“They wanted me to be a normal person and no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn’t.”

I have intense, overpowering emotions which are difficult to control.  I keep thinking people are being horrible to me, whether it’s true or not. I don’t really have a sense of identity, but I do think I’m evil and worthless. I want love and attention, but I don’t know what it’s like to feel loved and I can’t actually handle attention very well. It always feels negative and demanding.

My symptoms are there every day. I only go out for medical appointments, which are all for my physical health, as the NHS don’t take my mental health problems seriously. I have a private therapist whom I speak to on the phone.

I have never worked or had a proper relationship (I have been on dates, but I didn’t really like being around them and I’m asexual anyway so I was never going to have sex with them. I fall in love all the time, but I have no interest in anyone’s genitals). I only have one friend now – I have never met her and I doubt I ever will as she is housebound and there’s no way I could travel to see her.

I have never had a job. I am very overqualified for the kinds of jobs I have a hope of being able to cope with socially, so people tend not to invite me for interview, but there’s no way I could take a management role. I have been very successful educationally, but I didn’t make friends and now I’m an adult, I even struggle with relationships with my teachers.

I have tried voluntary work, but everyone knew I was different. They said they’d only let me work there because they thought I’d be normal if they were nice to me. Once I’d been at a voluntary job for four months before I found out they went out for drinks every week. I’d never been invited, but I overheard them tell someone else on their first day.

I hated it there and after I heard that, I couldn’t cope anymore. I had a big meltdown and got signed off. I was actually really good at the actual job. I was hardworking, accurate and a very fast worker. But that wasn’t valued at all. They just wanted me to be a normal person and no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn’t.

I’m not a social chameleon like some people with BPD. Every conversation is a potential for someone to be horrible to me and it feels that in almost every conversation, there is a cruel, negative comment. Most conversations leave me wanting to die. But I don’t have many conversations so that’s okay. I usually only speak twice a week – to my therapist and to my parents when they visit. I don’t really get lonely because I like being alone, but I also hate the fact I am alone and it embarrasses me.

My mum says I was never a happy or normal child. From the sound of it, I dissociated often and she ‘had to’ bring me out of it by shaking me and shouting at me. She still does that now (though I don’t live with her) when I dissociate or self-harm. I am terrified of raised voices and physical actions like being shaken or hit. She says when I was two years old, I announced “I don’t like the world.” So I would guess there was something wrong even then.

I think I quite liked nursery, but school was difficult. I didn’t make friends and nobody liked me and I didn’t really understand why. My mum said I was horrible. I thought everyone else was horrible. They would say unkind things and laugh at me. The older I got, the worse it got. At first, I got on well with the teachers, who mostly liked me even though I was overemotional (though I was actually very quiet, mostly silent), but as soon as I became an adult, people’s expectations of me were different and they didn’t find me cute anymore.

I always believed everything would be fine when I was an adult and I was away from my mum, but it wasn’t fine. Once I was an adult, I stopped getting on with adults. I tried to be friends and they backed away from me and stopped responding to my emails. Most people I just don’t like very much and I don’t want to be friends with, but when I do want to be friends with them, I really love them and I want to be in contact with them all the time. But now, every time I email someone, I’m afraid they won’t email me back; that I’ll finally have become ‘too much’ for yet another person.

Sometimes I push people away before this happens. My former best friend really hurt me by respecting my mum’s wishes over mine, even though I’d explained how it made me feel. I’d thought she was wonderful and understanding and she wasn’t, so I’m totally pushing her away. I don’t like her anymore and I can’t forgive her. But mostly, people push me away and that hurts because I love them.

I really like to study, but I always have real issues with university professors. I have successfully studied three subjects at university level, but my relationships with the professors have always been deeply upsetting because they aren’t supportive and validating. They just tell me everything that’s wrong and tell me I’m an abnormal person (to be fair, they don’t always use those words exactly, but I know what they’re thinking) and it makes me feel worthless and stupid.

One tutor is particular was very unkind. She was very negative about people with mental health problems, even though she knew a lot of us had them, and she assumed we must be there to learn to be therapists. I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t want to be a therapist. My work clearly was of high enough quality to pass, but you would never have guessed that from her feedback. I would like to do an MSc, but I am so scared the professors will dislike me.

I suspected I had BPD as soon as I heard of it, but it was very difficult to convince the professionals. They kept saying I didn’t have it, I didn’t want it, I was too nice, I wasn’t nice enough. But finally they said yes, I have enough BPD symptoms for a diagnosis. I felt triumphant. They had listened to me and decided I was right. This felt very, very unusual.

Medical professionals have always treated me badly. My diagnosis hasn’t changed that. They invalidate me and they discharge me the minute they can. I have self-harmed in front of them before, and then been discharged on the grounds that my mental health problems aren’t that severe.

I have a very strong impression that every time someone is referred to the Community Mental Health Team, a decision is made before they even meet the patient. I feel they are looking for reasons to discharge someone and once they’ve found a reason, nothing will deter them from that – certainly not the patient themselves. It’s not entirely their fault. They just don’t have enough money to help everybody.

In my area, they also only have one treatment option – ten sessions of goals-based CBT – and I’m sure they know this is inappropriate for a lot of people, yet it’s all they can offer. The CMHT can’t control the amount of money available, but they can control how kind they are to the patient. And in my experience they’ve not always been kind.

Traditional CBT involves some help with the understanding and control of emotions, but this did not feature in the CBT I was offered. Instead, I was expected to set a couple of very simple goals, such as going out for a coffee once a week. I have no desire to go out for coffee. I have teabags at home and a large box is cheaper than a coffee or a tea. I am also lactose-intolerant and I absolutely loathe soya milk, which is usually the only lactose-free milk on offer. So I have to take a Lactase tablet and they are expensive too. Why should I spend a load of extra money every week for a cup of tea which I’ll enjoy much more at home? I wanted to set educational goals, but the psychologist laughed at me and said I wouldn’t be able to do it.

I didn’t even want therapy to set goals. I wanted therapy so I could talk about being raped. But I was told that the rape was in the past, and the past doesn’t matter. Apart from the fact the past shapes the future, and that it’s often very difficult to move on in any kind of future when the past is holding you back, her words were horrifically cruel- and bewildering.

When I tried to talk about it, I was either reminded it didn’t matter or told that I’d probably given consent without realising it, or that it was my fault for not understanding the situation. This is a completely ridiculous thing to say – it’s impossible to give consent without realising it and it is always alright to say no, whether you’ve misunderstood someone’s intentions or not – but more worryingly, it was an extremely dangerous thing to say. It was also scary. It made me wonder if they treated everyone in that way or if it was just me. I felt worthless, disbelieved, stupid, invalidated, dismissed.

I don’t entirely blame the therapist. If they can only give someone ten sessions, then it kind of has to be goals-based CBT. It would be incredibly dangerous to give me ten sessions of trauma therapy and then discharge me. It could have left me in an incredibly vulnerable position. But what they don’t seem to realise is that they do exactly the same to me when they invalidate me and refuse to let me speak. I also would have considerably more respect for them if they would admit CBT isn’t suitable for everyone. Instead, the failure of the CBT was my fault for not engaging with it in an adequate way. They refused to consider the fact that it was the wrong therapy for me.

But even the CBT isn’t always an option. There are more people needing help than there is actual help available. People who have had ten sessions in the last five years are not eligible for more CBT. Not that I’d want any more, and not that it’s appropriate to my needs, but it means I’m left completely without help.

You might wonder why I allow myself to be referred when I know the process will be not just be useless, but also traumatic. GPs refer people to the CMHT. If the CMHT then discharge the person, it’s not the GP’s fault. They’ve tried; they’ve done their job. But they really want to make the referral. They can’t do it without consent, but every so often, they’ll go on about it and ask me to let them refer me for their own peace of mind. So I agree because I know I’m already a ‘difficult patient’ and I don’t want to be more difficult than I have to be.

There are many things that people get wrong about me because of my mental illness. That I lack intelligence; that I need to be spoken to sharply as that will help me to understand and discourage further responses; that I can’t look after myself; that my opinions can be instantly dismissed.

I wish people knew that I am intelligent; that being spoken to sharply makes me want to punch myself in the head; that I can look after myself pretty well, that my opinions do matter and sometimes I’m right. People actually don’t seem to think I’m trying to manipulate them. Or if they have, they’ve never mentioned it. I think they think I’m not clever enough to do that.

I don’t know if the stigma is easing or not. I’ve always felt the stigma was personal against me rather than my diagnosis because I was treated the same before and after my diagnosis. I would like to think it can improve because there have been big improvements in other areas, but I think everyone will still hate me.

I don’t believe recovery is possible for me. I don’t know how to recover and nobody can give me the help I need. But I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for other people. It does depend on the definition of recovery, though. Recovery for me would mean not having BPD symptoms anymore. I think that will happen when I’m dead. But I don’t want to invalidate anyone else’s definition of recovery.