“I have to ride the waves of my emotions all day.”

As far as feeling different and like there was something wrong with me goes, I think I noticed it my whole life. As long as anyone can remember I was always an incredibly emotional and especially scared child. But the first time I realized that I might really need help was when I was going off to college.

My best and only friend had left first and started dating someone right away, and I cried myself to sleep every night contemplating suicide because I was convinced that she would never talk to me again. It took time for me to go to college to realize just how intense that was.

Day to day, my biggest symptoms are feelings of emptiness and intense self hatred, guilt and shame. I have the quiet subtype, so I spend so much of my day alone splitting on myself, going between just feeling like I don’t even exist to self-harming because I hate myself so much.

In school and by my parents I was compared to my older sisters all the time, but I could never compete with them because I didn’t have the same capacity to overachieve in math and science. I was creative and needed time and space to work on things- I had big questions that couldn’t be answered, and I’d get in trouble a lot for just not understanding concepts right away or being ‘difficult’. I’d get angry with myself so easily when I would get bad grades or screw up.

At work, I still feel like I work at half capacity just because I have to ride the waves of my emotions all day- emotions that often are reactions to the work I’m doing and how well I’m doing it. Luckily I work remotely, but sometimes I’m expected to jump into action at a moment’s notice, when that just isn’t possible for me.

I started seeing a therapist at my university sporadically, but when I graduated in 2020 I started working with the therapist who would suggest the diagnosis to me. At the time I was in a long term relationship that I was really struggling with for all the BPD reasons, and after about a year of working together she went over the criteria with me. While she couldn’t really give me a diagnosis, we did DBT for a long time.

It wasn’t until I was hospitalized following a suicide attempt that I took the MMPI and those doctors diagnosed me formally. I think the therapist who initially suggested it was knowledgeable but not necessarily right for me, and the therapist I have now is the opposite- she’s wonderful but I don’t think she’s worked with many people with BPD before. It was incredibly difficult to find a therapist willing to work with me, though. Most professionals have luckily been kind, even if they don’t have the knowledge or understanding.

I’ve personally found a lot of solace in exploring my own spirituality and figuring out what that means for me. Practicing tarot and researching archetypal modalities has taught me a lot about myself and helped me approach my feelings and experiences with meaning.

To be honest, I haven’t told anyone in my current life about it. When my therapist first started talking about BPD, I told my partner at the time because it was a bit of a hard thing for me to accept. He hadn’t heard of it before, so he initially didn’t know how to respond or what it meant. Since then- and since we broke up- I haven’t talked to anyone except my therapist about it.

I think just that BPD is so complicated. I’ve had a lot of people tell me a lot of platitudes and oversimplifications of mental health and since I don’t disclose my BPD diagnosis, I don’t know how to tell them that it’s just so much more complicated than that.

There’s so much about BPD that doesn’t make sense from an outside perspective because I barely make any sense internally either. While I’m working really hard on figuring out who I am and figuring out how to show that person compassion, it’s a really long process with a lot of pain and confusion in it.