The short version. I blew up at people for most of my life. I used. I nearly didn't make it. And in 2022, at 50, in the middle of a COVID-years breakdown, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), on top of the Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and ADHD I'd been living with for a long time.
That's not a happy ending. It's a starting point. This site is me working through it in public.
Where it starts
My father died when I was seven. At eight I was in therapy. At nine, family therapy. At fourteen they gave me a social worker. At eighteen I left, and for years I stayed as far away from any kind of help as I could get.
When I did come back, I tried everything. Therapy, group therapy, art therapy. Programs, a few of them cult-ish, some of them famous. It always ran the same way. A set number of sessions, because the public system or my insurance (the years I had insurance) paid for that many. Then it stopped. Same issues, every time. Back to square one.
In high school I hurt myself. Later I started getting tattoos, because getting tattooed felt like therapy. I'm covered in them now.
Call it an addictive personality. Drugs, gambling, gaming, sex, alcohol, smoking, hurting myself. If it was bad, it was good. A lot of it was punishment.
Where the word comes from
Almost twenty years ago I was CEO of Raincity Studios, a web agency I co-founded in Vancouver. Good people, big clients, a lot of pressure. When something went wrong I didn't handle it. I exploded. At the people closest to the problem, usually. Sometimes at the people closest to me.
My friend Kris Krüg gave it a name: a robplosion. It was funny. It was also exactly right, which is the part that stung.
For years I treated it like a personality trait. Rob's intense. Rob's passionate. Truth is it was anxiety and overload with nowhere to go but out, and I didn't have a word for that yet.
The parts I don't usually say out loud
In 1998 I tried to end my life. I'm still here, and I'm glad I am, but I won't pretend it was a long time ago in the way that matters.
I woke up in the emergency room at Lions Gate Hospital in North Vancouver. I talked with the ER psychologist, and I chose to check myself in. I spent about a month there: group therapy, counselling, therapy, meds.
Cocaine and heroin were part of my life. I haven't touched either in sixteen years. Depression has come and gone and come back. So has the voice that tells me I'm a fraud.
The pattern
I start things with a huge amount of energy, then crash. When something I built finally works, I find a way to back away from it, or wreck it. I'm scared of being left, so I tend to leave first. I can walk into a room and run it. My friends are spread all over the map, and none of them are down the road. Going out at all can feel like too much. I build a bubble and stay in it.
For fifty years I thought all of that was just me being difficult. The tics, the habits, the obsessions, the passions that burn hot and disappear. Through my 40s I avoided help for well over a decade. Then 2022, and a full breakdown. I got lucky. The social worker assigned to me actually gave a damn. They helped me get real support, get diagnosed, and set up tools to deal with all of this in a more structured way. Suddenly a lot of it had a shape.
Why write it here
Because when I went looking, I found two kinds of content. Clinical pages that answer the question but never sound like a person. And personal stories with no sources, some of them dangerous. I want both in the same place: the plain answer, my honest experience, and links to the people who actually study this.
Also, writing it down helps. That's the selfish reason.
What I'm not
I'm not a doctor, a psychologist or a counsellor. Nothing here is a diagnosis or a treatment plan. If something I wrote makes you think "that's me," take it to a professional. If you're in a bad place right now, skip everything and go to Get help now.
Sandra
Sandra and I have been together about fifteen years. She met me after I got clean, and she's been on the receiving end of the explosions, the crashes and the bubble ever since. Some posts on this site are about what that's like from her side. She's not here to fix me, and I try hard to write it that way. She's also behind this site, all the way.
How I write
Every post answers a real question people ask. I say what I've lived, link to what the research says, and tell you when the two don't line up. The standards page explains how I handle suicide, drugs, sources and the affiliate links in the library.