Coping in crisis; a critical ethnographical essay.

Here is something I don’t usually do; a written ethnography. For those unaware, an ethnography is a posh, sociological term for a biography (in layman’s terms at least). After studying at University for approximately five years, I have become well accustomed to the task of colouring my jargon and lexicon with sociological speak.

I wrote my blog post originally with the idea of being spiritual and academic in mind. For this particular piece I am more concerned with the former as opposed to the latter.

A written ethnography is a philosophical expedition, one that requires wit and resilience. As I sit in crisis and write this ethnography in mind, I thought it best to illuminate the struggles of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and dealing with crisis.

I have dealt with crisis many times in my life and have with the urges to afflict myself with suicidal and self-harming impulses. Not afflict myself with the impulses so to speak, but rather the ramifications of what these impulses entail.

I’m afraid at this point I stray from my ethnographic principles and add a slight sociological flair to my coping strategies and mentality. I do this only however from reminiscing on anecdotal evidence, derived from the power of my memory, as to not bore my reader with facts and logistics.

The borderline experience is a gendered phenomenon, one that cannot be measured in statistics or data. Much of this data is derived from gendered phenomenology, accounting from the materiality of the body.

When we attempt to diagnose and distinguish between what is meant as gender and what is meant as illness, the materiality of the borderline experience when complementing the materiality of the body must be accounted for.

When we think about a body, its materiality must often be accounted for. Silhouettes illuminated on public restrooms are a demonstration of this. We garner this silhouette to be an illumination of what it means to be a woman in this world, or at least how to identify as one. Multiply this with the borderline experience and it thus becomes a recipe for disaster.

This is not due to female biological dispositions, but rather the perception of what it means to have a biological disposition to the gendered female body and psyche.

Females are constructed within our society to be frail and short of wit, over amorous for men in a heteronormative fashion. The plight of the lesbian discourse is really accounted for within this narrative.

This is then combined with mental instability when regarding the borderline experience. The lack of female resilience combined with a predisposition to mental subjugation subordinates us to the position of the inferior.

I am not a scholar or a philosopher in an institutional realm; I am merely relaying a critical divulgence in what I believe to be the borderline experience. Many scholars who have come before me have accounted their sociological ponderings into the realm of a critical ethnography so I thought it best to accomplish this task myself.

This has developed into more of a stream of consciousness but sociological ponderings are astute and worthy, and I believe it best to be succinct without convoluting the manner of my argument.