Being Borderline

When I was sixteen years old, I felt sadness for the first time.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I always knew what sadness was, and had shed my share of tears over spilled milk and broken toys. But I never felt true sadness. The harrowing kind. The kind that crawls through your pores and burrows deep into your heart. The kind of sadness that manifests in self-hatred. The kind of sadness that engulfs you. That has you reaching for razor blades, scissors, anything sharp. Anything that will make you feel something, anything, other than sadness.
I never shook it. Once I felt it, it never went away. Not really. It was always there, lingering somewhere in the background, drowned out by the taste of alcohol and the ever-growing pile of school books and exam papers on my desk.

The sadness was one thing. Everything that came with it…well, that’s where my story begins.

As a young child, I revelled in the limelight. I was confident, happy, and loved to show off. It wasn’t unusual for me to walk around singing in public – being four years old, this was considered cute, and not a symptom of being extremely drunk in daytime hours. But as a teenager, that all changed. I had little interest in people outside of my social circle, and this disinterest paired with chronic anxiety made for a terrible combination to have throughout my late teens. School was particularly difficult for me. I was constantly anxious, terrified of what my peers thought of me. I was almost always the quiet girl at the back with her head down. I was also the girl who had a different hair colour every month, but we’ll get to that part later.

I was under the impression that having such paralysing anxiety made me the outcast. I was surrounded by extroverts – people who were comfortable in their own skin, who could speak their mind, who could hold a conversation. But I simply couldn’t speak unless spoken to – and even then, I never said much. I was almost always unsure of myself, and I most definitely always disliked myself. Looking in the mirror became a rarity unless I was fully dressed in baggy clothes. By the age of seventeen, I couldn’t take it anymore. It was then that I developed anorexia nervosa. Within a four month period, I had gone down three dress sizes by starving myself and religiously counting calories. After six months, it became such a normalised thing that my habits barely phased me.
I never seen myself as self-destructive. I never really thought about it. I didn’t view any of these things as particularly odd. I put it all down to being a teenager. When my mother questioned my erratic mood swings, she too eventually put it down to being a teenager. Although, she did find it odd how intense I could be. I reacted to things differently. A seemingly silly event that would barely phase anyone else, would trigger an eruption inside of me. I seemed to feel everything so much more intensely. I felt like an amp turned up to eleven, while everyone around me was playing at a steady volume of six. I was a time bomb, and I could go off at any moment.

In between my inconsistent mood swings and bouts of anxiety, I spent most of my time constantly reinventing myself. I was continually going through phases of this, that and the other, and regularly changed my hair style and colour. Every few months, I’d blossom into yet another version of myself. But nothing seemed to fit. Nothing ever felt right about it. My self-image was always unstable. I never knew who I was, and I never got the hang of finding out. I often felt like there was no personality there to find. That I was merely a reflection of those around me. When I looked at myself, when I thought about who I really was, all I ever seemed to find was a strong feeling of dysphonia.

Most of this was easy enough to ignore. Or at least, they didn’t bother me all that much. It wasn’t until I turned nineteen that everything seemed to go downhill. When I turned nineteen, everything fell apart.
I couldn’t even tell you how, because I’m not all that sure myself. But what I do know, is that it changed my life.

I didn’t know it at the time, but throughout most of 2014, I was being triggered by my then-relationship. Relationship triggers are certainly not uncommon for a BPD sufferer, and are often the most dangerous. In my case, ignorance was most certainly not bliss. Had I have known of my disorder at the time, the events that followed could have been avoided. How and ever, they were not, and my life was turned upside down by a tumultuous relationship, which I naturally did not see as being tumultuous at the time. It was unpredictable in nature, much like myself, and I was never consistent in my emotions.

The volatile nature of my love life took it’s toll on my illness in more than one fashion. First came the reckless, impulsive spending. Then came the climax of my eating disorder. This climax earned me a long list of health problems, ranging from worsening anaemia to the deterioration of my gums due to malnutrition. My mood swings only worsened, and I began feeling anger like I never had before. I would lash out in my bedroom, screaming into pillows, throwing anything and everything I could get my hands on, completely at the mercy of my own emotions. I had no control over anything I felt. Whenever I cried, I couldn’t stop. I would weep hysterically for hours. When anger struck, I would rarely succeed in holding it back. I had a temper like a cobra, and it was always ready to strike. I never put much thought into why I couldn’t control myself. At the time, I probably thought I was controlling myself.

Finally, I was officially diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the diagnosis, other than feel elated about the fact that I wasn’t alone in my odd behaviour and abundance of emotions.

In late November, I began experiencing stronger suicidal thoughts than ever before, and acted on these thoughts more than once in the form of self mutilation. Once again, I had little to no control over my actions. Once I started, it was difficult to stop, and even more difficult to see the harm in what I was doing. I constantly felt unworthy, and had a chronic fear of abandonment that I would have done anything to ease.
In early January, I was confronted with this very fear.
I was always a fighter. And I always will be. But I could not win the battle with abandonment. I didn’t even try to fight. Within one week, I was hospitalised twice, in two different hospitals, for two separate suicide attempts. It was in those hospital beds that I realised the severity of my situation.

There I was, in the middle of an overcrowded A&E, curled up in an uncomfortable chair, hurling my guts up into a plastic bag. I was sobbing, I was tired, I was stuck inside my own head with no distractions and no way out. I had no choice but to face the ugly side of myself that I really, really did not want to confront.
Weeks went by, and I was bounced around from psychologist to psychologist, until I eventually landed in the hands of a wonderful psychiatrist who specialises in borderline patients. Eventually, I managed to get into a DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) programme, and finally, I found the solution to my problems.

I strongly believe more people should speak up on behalf of borderline personality disorder. It’s such an incredibly complex mental disorder which affects quite a number of people, and it’s also highly stigmatised when it shouldn’t be. It’s quite irritating when you open up to someone about having bpd, and then a couple of days later, they come back to you and say, ‘hey, I looked that up and wow, people are really mean about it online, like, really mean’. And they’re not wrong. What’s said about us online is horrible, and believe me, I’ve had it said to me in person to, and it’s not nice.
Someone needs to remind those of us suffering with this, that we should not feel ashamed. We should not feel as though our illness is a taboo, or that we are to be avoided. We need to be reminded that we are not ‘monsters’. We are not horrible people. We are good people, who deserve happiness, who deserve love and to love in return. We’re sick. So what? That doesn’t mean we don’t deserve the best. That does not mean that others hold the right to call us ‘psycho’ and ‘monsters’. Because we’re not. We’re absolutely not.

Mental illness is no different to physical illness in terms of suffering. Our illnesses do not define us, it does not dictate who we are. We are a separate person, and we all beautiful. And we will recover, and we will feel okay again.

For anyone suffering with this disorder, I highly recommend DBT. I no longer suffer with difficulty controlling my emotions, nor do I struggle with suicidal thoughts, inconsistent mood swings or self-image issues. Having bpd often means you need a strong set of skills in order to survive, and this is where DBT comes in. With the right combination of therapy and medication, your disorder will no longer rule over your life like it did mine. There’s a light at the end of every tunnel. Sometimes, you just need to search for it.