Borderline Personality Disorder: A personal revolution

Borderline Personality Disorder

My diagnosis

(WARNING! There are some aspects about this post, and probably this whole blog, that will be triggering and not totally appropriate for children. Just saying.)

Teenagers are supposed to see themselves as invincible, perfect, creatures of infinite possibilities. At 15 years old, I’d lived my life in total chaos. At 15 years old I was sat down by my therapist, Dr. Katherine Handcock, with my anxious parents next to me, to listen to the three words that explained my past and destroyed my hopes and dreams in one fell swoop.

Borderline Personality Disorder.

Everything else faded into the background at that moment, as Dr. Handcock explained to us what that diagnosis meant. And with that, my life shifted. We had to find a new therapist, a specialist. My mother bought books that she frantically read, trying to gain some insight and understanding of me, her marked and permanently damaged child. My world was forever changed.

I would never “get better.”

This fate was overwhelmingly horrific. I was the odd little ‘goth’ girl who had always wanted to be accepted widely, if not universally. I wanted to be embraced for ideals, ideas, and thoughts that were unique. The one thing that can be said for me was that I was an odd little child, filled to the brim with thoughts of life as one might expect from Faerie, or Neverland, filled with universal love, adventures, the ability to be who you wanted to be that day, and someone else the next. I didn’t want to be pinned down by who I was. What I craved was the ability to glamour myself into someone new, whenever it was I felt like it. I wanted my whimsical nature and plans to be encouraged. All of that, I found out quickly, are common parts of Borderline. In fact, everything I had ever done wasn’t really me, it was a symptom of my mental disease.

Talk about a blow to an already fragile sense of identity, not to mention sense of originality. It seemed to me that I wasn’t a unique human being anymore, I was now part of a collective. I was part of a ‘terminal’ mental illness. Those first few months of specialized therapy with Dr. Sarah Marsh were the worst of my life.

Homework and books. Hours spent reading, writing, and looking into the reasons for my behavior. Everything about me that was different was swiftly explained to me in medical terms. If you aren’t already aware, medical terminology isn’t very compassionate. Personally, I feel like those formative years are, by far, the worst time to learn of something so world shattering. It wasn’t long before I was positive that whoever I had been no longer existed and, in fact, had never been real at all. It was as though I was a badly written character in a terrible story.

Everything gained a new, harsh face. My ritual of release, of taking the invisible emotional pain and making it physical, visible and ‘real’ had a new name, a title… ‘Self-Injury’, one of the cornerstone symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder. Even my behavior towards my own my family, my friends… Now called ‘splitting’ and ‘I-Hate-You-Don’t-Leave-Me.’ And strangest to my, then teenage, mind, the concept of ‘intense and unstable interpersonal relationships.” These words took all my intense pain and turmoil and turned it into a science project.

Living with BPD, no matter your age, is harrowing and painful and extremely frustrating, in ways that others will never quite get, just like we don‘t understand how it is that they exist the way they do. We have all the empathy in the world, when we‘re in our good phases, but we can‘t ever understand what it is to live without our pain and our confusion and our fear. But I also had to learn that most of us don’t get diagnosed until adulthood, which was unsettling. Finding out from someone who is still practically a stranger that it isn’t like seasonal depression, that doesn’t ever go away…that was utterly heart breaking.

It was explained to me, finally, in a way I could understand. “Most depression is like a cold, or the flu. It comes and foes, but you can get better from it with the right medication. And when it comes back it is inevitability something slightly different. It will never be exactly the same. But Borderline, or any personality disorder, is more like cancer. It manifests in different ways. Very rarely, and only with some types, will there be a ‘cure.’ Most only have treatments. It will never go away, it doesn’t get fixed. In fact you should expect to have relapses and that hospitalizations are likely. You will most likely be Borderline for the rest of your life.” And with that my entire world came to a careening stop. I’m still not sure if it has ever recovered from that blow.

Surviving the storm: Living with Borderline.


Borderline: The sliver of emptiness where I exist. It’s tucked away somewhere between the total chaos of true insanity and the relative stability of neurosis.

For those of you who are fortunate enough to exist outside of this spectrum allow me to explain this statement. True insanity is, as my mother would say, doing the same thing over and over again and honestly expecting different results, because you’re that disconnected from reality. You’re lost in a whirlwind of colors and noises and pictures you can’t quite see, and it drives you to absolute madness. I’m sure you’ve experienced something like that…a noise that’s just beyond hearing teasing you until you want to scream. And neurosis, on the other side, for all that there are quirks and oddity, generally means you will respond to treatment and that you can mostly function like non-quirky people. You have longer, more frequent lucid moments then the insane counterpart. And me? I live somewhere between the two. Always have.

My childhood seems to me as if it were a series of snapshot moments, punctuated by trauma, rage, and loneliness. I was constantly finding myself locked in combat with everyone around me, while battling with everything inside of me. I was waging a hopeless war against my own emotions, my very existence. My parents didn’t know what to do with me anymore then I knew what to do with myself.

Being diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder was both a blessing and a cure. My otherness could be quantified, but it also meant that I was, and am, irrevocably damaged. My world went from endless possibilities to a narrow path that I will struggle along for the rest of my life.
Before the diagnosis changed my world entirely, I had assumed that once I’d confronted all the demons and monsters from my terror-struck and abused childhood I’d be heavily scarred, but totally functional just like everyone else.

How does one grow when the environment is incompatible? How do you live in a world that was created to hinder you at ever turn? Or, to be totally fair, how am I supposed to live and grow in this world when it seems as though I was created to live in a different way, in a different world? In a way I can compare it to a fey forced to live in our world, unable to return to the splendor and beauty of Faerie. It’d be Tinkerbell, never able to return to Neverland, the land of her birth and creation. Emotions, all the responsibilities, relationships, all the human interactions we experience every day. The ones we require to find a sense of well being and happiness… To live in this world, I must first become a living lie.

The hardest part of living with BPD is the ever present battle within my own soul. It’s almost as though to live I must constantly die. We all know that to be human is to change. To be unchanging is to be dead. It’s one of our species most admirable traits, the ability to adapt, to change. But for me, as a Borderliner it seems less like evolution and more like forced mutation, or as if I were losing myself to nothingness.

While watching my peers, my friends and my family, I find that I feel so stupid. They know how to connect to the people, the world, around them. They know how to live! When I see how effortless it appears for them to create and maintain relationships and general human contact, I feel so dumb. No one had to teach them how to live, or how to function. But not me. I had to learn to be empty so that professionals could fill me up with lessons, I had to let them take my mind apart so they could rewire all my thought processes, my very instincts, my reactions. They had to teach me how to feel, to connect, to respond in the correct manner. They had to build firewalls, and stop-gates. Things to keep me from behaving as I would normally. Because normal for me is unhealthy for the rest of the world.
There are things I have to think about that some others never even have to consider. I have to always be on guard, wonder if I am responding in an acceptable fashion, check to see if my emotions are my own or if they’re imitations of the emotions of other people around me. I constantly have to question my motives, my rationality, the logic of my choices and reactions, and a thousand other details that crowd my mind to keep me and my BPD in check.

After long, hard years of therapy, I’ve learned to cope as best as I can. I’ve had to learn how to act around other people, how to ‘fit in’ to the best of my ability. But most of it is just a front. Borderliners are the greatest actors of all. We don’t always know how to feel, how to act, how to behave. So, even though nothing has changed under the surface, I can take my cues and perfectly mimic relationships, desirable traits, normalcy, you name it…for a time, anyway. I wish people could understand that, you know? That no matter how hard I fight with it, no matter how long a period of time it is that I seem normal, or that I’m just an average young woman, I’m not. I don’t know when it’ll go away again. I can’t tell you when next I’ll be plunged into darkness and fire and chaos. I can’t give you a timeline, because so very often I’m the last one to know. I can’t tell that it’s shifting so much of the time. My Borderline is part of me, to an extent it is me. To me it is as normal as breathing. It’s how I lived. It’s my reality.

But those facts escape people’s minds so easily. They forget that I am different. They forget that I have to struggle to find something, in each and every day, that links me to the yesterdays gone by. Something that connects me to a past I don’t feel like I’m actually part of. I can never have the luxury of forgetting, even for an instant, that I live in a free fall. Completely disconnected from everything that grounds most people. When I feel depressed I can’t remember what it is to be happy. When a rage comes on, I can’t imagine ever being calm again because I don’t even know that word anymore. And when I’m hurt, when I feel betrayed, I swear I will never again trust anyone because time will never heal those wounds. I cannot recall my past on a whim. I remember my life mainly as one would remember a movie from their childhood, something that is hazy, separate, not of them. The only time that ever really changes is when I’m triggered, for good or bad, by something. Then the associated memories are released into me like a drug, filling my mind, my blood, my soul in an all consuming rush, just long enough for me to realize that it is mine, that I am real, no dream-thing from some warped mind, that I have a history that extends behind me, but just like that it is locked back into the recesses of my mind that I have such trouble getting to.

It is so lonely. Living trapped in this isolated realm. Feeling like I’m not real. Like I am a compilation of emotions that make no sense. I am a creation of every emotion I have ever absorbed and projected back onto people. I am the mold of every hand that has ever touched me, I am every name I have ever been called, I am every persona that people have offered to me, I am every role I have been given to play. I am like a shadow. I do not exist without the combination of two separate entities. When I am alone, I cease to be real.

There are many things that make me so I don't exist. Dissociation is the most distressing. I work hard to maintain control, but when I dissociate from myself I truly am not real. I can't always remember
my own actions. To behave differently but have no memory of your own actions...I do my best not to shirk my responsibility of my actions, even if I don't remember them. But sometimes it strikes me as very
unfair. There are, of course, varying degrees to dissociation. A mild form that leaves me feeling like my head is twenty feet above my body, swaddled in cotton, attached only by a thread. Or the types that feel
rather like a realistic dream, and you can't be sure what is true, the type where you auto pilot. And then there is the type where hours pass and I have no idea where they've gone or what I've done.

This is my life. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every year.