People can be cruel
As most of you know, I play the deadbeat poet punk AuRa with wild green dreadlocks in Final Fantasy 14. A lot of you know I suffer from LGS, a rare and extremely severe form of epilepsy. I take 14 prescriptions a day. 8 for my epilepsy. I have a VNS implant. A VNS implant is a battery in your clavicle, which sends electrical signals to your brain every 5 minutes. It changes your voice forever, but in my experience, so far it has been worth it.
What a lot of you don't know is that the rest of my medications literally give me the will and desire to survive. I was diagnosed with Borderline personality disorder in February, after an event which landed me in a psychiatric ward for 2 months. I'm not proud. I'm not glorifying anything. I want to explain how eye opening that experience was. I made a lot of friends with people who go through so much every day. One legged people, one eyed people, a man with a colostomy bag, a man who literally found out he has a hole in his heart while we were in there. But my absolute favorite person, who has become one of my very best friends, was a homeless man who had been disowned by his family. Every day he drank 4 cups of coffee for each meal. He used to go bat shit crazy when people didn't close his door (for good reason, it was always annoying.) He has paranoid schizophrenia, but always accepted me through thick and thin. He was there for multiple seizures. He was there to calm me down after every anxiety attack, to talk me out of my crazy ideas. He's honestly one of the most down to earth, beautiful souls I have ever met. He taught me a lot about my own life. He taught me to respect myself. He taught me that I am worthwhile. That I'm someone who can achieve anything.
Since my two months in hospital, I have continued to stay in contact with him, even though he's 2 hours away. I have only missed one day of work, and have moved into my own home. I'm damn proud of myself.
But society still holds massive stigmas over neurological and mental illness. Yes, my moods change every hour. Yes, I may feel too anxious to participate in activities, including Ffxiv. I hate bailing on people, and feel terrible for doing so. I have had to miss a lot of wonderful events due to my health. Society expects people to work 40 hours, then hold down a home. I'm doing that myself now. Every single day I open my eyes is a difficult day. Every breath is hard labor. Yet I'm proud to say I've survived. People often don't survive with borderline personality disorder, because they are misunderstood. It's one of the hardest mental illnesses to treat, because it's often loaded on people in conjunction with multiple other mental illnesses. For example, I have depression, PTSD,OCPD,Dissociative disorder, anxiety. Yet no matter what, I force myself to strive to survive.
People don't understand BPD. It's not like cancer, but its effects can be devastating. Simple little things said to a person with BPD can drive them over the edge. There's an imbalance of cortisol in the brains of BPD sufferers, and so areas of our brains are literally corroding. We react to things in a much more emotional way than the average person. Take the emotions of a normal person, times it by 100, and you may have a close estimate as to how a person with BPD feels. We fear everything. Rejection, abandonment, loss,failure. Everything. People don't understand how much they hurt us with what they do and say.
I'm currently feeling deeply upset about FFXIV, and my experiences on Balmung. Several times I have been reprimanded for not being able to attend events, or having to cancel at the last minute because my mind literally cannot handle people. I've been reprimanded for spending 2 months in hospital, rather than playing FFXIV. I've been disrespected because of my inability to follow through with every single thing. I can't always follow through because of my health. I've been disrespected for being too honest. I've been treated like crap because of the character I play in FFXIV. I don't play Mary Sue. Sorry. My character is a deadbeat with multiple flaws, who doesn't belong in the high class society. I've been denied RP because I'm not playing the "right" type of character. I've been shot down and found myself being replaced because of my inability to play 100% of the time.
So what am I saying? Even in online games, you have ignorant people who refuse to accept people for the way they are. People who claim to be open minded, but refuse to RP with you because you're not a perfectly prim and proper character. People who breed intolerance, when they claim to accept anyone. People who ditch you if you can't make one day of RP, one event.
Yes, I do cancel a lot of events when I feel like shit, but I fucking rock at being me. I kick ass at surviving. I am great at working hard and maintaining my home. If I can't play because of life, something that "always comes first", yet gets in the way of gaming and causes rifts, so fucking be it. I'd rather strive to live my life to the fullest, than try to be the perfect roleplayer, the perfect Eorzean citizen. If people don't like it, they can kiss my fucking ass. I have always been open minded, always respected people for who they are, but if I do not get the same respect back, those people aren't worth my time.
I may lose all of my FFXIV friends for saying all of this, but right now, I don't give a flying fuck.
Peace out ignorant, closed minded shit heads. I know who my real friends are.
