BPD

A few days ago, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Frankly I’m still struggling with what this means.

It’s hard not to feel like my personality has been wiped away and I’ve been placed in a category – I feel like this label defines me.
Someone made a seriously insensitive joke today about me being special ed, and it was completely unrelated, but instead of being offended by it because it is ignorant of the plight and struggle of those that do suffer retardation, I feel like I am “special ed”. I feel like this disorder makes me retarded, mentally disabled, a weirdo. Sick and different to everyone else. I felt like today, that joke was made at my expense. It’s different from being told that you have depression, anxiety, anorexia – I know all of those things. I knew and felt those things before some smarmy doctor behind a mahogany desk signed away his confirmation on it. With BPD, it was a total shock.

When I used to read about personality disorders (histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial), I thought they were fairly flimsy labels that could be smacked onto anyone. I never took them very seriously as mental conditions, they seemed far too vague, far too subjective to experience, far too easy to fake and tout as some kind of badge of “edgy” fucked-up-ness. I see things in a whole new light now.

I think it’s fair to say that I never expected I had a personality disorder. I thought I was an extremely intelligent person who had a bright future, who had afflictions based on environmental factors, but never had anything inherently wrong with them. Depression, anxiety and anorexia were things that I always believed were induced, and due to the fact that I was such an emotional person it seemed reasonable for me to suffer these difficulties. I feel like there is something wrong with me now. I feel like all my life, I’ve been an idiot living in oblivion of the fact that I am a mentally retarded person in a sea of the (relatively) mentally normal. I’m having a lot of struggle coming to terms with the fact that I have BPD. I find myself often crying.

Those close to me that do know, don’t seem to understand. Which is fair enough, I didn’t really understand until I took the time to read about it. The more I had read about it, the more trouble I had keeping up the denial of it that I was so desperately attempting to submerge myself in. It just seemed so painfully accurate – the more I went down the list of symptoms, the more my heart panged with painful recognition, akin to recovering a suppressed childhood memory or traumatic experience. All of it was far too familiar, all these things that I either thought were normal or I hadn’t realized really did afflict me in my day to day life. Much of it I had, up until now, attributed to my emotive tendencies and depression/anxiety/anorexia – but now I see that all of this was just symptomatic of the BPD.

It makes me feel like all the normal teenage stuff I experienced was a lot more serious and a lot less normal and teenager-y. This scares me. It makes me uncomfortable, upset, confused. And because of the stigma attached to personality disorders and mental illness, the same stigma that made me view these disorders as flimsy, far too broad/subjective in their definition, and lacking substance in the way of being inexplicit, I know that people will view what I suffer as “not real”. It’s just like what my counselor said; depression is just as rampant and lethal as cancer, but if you have cancer you are showered with gifts and sympathy and understanding, whereas mental illness is faced with dismissal and ignorance. I am scared of the way people will judge me for BPD – but I am also scared of the way they judge me for the things that I do because of the BPD.

It’s a lot more serious than you might think. People with BPD feel their emotions far more deeply and easily than others, so it takes us a much longer time to return to a stable emotional baseline. This means we suffer feelings like grief where you might feel sadness, and horrifying humiliation where you might feel mild embarrassment. Things just matter so much more for us emotionally. People with BPD are often characterized by their intense fear of rejection and perceived failure – this was a big one for me, as I always just thought I was a sooky perfectionist. The inability to handle rejection is what makes us self-harm and engage in suicidal behavior, which is actually common in 80% of sufferers. Basically, when normal people harbor negative emotions, it indicates to them that there is a problem that needs to be fixed. With BPD sufferers the emotions are so intense that they cannot regulate them, and so they shut down entirely (much less even begin to think about fixing the problem that caused them to feel that way). We are prone to dysphoria – always feeling unsatisfied – and there are three specific states that are common to us. They are; feeling betrayed, feeling like hurting oneself, and feeling out of control. All states of being that seem to overpower my day to day life instead of appear every now and then when appropriate to the situation. I never realized how prevalent those states of being really were in my life. All this time I thought that how I felt was normal. Now? I’m not sure if I’m so comfortable knowing that what I feel isn’t normal.

Anyway, there’s a lot of misconception about Borderline Personality Disorder. When I first told my mum about it, she thought it was something along the lines of Multiple Personality Disorder. The word ‘borderline’ is used because the disorder sits on the ‘border’ of neurotic and psychotic disorders – it has nothing to really do with mood swings between depression and happiness. It means that people with it are very impulsive, and often engage in risky activities like substance abuse and eating disorders (tick and tick). A typical cycle of action for someone that suffers BPD is that they will suffer intense negative emotions, act impulsively to gain short term relief from these emotions, feel intense guilt and shame for their actions, and then the cycle starts all over again.

Probably the one thing that upsets me most about BPD is the way it affects my socialization. People with BPD do this thing called idealization and devaluation – we will idealize and make someone out to be the best person in the world when we perceive kindness from them, but as soon as we feel they are being hurtful or critical of us we’ll be disappointed and dislike them or be angry at them. It means we have a really poor and unreliable judge of character. The same goes for self-image, unfortunately. For the majority of the time this means that all our relationships are fairly tumultuous and undermined because of this.

In addition to all of the above, we have a really hard time with our sense of self and identity, being unable to figure out what we really enjoy, value, or are good at. I have a really unclear picture of the person that I am, and as soon as I feel like I can say something about myself, I’ll second guess it and wonder if it’s actually true. Feeling “empty” and “lost” becomes a way of life for us. Oh, yeah – and on top of all that, we have horrible concentration spans and often dissociate, too.

The list of problematic symptoms that BPD brings is endless, and I’m still reeling from the shock that I even have it. No one really knows what causes it exactly; a cocktail of neurological, environmental and genetic factors seems to be the most common cause. It’s something I didn’t even bring upon myself, but is in part thanks to just the way my brain was wired from the start. It makes me feel kind of helpless, almost. To know that this was something unavoidable, something that was always going to afflict to me no matter what.

This post doesn’t have a happy ending. Or any structure, really. I just wanted somewhere to express the way I felt.