A Sad and Sorry State of Disorder. Tracy Barker

simply, my sense of self depended largely on other people and how they treated me. If people were nice to me, I believed myself to be nice also – if they weren’t nice then nor was I.

      I often felt as though the person I was with defined who I was in that moment. When they left, it felt like they had taken ‘me’ away with them, and I was left floundering, not knowing who I was. I was who they had made me in that instant. That is to say, I existed because they defined me. Without their definition, I was incredibly lost, and I relied on the next interaction to recreate another ‘me’. Parallel to this ran a subconscious aim to actually become the person I was with at any given time, be that good or bad, happy or sad, kind or unkind.

      In social settings, I would fine-tune my behaviour accordingly. If the occasion was rowdy, I could be rowdy. If it was happy, I could do happy. For me it was like being a social chameleon, which most people can do to some extent. But, as with everything borderline, this was done to the extreme. Not merely to ‘fit in’ or be acceptable in any given crowd, but to feel like ‘someone’, and to become ‘someone’. I wouldn’t just show a polite interest in the thoughts and pastimes of those around me, I would embrace them as my own. If I met (and liked) a nurse, I would suddenly want to be a nurse myself, or a security guard, or a bin man and so on. If I spent time with someone who wore nothing but black, I would revamp my entire wardrobe to black. And so it went, and had gone, for many years.

      I didn’t know who I was or what I wanted. My sense of self was based on who I was with at any given time. So too was my entire sense of being. I tried to become the person or people I was with in order to give some substance and justification to my existence. And I sought desperately to find myself in others by allowing them to define me, or by trying to become someone else.

      I had lost myself.

      I was lost.

      PART OF ME

      A part of me

      is gone,

      crept into the bosom

      of your compassion;

      I diminish

      to give room

      to how great

      your love could be.

      I dissolve

      and melt away from me.

      A part of me

      is gone;

      leapt into the embrace

      that I imagine.

      I depend on you

      to keep this

      part alive,

      and when you don’t,

      a part of me

      is gone.

      THICKER THAN WATER

      My head’s in the clouds,

      my feet two feet above the ground –

      without doing a thing

      you’ve turned my insides upside down.

      Inside-out my crazy world

      is melting in my hands,

      and ice and fire, and blood and stone

      are now my sinking sands.

      But you can’t get blood from this stone…

      or can you –

      if you break me down?

      If I extinguish all I am

      perhaps I’ll come around.

      I’m skating on the thinnest ice

      on the knife-edge blades of my heart –

      without saying a word

      you’ve torn my insides all apart.

      Back-to-front I’ve dressed myself

      in clothes I’d never wear,

      I can’t see where I’m headed

      running headlong through thin air.

      But you can’t get blood from this stone…

      or can you –

      if you break me down?

      If I extinguish all of me

      perhaps I’ll come around.

      A STRANGER IN A STRANGER LAND

      I don’t belong here;

      never have, never will –

      it is a strange land

      and I am stranger still.

      I understand their language

      but cannot communicate.

      I am carried by the crowd,

      swallowed in their wake.

      I dissolve into the shadows,

      sink beneath the strain,

      glide across the oddities

      for I, too, am strange.

      I melt into the background,

      enhance the scenery,

      but this I know and cannot hide;

      there’s none so strange as me.

      THIS ME

      This me is tailor made

      to suit your every need –

      everything you asked for –

      guaranteed to please.

      This me is custom built;

      designed with you in mind

      cleverly constructing

      exactly what you want to find.

      This me is made to order

      created while you wait –

      the finest architecture

      just as you stipulate.

      This me is solely yours

      and if you want a change

      I’ll be happy to accommodate;

      I can simply rearrange.

      MIRROR, MIRROR

      My eyes are not deceived

      Truly, this is what I see

      A monster;

      Seething, clutching

      At chances long expired.

      A beast;

      Heaving, drooling,

      Insatiable and wild.

      An animal,

      Untethered

      Wiley, swift and sly.

      An alien;

      Abnormal, strange,

      Come to bleed you dry.

      My eyes are not deceived,

      This is truly what I see –

      Every time I face the mirror

      This wretch stares back at me.

      So, how did I find myself? My default belief was that I was, essentially, a worthless person. I tried to attribute worth to myself by trying to be someone other than me. The theory is simple: I had to find worth and value within myself, in order to find who I was.

      But I also had to find who I was in order to see worth in myself.

      The practicalities of this are not so simple. It is an ongoing process that begins with trust. And there we have our