“My reaction was extreme- I hated talking about what bought me to this point.”

I have Borderline Personality Disorder with depression and anxiety. My symptoms include fear of abandonment, lack of sense of self, a disturbed pattern of thinking, impulsive behaviour and chronic feelings of emptiness. In total there are nine symptoms of BPD and I’m lucky to no longer have turbulent relationships, explosive anger or self destructive tendencies.

They affect my day to day life by having a chronic effect on my mood, including feeling not good enough and almost an imposter syndrome that I shouldn’t be at university because I don’t deserve to be there like the other students.

My lack of sense of self impacts my day to day by being unsure if I really like the things I do because I enjoy them or if I like them to please others. My disturbed pattern of thinking makes it hard to function at times because I struggle with my perception issues, as I fear abandonment. This includes friends, family and partners. Not necessarily that they are going to leave me because of arguments, but that I overthink and worry that something terrible will happen to them and they will die. I fear disagreements and get really insecure at the smallest of encounters. I start to overthink that what I’ve said and done is an over-exaggeration, and I should backtrack on what I’ve done and said.

Before treatment I was a completely different person. I would have explosive anger and my parents described it as walking on eggshells around me. I would walk into the room one person, and leave a completely different one in terms of extreme anger. The littlest of things would set me off into a rage and this would impact on my relationships heavily.

With romantic partners I would get angry and jealous over small things, and would wait until night time until my ex was almost asleep and start packing up my stuff in a rage. I did this because I feared abandonment and wanted him to fight for me and our relationship, but I would never get the reaction I wanted and we would continue to fight.

There’s a saying in the BPD community: “I hate you, don’t leave me,” which is also a book on how to understand BPD. It basically means we need help and understanding, but would fly off into a rage in the hope that the person we love would fight for us.

This typically happens with a term called ‘splitting’ where we see things in black and white- where something is inherently good or evil. There is no middle ground or in-between. So for example we split on our partners and see them as bad even though they haven’t done anything to harm us. Splitting can cause a whole range of issues and the symptom can last for minutes, to days, to months. I would split on my ex’s nephew- who was two at the time- because in hindsight I hated the attention he got and was jealous that I had to share my partner’s affection with him.

In regards to school, I would get angry at small things. If a teacher would tell me off, I would cry because with BPD you feel emotions much more intensely than the ‘normal person’. BPD was once described as being similar to having third degree burns all over your body. Luckily I’m stable now and whilst at University, it hasn’t been impacted much. I still experience splitting but these last minutes and I’m soon able to change my mindset, but this is also due to the BPD symptom of rapid mood changes. 

My process of diagnosis was quite extreme. I had three terrible things happen to me in a week. My partner of three and a half years left me, I lost my job and I found out my nan had a terminal illness. One of those things is enough to send someone into a spin and depression but for all three to happen to someone with undiagnosed BPD was heartbreaking and sent me into a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and self destructive behaviour until I finally tried to overdose.

The Crisis team eventually got involved and I had home treatment for three months where they came to see me every day to try and help me come to terms with what had happened, help care for me and give me short term care until I could be transferred to the community team.

During this time I regularly saw a psychiatrist (about once a week) to talk about my problems, the things I had faced and what was going on in my own head. My reaction was extreme- I hated talking about what bought me to this point.

With the Crisis team you don’t see the same person twice, and they never read my notes on what bought me to the Crisis team, so I found it very distressing and traumatising having to talk about my attempt and week from hell every time someone new came to see me at home.

With the psychiatrist, I hated him with a passion. Remember people with BPD can have explosive anger, mood swings and splitting- my psychiatrist spoke in riddles and metaphors, and this made me so angry. I just told him about my childhood and how it was traumatising for me and he spoke in metaphors. I lost it at that point and to take control of the situation they sedated me to try and make me snap out of it.

I once had a professional say to me, “Well if you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to do it anyway.” I lost it again and flew into a rage. I was vulnerable, recovering from an OD and a  traumatic time, and these were the people who were meant to look out for my wellbeing and had a duty of care to provide emotional and physical support.

They weren’t very knowledgeable on BPD. They didn’t know how to deal with me and often stigmatised me as being ‘one of those people’. My local services were overwhelmed and didn’t have the staff, and you could feel it in the care they gave you.

The treatment they offered me was poor. I was on a cocktail of medications for about two months until we found the right combination for me. I’m lucky I found a good combination so quickly that reduced my symptoms and made me much more stable, to the point where I now relate to ‘quiet BPD’ where anger is much more internalised.

I was transferred to the community team, where I was given a care coordinator. I saw her on a weekly basis to talk about my problems and to check in on how I was doing. There were days where I couldn’t even shower, and my care coordinator helped me to wash my hair. She would take me out for coffee to help me get out of the house and get used to being reintegrated back into the community.

Eventually I was offered talking therapies, but I had to start off in group therapies to see how I would handle them. I ended up moving 45 minutes away where my catchment area for the mental health services didn’t stretch to, so I had to move across to a different team.

I spent three months without a care coordinator and was stuck in limbo with no support while I had a transfer of care to a different team. I had to put a formal complaint in, because of the lack of support and their failure of duty to care. Luckily I got a new care coordinator with the new team and everything changed. My new care coordinator was like an angel sent to me, and really helped my recovery to the point where she inspired me to want to become a mental health nurse myself to help others going through a crisis.

I think the main thing people misunderstand about people with BPD is that we can be manipulative. Manipulation means there’s intent behind your actions, but that’s just the thing- people with BPD don’t set out to be manipulative and don’t realise what we’re doing is manipulative. We often do things because we want care and attention, not because we intentionally want to be harmful to someone.

We don’t often understand our own emotions and behaviours at times. We so desperately fear abandonment and rejection that we would do anything to stop them, and that includes doing risky and harmful things without knowing why we do them. We often get stigmatised for being out of control people with anger and violent tendencies, but we’re not all like that and if we are, it’s because we need help and are scared, and don’t realise we’re doing harmful things. We just need care and support but don’t know how to ask for help or even where to begin.

Our emotions can often overwhelm us and cause us to act out. We’re not bad people, we’ve just suffered a great deal of trauma in our life and our brains haven’t developed properly to allow the part of our brain that handles emotions to develop, and that’s what causes us to act out. Not because we want to, but because we lack the capacity to do so. We’re incredibly empathetic people and are so caring- we just sometimes act out, split or get aggressive out of fear.

I think there’s still sigma because people just don’t understand it and the viewpoint they have is negative, because only the negatives are talked about with BPD. We need to focus more on the positives and celebrate the little victories we have no matter how small. If you got out of bed today- celebrate. Did you wash your hair? Celebrate.

I’m very open about my diagnosis. Again the only way to normalise these things is to talk about it. If people want to ask me questions I’m completely fine with that. I’m now very stable with little to no mood swings thanks to medication, therapy and self awareness and my BPD symptoms have subsided to the point where I refer to myself as having quiet BPD.

BPD is rarely acknowledged or understood, and I try really hard on my Instagram platform to talk about these things and issues. So far I haven’t received any negative reactions to me telling people I have BPD, I’m very lucky in that aspect in that the people I’ve told have been understanding and supportive. I know at some point I will encounter someone who may stigmatise me, but from who I am now as a person, how stable I am and how far I’ve come, I hope they’ll see the real me and see that I am more than my diagnosis.

I’d like people to speak out more about their experiences and about their lives. The only way to normalise something is by talking about it. People need to know that it’s okay to not be okay. Life is a crazy rollercoaster with so many ups and downs, but you have to roll with the punches and do the best you can with the situation life is presenting with us currently and know that this too shall pass. Flowers bloom at different rates and so will you. It just takes time.

The only way we’ll break these walls down is to talk about our experiences. Mental health in general is so much more accepted and normalised now, but personality disorders are often rejected due to people’s misunderstandings and viewpoint that we’re bad people. We are human beings like everyone else and deserve acceptance, understanding and compassion.

I truly believe one day PDs will be more understood and widely accepted as the mental health movement is moving rapidly. Our time will come, but until then speak out, be heard and ask for help if you need it. There’s so much support out there now and I wouldn’t be standing here today without it. Now I’m stable, in a loving relationship with no instability and studying a nursing degree. Life truly does get better.