I first posted this over on my Patreon page, to see how it felt. I sat with a few days, and decided to post it here too.
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I first told my bipolar story two and a half years ago (it’s been two and a half years already!) You can read about it on my blog here. In a way, it was kind of anti-climatic. I’d known in my heart of hearts that it was bipolar for SO LONG before I had the official diagnosis. What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t know, was that it didn’t exist on its own. I didn’t know that even as I was getting better – and I was… the depression was getting shorter and less severe, and the mania was getting less, well, manic – I didn’t know that there was something else there. Something that was not getting better. Something that was in fact getting worse.

That something was Borderline Personality Disorder. Scary words, right? They’re right up there with Schizophrenia and Dissociate Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). And as an aside, you know what? People live productive lives with those disorders too.

But despite the weight of the words themselves, learning it was BPD was one of the most freeing, AHA, light bulb moments of my life. The more I researched, the more I went, “Ooooooooh.” It made sense. It made So. Much. Damn. Sense. I was reading about MYSELF. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t just “too sensitive”. I wasn’t failing at getting better at bipolar. My bipolar was actually under control. There was just this … thing. This thing that was still ruling my life. This thing that I had no idea had to handle. And it was destroying me.

The list of possible BPD symptoms is lengthy. In order to be diagnosed, you need to exhibit 5 of the 9 main criteria.

What follows are some of the bigger ones of which I am painfully and intimately familiar. These are the things that made me ask – even as I went through therapy (which turned out to be the wrong kind), and took my medication and did everything I was supposed to do – “What is WRONG with me? Is this supposed to be SO HARD?”

1) Fear of abandonment. Every relationship I’ve ever had, romantic or otherwise, has been marked with my severe, irrational fear that I am going to be abandoned. That I am eventually going to f**k it up. This fear made me clingy, paranoid, and overly attached. It’s made me pick fights so that there’d be some reason for them to eventually leave me, other than that I was just an inherently unlovable person.

2) Unstable relationships. This is kind of the hallmark of BPD. I am BAD at relationships. I get quickly attached, and quickly unattached. Like noted above, I have an intense fear of being abandoned. Even with this fear, I often have no problem walking away myself. I idealize someone one second, and then rapidly devalue them or get angry or hurt at the slightest infraction the next. I get irrationally paranoid. My feelings are hurt. Often. I worry that I’m hated, even by people who, in a lucid moment, I know love me. I worry that I said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing or thought the wrong thing. While lots of people can relate to some or even all of the above, I cannot overstate how extreme it is in BPD. It takes over. It rules my whole mind. I love hard. I feel hard. I hurt hard. My relationships are intense. Crazy intense. Fleeting. Unstable. I don’t know how to do relationships like “normal” people.

3) Impulsivity – Risky behavior, substance abuse, self-harm…. Check. Check. Check.

4) Emotional instability and inability to regulate emotions – This is the thing that tripped me up for a long time. I couldn’t understand why I was still having so many emotional problems even as we got my bipolar under control. Emotional instability is of course a symptom of bipolar as well (this seems a good a time as any to point out that they share a lot of symptoms, and they do often co-exist) but they’re different in the two. With bipolar, it’s like a roller coaster. Sort of swoopy, sometimes even predictable ups and downs that might span weeks or even months. With BPD it is a day to day, minute-to-minute dysfunction. I can be feeling on top of the world one moment, and then someone will say something that triggers me (I hate the word triggered, but regardless, it’s the right word), and I am sliding down a shame-filled, self-loathing spiral like none other. I hate myself, I hate the other person, I hate everything and everyone, with the fire of a thousand suns. And then I’m cool again. Over and over and over all day long. It is intense, scary, and more exhausting than words can possibly explain. It’s like it takes over, and I have no control over it.

5) Suicidality – Self-explanatory, and another one that’s shared with bipolar. Yes, I’ve been there. Boy howdy, have I been there.

6) Disturbance of self-image and self-concept – Anyone who’s read my blog for any length of time knows this about me. I struggle with this. A lot. A lot a lot.

In a nutshell, I think BPD is best described by the quote up above. I have no emotional skin. I have raw nerve endings all over my body, and everything hurts. Things that would just brush off most people’s backs are excruciating. Which is why, it never ever helps a person with BPD to be told that they’re just being too sensitive. I stand before you to tell you it actually makes it much, much worse. In fact, it probably needs to be said that in almost all cases of BPD, the person grew up in a home where their feelings were continually invalidated. And invalidation of my feelings, or feeling like I’m being talked down to in some way, has always been, and continues to be, my absolute biggest trigger into breakdown territory.

The good thing? I don’t tell you this to excuse poor behavior. I don’t tell you this to garner sympathy or to convince you you need to walk on eggshells around me. I mean, yes, it’s helpful for me if you understand a little bit about why I am the way I am, but make no mistake:

I’m working on it.

I’m learning how to handle my emotions. I’m learning how to have healthy relationships. I’m learning how to respond like a “normal” person. I’m working with my psych on symptom management. I’m practicing the principles of DBT (the gold standard of treatment for BPD)

I’m working on it.

My God, I am working on it.

And now I’m talking about it too, because it’s important. It’s important to put a face to these things. It’s important to fight the stigma, it’s important to encourage people to get help, it’s important to reach even ONE person who can say, “I’m not alone. And if she can do this, I can too.”