Drawing

Splitting in relation to my Borderline Personality diagnosis (In my own words)

I had written this while feeling like I was on the verge of splitting the other day. I decided to take a few sentences of what I had written and write them directly onto my drawing, documenting my thoughts and how I was feeling at the time.

A split is not directed towards anyone, even though when it happens it seems like it. It only happens with the people that I love the most, because they are the ones I am scared of losing. It's my safety net that I can't control, but it's when I feel the most unsafe. I ruin things. I say things that I don't mean. I actively sabotage things because it's the only way I have control.

I see in black and white. Black being only bad. White being only good. In a split, I can only see in red. Red being that everything around me is trying to hurt me. A split is trying to remove those things. A split is full blown rage.

It is called borderline for a reason. It is being on the border of a psychotic breakdown. Living with it feels like I am serving a life sentence for somebody else. I constantly feel trapped.

A split is only ever self hatred. You can see in my eyes that I am trying my absolute hardest to hold back, but it has so much power over me that it's hard to hold onto myself.

While thinking about what I have written and thinking about Melanie Kleins 'Object Relation Theory', I am beginning to see meaning as to why I have been splitting my drawings in half and shuffling them around before I start something new.

The previous of the drawings I had brought someone outside of my art practice to shuffle and hang the drawings back up on the wall as to remove my own biases and control from the image that I had been creating. My only prompt for them was to not worry if the pages were right-side up or upside down, and to just place them in whatever order they felt inclined to. I also decided to leave my studio as I didn't want to feel like I had any influence over what they decided to do.

I decide to repeat this process with a second person on this next split as to have new eyes on the image that is being created, again removing any biases.