Hello and welcome to recommendation number three in Blogmas 2020 with I’m NOT Disordered!
Today, the post is going to look a bit different… I wanted to talk a bit about organization and recommend some skills to help you to keep your affairs in order, but I thought what better to help than to create checklists and worksheets for you to actually use in your own life?!
I really struggle with my mental health when my environment and life in general are a mess! And sometimes my home (mainly my bedroom) doesn’t look tidy but actually, I know where everything is and it all has its own place. I think that a huge reason for me struggling with this is that – without my medication – I experience hallucinations…
When my mental health was at its absolute worst, I was experiencing four auditory hallucinations and seeing numerous ‘rabbits’ as a visual hallucination. And having so many ‘things’ in my life – things that weren’t even real(!) – just made everything feel cluttered and messy. For a long time, I felt that I had no control over the hallucinations because I didn’t think that they were a product of my own mind…
I held the ‘psychotic belief’ that the auditory hallucinations were spirits of people who’d died, and they were now trapped in my body. I couldn’t see or believe everything the professionals were saying about the hallucinations being down to the fact I had dissociated during the abuse. Because while it had happened, I distanced myself and experienced it as someone looking down on it happening to some poor girl who wasn’t me. The professionals explained that in doing that, I had separated myself from reality and that as I got older, my mind continued to separate itself to the point where it was now causing me to experience things that weren’t even there!
The disorder in my life only escalated when I began self-harming and attempting suicide because often, it felt as though the thoughts around those things were impulsive and really spontaneous. Sometimes I couldn’t even pinpoint a cause of influence for the thoughts and feelings. They were just there, and I had to act on them. And I think this is a common experience in someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and it’s why the psychiatric specialising in the Disorder put a lot of focus on rigorous schedules and long-term commitments to therapies. The hospital realizes that structure is helpful to someone with BPD who is struggling to find any sort of order to comfort them.
With all that in mind, I thought that rather than do a few pages of text about how I organize my life now, I’d show you(!) because I like to use to-do lists and worksheets so I’ve created a few for the many different aspects in your life that you might like more order and control over…
Feel free to zoom in on them and print them out, but please please please don’t remove the acknowledgement at the bottom of each one!
