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.”

The other day I asked a question on Facebook that basically started with, “Does it bother you when…” (The topic is not relevant to this post, and probably deserves its own conversation.) I asked mainly because I was curious, and sometimes I like to be curious out loud.  People’s answers ran the full gamut from, “No, not at all,” to “Sometimes”, to “I absolutely hate it!”  The one comment that is standing out to me though is this one:

I try not to be bothered by things like that. Life is too precious to worry about the little things.

Is it true?  I mean, sure.  Of course.  It’s important to try not to sweat the small stuff.  (And indeed, most of what we tend to stress out about is small stuff.)  I’ve written entire blog posts about it, including one about my then 3 year old throwing her brother’s shoes into a lake, and why I was able to laugh about it.  That was the post that initially led a lot of you to my blog, so I kind of have a soft spot for it.

But … I would write it differently were I to write it today.

The above comment, even in its truth, bothered me.  Largely because it sounds so patronizing, but also because – just like the blog post I wrote all those years ago – it glossed over the fact that we are given a full range of human emotions, and that THEY’RE OKAY.  It’s okay to get annoyed sometimes.  It’s okay to get sad and mad and frustrated and scared.  Because real life?  Real life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.  It’s just not. In real life, sometimes we do get upset over little things (and big things, and everything in between).  Sometimes we’re cranky and irritable and don’t even know why.  We’re human.  We’re gonna feel stuff, and it’s not always going to be pretty.  And we can have those feelings, and recognize them, and accept them, and allow them to come and go with curiosity and without judgement.  There’s no prize for being perpetually happy.

I’ve been in therapy for the past twenty months  – I totally just counted on my fingers for that number – and not once in those twenty months did he ever tell me, “Don’t feel that.  Don’t think that.”  We’re going to think what we think and feel what we feel.  We can’t help that part.  Our brains do it all by themselves.  We can absolutely change how we respond to those thoughts and feelings, the tools for which therapy has taught me in spades.  Ha.  Tools, spades, see what I did there?  But the feelings themselves?  Sometimes they just come, and they’re okay, no matter how much someone else tries to shame us for having them.

I want my kids to see me dealing with my emotions in a healthy way.  I want them to see me continually doing the work I need to do to interact with myself and with the world around me in the best way I know how.  I also want them to see me being a human.  I want them to know that it’s okay to get annoyed sometimes, even over something that someone else would consider small.  I want them to know that it’s okay to have bad days and cranky days and I’m-going-to-hole-up-and-listen-to-melancholy-music-all-afternoon days.  I want them to know that they can feel whatever it is they feel, and that their feelings don’t make them more or less than the person next to them.  I want them to know that what they feel – whatever they feel – is VALID, and that I won’t try to tell them they shouldn’t feel it.

I think one of the greatest gifts (and rarest gifts, it seems) that we can give each other is the space to just …. be.  No trying to fix, no telling someone that they shouldn’t feel what they’re feeling.  No judgement.  Just space.  Acceptance. Sometimes the best thing we can do – really, the only thing we can do – is to just be there.  To just sit beside someone, literally or figuratively, in the hard and the scary and the uncomfortable and let them feel what they feel.  And it IS hard.  It IS uncomfortable. And oh my gosh, do we want to fix it.  Even I want to fix it, and I’m not generally a fixer. Sometimes though, you Just. Can’t. Fix. It. Sometimes, there are no magic words, and there are no solutions.  There’s just space, and time, and empathy.

I was venting to my go-to person recently (I don’t even remember what it was about anymore), and I was just having a moment of feeling the injustice of the world, and of life, and of circumstances.  And I told her how MAD I was, or SCARED, or SAD, or whatever it was I was feeling at the particular time, and the words were all flying out, and when I was I done she simply said, “I know.”   That response kind of blew me away, and instantly tempered a lot of what I was feeling.  It wasn’t a patronizing, “I know.”  It was a genuine, heartfelt, “I heard you, and I get what you’re feeling.” She didn’t tell me not to feel that way.  She didn’t tell me what I should do about it.  She just … heard me.  She saw me.  And I’ll tell you what:  That kind of response is a million times more helpful than any well-meaning “Look on the bright side; don’t feel that way; just think positively” admonishments could ever hope to be.  Having someone – or I guess more than one someone, if you’re lucky – in your life that can just hear you that way is utterly invaluable.

I spent the good majority of my life trying to be someone and something other than what I was.  “You’re TOO SENSITIVE,” was the refrain I heard – and to be honest, still hear – over and over and over, until it was like the scarlet letter that I wore around my neck.  And oh, it was heavy.  And it hurt.

But now?  Now I own my sensitivity.  I’m proud of my sensitivity.  I’m not “too” anything.  I’m me.  And yep, I feel things deeply.  Yep, my emotions are often always on a hair trigger.  Yep, my feelings are hurt easily.  Yep, I sometimes feel annoyance at something that you deem too small to worry about.

And you know what?

It’s okay.