Finding HopeDisconnected From My Name
Posted on May 20, 2023
This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a long time and an issue I’ve been struggling with for even longer: my name and how I feel about it. A simple and yet deeply complicated thing.
I’ve always wrestled with my sense of identity. It’s always felt like something unstable, something permanently unsettled that I can’t get a grip on. And one specific thing I’ve always struggled with is my name.
I don’t think it helps that my name – the most straightforward form of my identity – has changed multiple times over my life… Growing up, I was Alex: that’s what my family and friends called me. But, given that it was legally (and therefore from an administrative point of view) my middle name, I was constantly getting called the wrong name by teachers and doctors and so on; it was very frustrating to continually correct people. So, when I moved up to secondary school, I started using Lauren. I was about to have more than ten different teachers a week for five years and meet potentially hundreds of new people; I really, really didn’t want to be correcting that many people. And I wonder whether it was a manifestation of struggling with my name even then, even if I wasn’t fully cognisant of it then. So, from that point on, I was Lauren. It took a while to get used to – and coming back from the summer holidays was always a bit of a culture shock – but it wasn’t long before it didn’t even register anymore. I was Alex at home and Lauren everywhere else. I’m not sure it was a decision I should’ve been making at eleven but the change in school forced it and after all this time, it is what it is. The decision was made and, honestly, I think I’d probably do it again, if only for practical reasons (although I do still get confused about who I am to who and which name to sign on Christmas cards and so on).
Having said that, I’ve never felt particularly attached to either name; they’ve always felt weird to me and have done my whole life. Each name could just be another word; they don’t mean anything to me, don’t have any sentimental value. They just feel like prompts to respond to or indicators for action. Being called by either is a bit like wearing clothes that aren’t quite the right shape or trying to use a flathead screwdriver when you really need a Phillips head screwdriver – it does the job but it doesn’t feel like the right fit.
I’m hardly the first or the only person to feel this way. Sometimes our names don’t match our personalities (whether that’s down to stereotypes or literal descriptive words that get used as names, such as ‘Patience’ or ‘Faith’); sometimes they remind us of things we’d rather not think about; sometimes we simply don’t like the way they sound. There are even studies that show that your name can have a pretty dramatic impact on who you grow up to be and how you interact with the world, a phenomenon known as nominative determinism (x). Having a name that doesn’t feel like yours, that doesn’t feel like it fits you, can create a feeling of almost cognitive dissonance: our image and understanding of ourselves doesn’t match up with how the world views us, how the world identifies us, how we interact with the world and the people around us.
My relationship with my name has changed a little since I started releasing music under my full name, Lauren Alex Hooper, maybe because the name is now being associated with something I’ve created, something I’m proud of. That’s when I most feel like Lauren Alex Hooper. But I still don’t feel particularly connected to it. It could still be any random word but there’s some warmth that wasn’t there before.
When I was younger, I thought a lot about changing my name, about choosing a new one for myself but, in the end, I never did it. And then I started releasing music and, given how hard it is to carve out a career as an independent artist and songwriter, changing my name now would only make my life harder (and, quite honestly, it’s hard enough already – I don’t need to add to the pile). Plus, I’m not sure changing my name would actually change the feeling. I wonder if it’s more a case of not feeling comfortable as a person; maybe if I felt more comfortable in myself, my name wouldn’t feel the way it does. Or maybe it would and it’s just one of those things, one of those feelings that I just need to learn to make space for.
On Feelings Of Abandonment (BPD Awareness Month 2022)
Posted on May 29, 2022
I’d hoped to write and post more for Borderline Personality Awareness Month but between my depression and changing medications, I’ve been struggling to write; I’ve started a handful of posts but been unable to finish them. But, of the symptoms of BPD, my fears around abandonment have been particularly oppressive recently and so I’ve been thinking about that a lot. I thought I’d write done some of my thoughts; it’s the best I can do right now.
Fear of abandonment is a significant aspect of Borderline Personality Disorder and it’s something that I’ve personally struggled with for most of my life. I was diagnosed with BPD when I was twenty and the consensus was – and still is – that it was due to the difficult and frustrating process of being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, where I was repeatedly ignored and invalidated by medical professionals when I expressed how much I was struggling. I guess those could be interpreted as abandonments. But I’d been abandoned in the more traditional sense multiple times before that, so the ‘foundation’ – I guess you could call it – for a fear of abandonment was already there (I’m not sure if it works like that but I noticed the pattern as I thought back): most of my friends stopped hanging out with me when I was eleven and then my one remaining friend moved abroad about a year later so I started secondary school with basically no friends; my Dad died suddenly when I was thirteen; and then, when I was nineteen, a very important figure in my life just cut me off without warning. Each one reinforced the fear and the fear just kept building exponentially. So I think it’s fair to say that I was well on my way to developing a complex about being abandoned by the time I was diagnosed with BPD.
It didn’t stop there – and there were a couple of painful ones – but, on the whole, life has been relatively stable until recently. Over the last few months though, I’ve been dealing with a lot of feelings of abandonment. Some of the actions that have caused these feelings were intentional, some not; some of these feelings are based in reality and some are based on anxiety. People who’d been consistent in my life for a long time left suddenly for work or family stuff, people not being who I thought they were, people drifting away… I don’t want to write about them specifically because the point of this is not to ‘name and shame’ – it’s just felt like one after another after another lately and it’s been really tough. And, again, I’m not trying to say that these people are deliberately, intentionally abandoning me; BPD has just made me particularly sensitive to situations that could be perceived as abandonments, especially when they seem to be happening a lot. Sometimes it’s on me for overthinking or overreacting, sometimes it’s on them for doing or not doing something, and sometimes nobody did anything but it still feels awful. We’re all human beings just doing our best (most of the time, at least). I guess the point I’m making here is that it’s a feature of BPD that I have to live with and have to navigate on a daily basis and this is a part of that.
I don’t think it’s a great leap to assume there’s a link to low self esteem. I find it hard to see why other people would want to be friends with me, which has only been exacerbated by all of my health problems: I feel like a burden (something I wrote about in this year’s MHAW post).
I remember seeing this on Instagram and relating to it to a painful degree…
Now I don’t even feel capable of being useful.
I feel like I’m always the one who can’t keep up, the one letting people down. I feel like, between me and my problems, I’m just too much for most people. Both too much and not enough at the same. And I can’t help but feel that if someone doesn’t think that yet, then it’s just a matter of time until they realise it. I know that these are my thoughts and not necessarily what other people think but it’s a hard thought pattern to shift; it’s pretty deeply ingrained at this point. It’s something I need to work on in therapy but I haven’t had access to therapy recently. Hopefully soon, although there’s a lot that’s happened over the last year that I need to work though.
I don’t know what I think about this post. I find writing about anything BPD related very difficult. It always feels much more personal and revealing to write about, compared to writing about Autism, for example. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because a lot of the symptoms of BPD correspond with issues that we’re conditioned to feel shame for and around: fear of abandonment can be portrayed as ‘clingy’ or ‘manipulative’; an unstable sense of self sounds scary to a casual ear; self-destructive behaviour can be interpreted as not wanting to be helped; and so on and so forth. Plus there’s a lot of stigma around BPD, even amongst the people who should really know better.
To learn more about BPD, you can find good information here and here, and here is a post I wrote about my experience with BPD in 2019. I hope this has been helpful or thought-provoking or something along those lines. I do want to write more about BPD because there needs to be more understanding around it as a disorder; it was just unfortunate that BPD Awareness Month – when I had planned to write a handful of posts about it – coincided with a period where writing felt really difficult. Combine that with a topic that I find hard to write about anyway and I’m kind of surprised that I even managed this, given how I’ve been feeling recently.
Mental Health Awareness Week 2022
Posted on May 14, 2022
I have to admit that I often struggle with Mental Health Awareness Week, particularly the flooding of social media with “it’s okay not to be okay” and “reach out to someone if you need help”; it makes me want to scream in frustration because we are so far past that. If we’re going to create better support for mental health, we need more than that. This year, the theme is loneliness, which is an apt one, two years and change into this pandemic. I’m certainly seeing a lot of loneliness around at the moment: those with mental health issues, disabled individuals, people who are still shielding and feeling abandoned by society because of the dropped mandates… I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in or from Ukraine right now…
All of these situations need to be talked about and since the Mental Health Foundation is encouraging everyone to share their experiences with loneliness for Mental Health Awareness Week, I thought I’d write about my experience, as a disabled person with mental health issues.
This is something I find kind of hard to talk about. I guess talking about it – and writing about it – makes me feel a little guilty because I’m not alone. I know I’m not alone. I have a great family and some really wonderful friends who have been there for me through some really tough stuff. They try so hard to make sure that I don’t feel alone. Fortunately, we – as people – don’t need to understand each other’s experiences point for point to find friendship and create those important, supportive bonds: I have a friend who has experienced very different trauma to me but there have been a lot of similarities throughout both of our journeys that have made it possible for us to relate to each other. I’m grateful for that, more than I can say.
But it’s also true that I do, often and increasingly, feel alone, feel lonely. And I think that that’s because no one – no one I’ve found at least – really understands what it’s like to be in my head, in my body, in my life, dealing with the problems that I have and the ripple effect that they can create. I’ve had multiple doctors and medical services simply stop helping me (or refuse to help me at all) because my case is “too complicated.” These are the professionals – the people who are supposed to really know and understand this stuff – and even they don’t know what to do with me (and those abandonments, plus other abandonments in my life, have left me with a lot of issues and fears that I have to work on every day). I think the issue is compounded by the fact that I have multiple diagnoses so, even though I may fit into the autistic community, I still don’t feel like I fit in because I also have OCD and BPD and so on; I can’t imagine there are many people who fit into the same community as me when the criteria is so narrow. I’m also not entirely convinced by the idea of community based on diagnosis either, to be honest, especially when the diagnosis covers such a range of symptoms, behaviours, and experiences, like Autism Spectrum Disorder. Anyway, my point is that I don’t feel like I fit in, even with the people that, on paper, I would likely get along with.
As I said, I’m not alone. Even though I’ve never felt like I quite fitted in, I have some great friends and friends from all areas of my life: school, sixth form, uni, Masters, as well as stuff outside education… But I can’t always keep up with my friends, with my peers, and I can’t always do the things I wish I could and I find that so hard. I always end up feeling like there’s a gap between me and everyone else and it’s lonely. Not being able to physically keep up with those around me means that I often feel left out – even if that’s nobody’s intention. And there’s a level of embarrassment and shame about being the one who can never keep up, the one who is always asking people to wait, always having to double check or change or cancel plans. I don’t know where that comes from – I know my friends would never want me to feel like that. But still, it’s there. It widens the gap and it makes that loneliness worse.
The older I get, the more I notice it – the gap. While I spend my time trying different medications, going to appointments for my physical and mental health, and resting after doing what I can manage to do, a lot of my friends are pursuing PhDs, establishing careers, living independently, and building lasting relationships. Our life experiences are just so different. And the longer it goes on, the bigger the disconnect feels. It just feels like the future is full of loneliness and I don’t know what to do with that.
I know this is kind of a depressing post. It’s a depressing truth, although it might have come out differently if I weren’t coming off my antidepressants; if I were in a better place mentally, I might have a more hopeful outlook. I don’t know.
I don’t think it’s a bad theme – loneliness can have a devastating impact on a person’s mental health – but the Mental Health Foundation’s website says that they want to “shatter the stigma around loneliness” and while I can’t say that there’s no stigma associated with loneliness, I can think of so many things that might have more impact as a theme, might make more of a difference, like access to mental health support or the impact of social media or… I don’t know, something more specific than loneliness or nature (last year’s theme). (I talked about this more in my Mass Observation Day post.) As I said at the beginning of this post, I find Mental Health Awareness Week difficult because I so often feel like the information being circulated is somewhat obvious, that we could – and should – be going deeper. I guess it all just feels a bit surface level but I don’t know how that changes, if anyone else even feels this way. It just doesn’t feel like enough. It’s one week a year and it doesn’t feel like enough.
Finding Hope 