November 2026
She picks up her text and begins to read what attempts to trace how making certain types of performance and receiving certain types of feedback have led her to be (mis?)diagnosed, feel (mis?)understood, and begin to expose the immensity of her long-enduring masking.
What happens to a person's sense of self when they exist through the interpretations of other people, becoming exceptionally skilled at presenting legible versions of themselves that other people can comprehend, and then using those interpretations to construct an identity?
How can she expect someone else not to mischaracterise her actions when her own sense of self is constantly repositioning itself?
The gaze, impressions, and opinions of others—partners (wordplay), parents (far experience), psychiatrists, peers, external advisors, teachers— the impressions have always confronted her and carried great weight in said repositioning. Grappling with self-comprehension for as long as she can remember, it always comes as a shock to hear herself situated through the lens of another.
It shocks me.
Jaared is her resting state when receiving opinions about her potential diagnosis, her solo work, her writing or analysis of texts… how she conducts herself in an artistic process. The words, reflections and labels leave deeply etched impressions because of the precise, raw gap between what she understands to be true for herself and what the opinions declare.
She did question it for a while—was it simply that she could not receive critical feedback? She has to admit- partially yes. Raised with that particular flavour of father, criticism will probably always be a jagged pill to swallow…but she no longer regards this as being at the core of things. No.. she has begun to feel it running concurrently on a different frequency, a coarser frequency of miss... misss… missing something. Something is missing.
She is constantly letting people down. (fact)
People seem initially drawn to her, enamoured even. But that admiration has a cheeky way of hardening into expectation. People begin to anticipate certain things from her, based on certain competencies, based on certain past performances. She receives their disappointment when those expectations are no longer met. She receives the disappointment because it is usually accompanied by some degree of abandonment.
“You know.. But you have so much potential”
Her mother last Christmas.
She is beginning to collect clues as to why this perpetual series of ‘let-downs’ might be happening,
and this is what we will expose here (address audience)
First, So Fucking Well, and how the making of this solo work became entangled with a Borderline Personality Disorder (mis?)diagnosis.
It was in the making, performing, and receiving feedback on this particular solo performance that she collided with some of the more furiously hidden parts of her interior self for the first time, despite, as you can see, having fragmented herself into many parts within the performance in an attempt to avoid this very grasp. The work was densely packed, and for her, the connections were incredibly clear and meticulously mapped. Everything belonged somewhere; every fragment connected to another. She did not for a single moment consider the work as possibly incoherent. The process of making this masterpiece was rigorous and torturous. - as it should be- E v e r y t h i n g was in there.
The work, it turns out, was having an identity crisis. It was having an identity crisis because she was beginning to realise the actuality of her own. She was beginning to realise why she had built such a meticulous mechanism to avoid herself for so long. It had actually been an extremely impressive safety plan, and quite remarkably sustained for 29 years with minimal maintenance.
The truth, the truth?The truth! Too much to comprehend. It would be too much for anyone to comprehend. It would be too much to sacrifice! The work was showing her herself, and vicious fissures began to form between the aggressively fused fragments.
Rivers of cracks, and in the cracks there was sense. But it wasn't a beautiful sense. It was an ugly, twisted, painful sense.
It felt as though she was meeting herself for the first time. She felt both incredible and so incredibly vulnerable after that performance. A process of exposure, sharing with the public what she hadn’t even realised yet for herself. It was her coming out, and Mad awakening in the very same moment.
After the first performance, she was staying at her partner’s house when a mutual friend messaged him, saying that he
‘wasn't exactly sure what she was trying to communicate in the performance’
Sharing her interior self for the first time, only to feel misunderstood, was so triggering that she almost refused to perform the following night.
The following week, she had a formal feedback session, and the reviewer suggested there was something inherently wrong with how she was existing in the world.
‘It seems to me as though you were performing for the male gaze.’
To which she replied,
‘I am, we all are.’ to some extent..
The reviewer needed a moment.
Did her lived experience not qualify for public sharing? Was it invalid? Again a young child, fundamentally wrong. A nauseating experience for someone attempting this self-seeing, self-sharing for the first time.
A month into their “relationship”, the partner offered:
‘Do you actually know how much you are suffering?’
It took someone else's commentary for her to even consider categorising her experience as one of suffering. Was she really suffering? Or did every word he spoke become her truth? Regardless of which reality she tried to choose, the presence of suffering began to consume her. To consume her identity.
A few weeks later, this remarkable partner further proposed:
‘Don't you think you might be Borderline?’
(dramatic musical interlude)
Then something… THE thing. just. clicks. Suddenly, those infinitely disparate fragments momentarily tessellate, and everything that has always felt so disconnected connects. You go back and re-contextualise your entire experience of life. On par with someone requesting that the solar system reorder itself. Um, Pluto, could you please try being the sun from now on? You had to let go of who you knew yourself to be.
letgo
No one speaks about the process of grieving the death of oneself whilst still alive. An “accidental” overdose and re-admission to the psych ward for the first time in 10 years. The mattress is plastic blue, foam, no sheets allowed. The person in the cell next door is screaming about having stabbed someone. The magazine in the common room is annotated with paranoid thoughts. “DELETE THE PHONE!”
Some faraway part of you remembers the only advice your mother ever offered you as a teenager:
‘Why don't you just give up?’
So you decide to take your mothers advice for once. You give up. You give in to the interjection. To the sinkhole. Who knows what waits on the other side, the only clarity you have is that staying here is no longer an option. Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkk. (you think this because you cannot speak- you have been non-verbal for days)
Although you’re rightfully suspicious of the labelling of Western psychiatry, this label, the bpd label, without its ability to be accurate or not, did assist by temporarily narrowing some parameters, allowing some functional delusions of clarity to emerge through which you could begin to navigate yourself. begin to accept new ideas about yourself.
However! Recognising these parts of yourself came with its own special set of repercussions - additional to that of experiencing your own death. Before, you fought constantly to operate as okay, not yet realising that you maybe had a reason not to be. That fight kept you closer to functioning within societal standards, but that fight kept you, further out of touch with yourself. The parts of yourself you hadn’t realised you’d spent so long containing became harder to ignore. You unravel. You became less able to meet the very standards you had spent your life trying to appease, while becoming more able to recognise what those standards have demanded of you. [hammer!]
You invested all your energy in understanding yourself through this framework. And when I say all, I mean all.
“It’s just burnout”
The huisarts told you when you presented with tongue ulcers, lumps in your breasts and constant headaches.
You invested all your energy in understanding yourself through this framework. Only to arrive in rehab and, after two months there, have a therapist sit you down and tell you:
“We think you’re not manipulative enough to have BPD. You are not constantly manipulating us—unless, of course, you are just really, really good at it.”
Goodatitgoodatitgooaatitatitatigetitgetitgetitgetitgetit getit getout out out.
Someone else has come along, kicked the new frame over, and you’re left having to reconsider not only who you are again, but how much of that understanding came from someone else’s interpretation of you in the first place. Which part of me is actually mine?
As taxing as it was to be diagnosed, to re-comprehend everything through it, and for it to topple, it has left you with a strange comfort in the instability of the frameworks through which you attempt to make sense of yourself and others.
Is this maturity? Is this what it feels like? Maturity? Who knows.
It was after making your second major solo, I Stand For You, that you started to get the sense that, hey… maybe there is something else going on here. It was also through some feedback from your mentor regarding your gaze, modes of relating to the audience, and HOW you constructed the work that a previously dismissed thought of an autism diagnosis was raised again.
“I would also invite you to think more about a tension that I perceive in the work: on the one hand, you are questioning coherence and saneist structures of rationality, both conceptually and in details, for instance when you slip out of intelligible language; on the other hand, the performance itself is highly formalized, controlled and composed. There is very little messiness, awkwardness or real loss of structure. I think this little inconsistency between the theme of the piece and your approach to performance making is an interesting question to reflect on and explore further. -well look at me now-
At the same time, when it comes to your relation to the audience, I sometimes noticed a hesitation in your address—was it an address? I still wonder—and this hesitation did not come across as intentional.”
Although a lot of the criteria are relevant to you, you have always disregarded this potential diagnosis of autism because of your ability to tune into people and sense the shifts. But through the recent addressing of different traumas and attachment disorders, you have begun to peel off the layers and see what might lie beneath, as a possible precursor to, and reason for, why you have experienced so much trauma and difficulty in being understood or relating to people (or yourself). Is this why it is so confusing and overwhelming for you? Why you depend on structure or certainty? Is it not from a place of fear? Why you sometimes wear the same clothes for a month and have meltdowns with white noise when too many things shift at once? Why you prefer it that someone announces before they switch off a light. Why you like the brrrrrrrrrp noises?
Through making, performing, and receiving feedback on I Stand For You, you were able to see more clearly why this framing felt truer for you. And this… this….makes you veeerrryyy angry. You have been missed so many times in your life, and you wonder how much of this has to do with the ways you had to learn to mask. You sense so much—you just don't interpret it the way you are expected to. So many striking secret facades from such a young age; no wonder you (and others) are confused about your identity and ways to be. No wonder it's hard for you to receive feedback and feel like people just don't understand, because you haven't ever been allowed to understand yourself. You’re so angry because you have been made to feel like an imposter within yourself for so long. Since forever, really. It gets even more complicated by the performance for the male gaze - a special bonus obstacle—who are you masking for? And why? There is some sort of crazy multi-directional masking performance going on at all times, and it's exhausting. I’m exhausted. But hey, at least I get to make performance about it.
I recently completed a formal diagnostic process for Autism, and it has been confirmed by the “professionals” that I am indeed, well and truly, on the spectrum. Whilst my previous experiences of being diagnosed have taught me that a diagnosis doesn't define me (it hasn't so far, so it won't now), what excites me about this instance is that I began this understanding myself, through my own reflections on how I experience things, and not because someone else prescribed this to me. It was also my choice to go ahead with the diagnostic process. It came from a place of curiosity and not desperation. THIS IS MATURITY! (?)
I recently went looking for feedback I received in 2018 during my Bachelor of Dance in Melbourne (Naarm),
I remember as particularly difficult to receive. Here it is:
“Thalia, congratulations on your performances of Generation Generation and thank you for participating in the process. You are a talented dancer and have a clear interest in the process of making and conceiving dance works. Your contributions throughout the process were insightful and interesting.
Having said that at times it took a lot of effort to coax a hard working attitude out of you as you seemed more concerned with the reasoning behind the job at hand rather than the job its self. This is probably reflective of your critical mind that is often focused on the logic of a situation. This, in itself can be a great quality to bring to the studio given the right set of circumstances, but as mentioned can also hinder the flow of jobs with little critical or logical reasoning behind them.
A very smart person once gave me some advice that I think you'd benefit from considering as you move forward as a dancer. It went like this: Treat yourself with your mind and others with your heart.
I don't want to break down the meaning of this too much as pondering a mantra itself can reveal personal truths beyond someone else's understanding of it. But I will say that it helped me listen to others with more empathy and speak to others with more consideration.
I thought that your progress throughout the process and the depth at which you built your roll was impressive. Again congratulations, I wish you all the best with your dance future and I enjoyed working with you.”
I remember this as an of receiving feedback that I found extremely difficult to reconcile with my own experience in the project. I couldn't align it with my intention in the process, or with my intention as a person. I ask questions to understand, not to argue. All I remember from that process is feeling really engaged and excited by the propositions. I was quite enraged after this feedback, not only at the choreographer but also at myself. Am I a rude person? Is this sexism? Now I add: is this ableism?
Looking back at it now, I find myself wondering what else might have been happening in that interaction that neither of us had the language for at the time. The things he describes—my need to understand the reasoning behind a task, my fixation on the logic of a situation, my difficulty with jobs that seemed to have little critical or logical reasoning behind them—are things I now recognise differently.
I'm share this experience not to deflect or blame, but because it makes me wonder how often I have been interpreted through a framework that did not quite account for what was actually happening for me. I was trying to understand. He experienced that as something else. I think this gap between intention and interpretation is part of what I am trying to understand in this writing.
When I first approached my current therapist with my new theory of me actually being autistic, and BPD just being a big sexist misunderstanding after all, she again inverted my frames by looking me kindly in the eyes and saying:
'You know, Thalia, people can have both BPD AND Autism.'
In everyone's favourite book, The Body Keeps the Score, Van der Kolk discusses the power of diagnosis: it can provide understanding and guide treatment, but it becomes limiting when it reduces a complex person and their life history to a collection of symptoms. I would add to this- there is a danger of the stigma attached to the label beginning to define the person for themself, to themselves.
Having some language for my experience has given me another way of understanding myself, without necessarily making that understanding definitive. Definitions as disruptions, not answers.
I am still figuring out what belongs to me, if anything ever can, and what I have learned to believe about myself through other people's language. There’s no need to separate the two completely, but I do want to be able to question the language I use to understand myself, even when that language has helped me.
Well, luckily for me—technically, DSM iv speaking, I have at least two sets of languages to choose from
DSM
NDSM
BDSM
S&M
Dism
Ism
sexism
Autism
Bzzzzt