By Ila Ananya

We stumbled across this lovely thread on Twitter by journalist and editor @TheRestlessQuil for Maple Jar, that provides people with online counselling for mental health concerns. It begins with her writing about living with borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder. She talks about everything, from medication, to pleasure and how complicated having sex can be, to talking to others about having BPD and bipolar.

Here are a few tweets, but it’s an ongoing thread for the rest of today, and really just required reading for everybody. You can follow it here.

difficulty fitting in. Sometimes, I delude myself into thinking that there is no such thing as mental illness and i am not sick.

— Maple Jar (@JarMaple) May 11, 2017

many drugs — such as mood stabilisers and antipsychotics (both of which i take) — inhibit sexual pleasure. this can pose a serious problem

— Maple Jar (@JarMaple) May 11, 2017

I hate both those labels because they assume a) that i live by someone else’s value judgement.
b)that I don’t have control over my life

— Maple Jar (@JarMaple) May 11, 2017

It’s very very fraught, this internal dialog. And it leaves me with so much anxiety that i end up screwing up any potential relationship.

— Maple Jar (@JarMaple) May 11, 2017

Featured image courtesy: Johnny Silvercloud via Flickr CC by SA 2.0.