As I’m sure many people have experienced, having anxiety and living through a pandemic is about as fun as being smothered. Can’t breathe either way.There are good days, where you can have distance and perspective, and there are bad days where you wonder if it’s ever going to end and if you’re ever going to be okay again. Today I found out I may have been exposed to the virus. #somuchfun…And to make it worse, my elderly very at high-risk parents may ALSO have been exposed. It just gets better and better…trying to tell my anxiety that everything is going to be okay is like trying to tell the wind to stop blowing. It keeps doing what it wants to do anyways regardless of what you have to say. Add in that it’s my birthday this week (which I abhor) and heeeeey we’re rolling now. Needless to say, not my best day. The cause of the exposure? My elder brother coming to visit us. Gotta love family right? Then, when talking with my mother later, I find out that my brother has previously been diagnosed with BPD. I always knew he had a mental disorder and that he’s had multiple severe brain injuries, but I’ve never known what the diagnosis actually was. I’ve had my guesses, but BPD actually wasn’t one of them. I’m not very familiar with Borderline Personality Disorder, so I started doing some reading after she shared that tidbit with me. It’s almost strange to see how perfectly he fits into every category. Going down a list of descriptors and being like, oh yes, he checks all of these boxes, in both the good and the bad. I’m not sure why it feels so strange, to be honest. It’s weird to take all of someone’s actions, idiosyncrasies, and personality traits and realize they all stem from one thing. I guess because he’s my elder sibling and so there has always been that distance between us (over 10 year age gap). I don’t know how to feel about his BPD. It doesn’t really change anything. I still love him. He’s still my brother. I guess it can just help me understand some of the things he does that seem strange to me. Still…I wish he hadn’t exposed us to COVID-19. Let the long sessions of anxiety attacks begin…