is alive and impacts pretty much everything we do. How we talk about things, the labels we use, they matter even when they are messy and ever-changing. I began using BBA and BBIA instead of BIPOC several years ago. Here’s why.

I learned silence early.

As a queer, fat, Black, multiply neurodivergent woman, I learned that my voice was too much. Too loud. Too honest.

Even when I whisper, even when I covered my words in flowers and acquiescence, even sometimes when I was silent I was still too loud.

I’ve been the bad guy. And I’ve made others into one too. It’s a tempting and societally pressured response to many feelings of discomfort.

The problem with bad guys

As much as life might be easier, more comfortable, if there was a villian it leads us nowhere. We get to point the finger. “If they would just change everything would be better”. It halts real progress.

So, I started this business to try to support people in my communities and people who want to support people in my communities. All the time, especially when talking about business type shit (like marketing and “content pillers” or whatever) people talk about “what is your why”.

I sometimes have a hard time nailing down just one why. It’s not something easily wrapped up into a cute little saying. Very few things about my life as a multiply marginalized person can be wrapped up into a cute little saying and as this business is in a lot of ways focused on finding the nuance it’s just never going to get narrow like that.

When I first decided to go into the field of mental health I was in high school and I knew, even then, that I wanted to work with teens. I was one of those “I want to be the person I needed” even while I still needed that person. It’s not a new story, but I do think it’s an important one.

Why Teens? There’s something magical about working with teens, some combination of a continued raw connection to emotion, strong walls and very gooey centers, the whole of possibility before them. And, in a more personal way, my teen years were when everything could have changed for me, and when I’m sure a lot did due to having a great therapist at the time.

So I read a book about leadership recently. It was written by a white woman who’s worked for huge companies like Google and Apple. The book is called Radical Candor by Kim Scott and I really enjoyed it.

The premise is basically this: for leaders, there is an axis of caring personally and challenging directly. You want high levels of both to run an effective team.

Let’s break the axis down…

I did notice that I kept feeling behind this year. I do think some of that is a function of coming into the late part of my early career and I think some of it is more systemic than will ever be something that I can take responsibility for or action about.

But some of it is also that I am surrounded by people who are further along than I am.

I’ve been no contact with my step mother since I was 15 and sent to live with my uncle. I’ve been no contact with my mother since 2019. Since the day I sent the no contact email, I’ve been torn.

A part of me, the same part that loves a traditional holiday set up, has longed to find a way to “get over it”. I want very little more than to wake up and realize that I was wrong, I was seeing and understanding it all wrong and there is a salvageable relationship with this person who means so much to me. That I could follow through on the self abandonment that served to get me through my childhood and adolescence (just barely) and it would mean that I finally get a hug from my mom.

But alas, even if I found a way to do that, I would bleed out from the wounds she inflicted. She’s a Knife Person, she cannot actually hug me without her sharp edges catching on my self worth and tearing it to shreds. To love her is to betray myself, all my little parts that most need my big self to care for and protect them.

I’ve had to figure out boundaries the hard way. I grew up in a very un-boundaried house. It was unstable, unkind, and unpredictable. The expectations of the adults in my life were a mystery to me (and often to each other and even themselves). My own needs were viewed as “too much”, overwhelming, dramatic. Emotional exploration and processing were not the name of the game.

This became a big problem as I got older and picked friends that mirrored my home life. I was never comfortable directly expressing or acting on my needs until my system just couldn’t take it anymore. I found friends who didn’t care for themselves well and took it out on me.

It took me years of feeling unmoored, questioning myself and my ability to be loved, before I would figure out that the key to the healthy, stable relationships I craved was in fact boundaries.

I recently went on two big trips though I’ve been traveling all my life. I first flew unaccompanied minor at 13 and before that my mother and I made frequent trips to visit family several states away.

Similarly to being a lifelong traveler, I’m also a lifelong fatty and my mother has been fat my whole life as well. We have been fat travelers as long as I can remember. But it’s only been in my recent travels, alone, as an adult that I’ve really felt the brunt of fat traveling.