I can’t remember exactly how I came across it but a few weeks ago, I started looking into borderline personality disorder (BPD) and realized very quickly that there’s a good chance I might have it. My first reaction when realizing this was relief – I had more words to describe things that have been happening my entire life. I finally had a better way to describe many things that I have been feeling for years. I mean, I’ve known I’ve had anxiety for years and depression for even longer than that but looking into BPD, I found an even better way to talk about how I often felt.
[Image from artist Toby Allen’s Real Monsters project and text reads: “The Borderline Personality monster is one of the most delicate but perhaps the most sinister of monsters. They gather in small swarms around their victims and use pheromones to heighten the emotions of their victim before feeding upon the emotional energies. They feed upon any emotion but tend to favour feelings of depression. The monster is made almost completely of clear ice, rendering it invisible. Only the maple shaped leaf on its tail is visible to the naked eye and looks like a falling leaf. At times when the monster gorges itself too much on any given emotions, it can overwhelm them and they shatter like glass.”]
Reading through the resources and information about BPD from the Mayo Clinic and National Institute of Mental Health helped me to put more words to the things I’ve been experiencing and explained the symptoms of the disorder. And over at the Good Men Project, Nathan C. Daniels wrote about his experiences with BDP, particularly saying something that I can identify with:
I’m hypersensitive on an emotional level and extremely over-analytical, intellectually. My thoughts and feelings are balls in a lottery tumbler, and I never know when the next drawing will be or which ball will be drawn.
To anyone out there struggling with borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, or any other mental illness, I love you so much. You are so wonderful and amazing and fantastic and everything that’s saying you’re not any of those things, they’re wrong.❤
This is how I felt when I found BPD too! It’s so nice to know what all this is. It’s funny that this and autism are the 2 (self) diagnoses that have helped me the most in actually making change in my life, healing, accepting myself, and they are the only self diagnosed things (because really the advice about depression is mostly useless) It’s hard to find help though because if you google it, it’s mostly links for how to cope *with us* which is literally the worst thing to show up as the first 5 results for someone with BPD (wonder why we continue having trust issues when it’s like that….) I’m glad you found a helpful word!