Take it down a notch

Part of having Borderline Personality Disorder is a tendency to take things to extremes. (Those of you who know me are going "No shit, sherlock!") I have a very hard time disengaging from the woes of the world. Lately I've gotten much better, but when adolescence hit, I agonized over food I didn't eat because of starving people in the world, took turns weeping and railing in fury over injustices I saw everywhere, tore myself up over trying to figure out if people could change, and wondering overall what the hell was wrong with people.

My counselor says I take too much ownership of things. So does my mother-in-law, actually.

For a while I'd swung back in the other direction, at least in some ways. I became a hedonistic, mostly selfish person who had moments of extreme self-loathing, and other moments of extreme overextending myself for other people in some sort of effort to compensate. (You notice the extreme theme here again, yes?)

Anyway, I wasn't planning on getting into all this. Having a loving, stable relationship with a husband who is at the same time patient but not a doormat has helped me level out somewhat. (As has Zoloft, woohoo.) Having two children to focus on helps too.

The current administration and recent news does not help at all.

I wish Billy Joel would update his "We Didn't Start the Fire" song - think of the verses he could come up with with all the crap going on right now! Iraq, the WMDs that weren't, DeLay, Abramoff, Valerie Plame, NSA spying domestically - and this doesn't include the millions of small idiocies and scandals that fly under the radar. I think I'm developing an ulcer.

I'm reminding myself that I have things to take care of, but that voice in my head that so frequently manages to find something wrong with me says that I should be doing more.

I was writing this post to try to calm my fury. I've succeeded in smothering it into the cold ashes of tired semi-depression. I'm not sure that's an improvement.