Living with Mental Health | Borderline Personality Disorder

A friend asked me to write about my experiences with mental health recently. 

This is my attempt to describe how it feels to have emotionally unstable personality disorder, or borderline personality disorder.

The symptoms I experience include: extremes of emotion that are hard to control; impulsive behaviour; desperation for the good opinions of people I care about; black and white thinking, things being either entirely good or entirely bad; and self-destructive coping mechanisms. If my tendency towards chaos comes through my writing style, I apologise, organising my thoughts is tricky at the best of times.

My life is filled with a near constant barrage of intense emotion. Every day is filled with panic, fear, elation, terror, rage, depression and joy. Sometimes I am so sad that my chest seizes up and I feel that I would do anything to make the physical and psychic pain go away. Sometimes anxiety will make me feel like I am going to be sick. Recently, I watched something that made me cry so hard that I vomited. On a night out, I flipped between joy and despair. In the space of an hour I had danced to my favourite song, cut myself in the ladies’ loo, got asked out by someone and was incredibly flattered and euphoric, then went out into the street to cut at my arm until my sleeve was soaked with blood, then came back inside and danced like a wild thing, happy again. It was the best and worst night of my life.

At other times I don’t feel like a human, I feel dead inside and a crushing emptiness that threatens to devour me. Sometimes I feel like everything is unreal and that I don’t really exist. The first time it happened to me, I was convinced someone had drugged me, and I was trying to panic whilst being unable to experience emotion. During my January exams, I was so stressed that I felt like I was floating outside of myself, unable to return to my body.

I don’t have fixed idea of identity, of what my character is. I sometimes feel as if I have too many characteristics – some of which are conflicting. I’m something of a chameleon by necessity; I adapt and edit my own personality in order to fit in with a particular group of people. I feel I’m always hiding pieces of myself away from them.

My inability to regulate my emotional state makes it difficult to carry out normal tasks. At the moment, a good day for me is one where I’ve managed to eat three meals and then perhaps done the washing up or laundry. A bad day will be one where I sit in my bed, tying nooses and self-harming, convinced that nothing will ever be good again.

Conversely, the times that I spend with my friends and family and people I care strongly about will put me in the best of moods. I feel an intense love for my friends that I know other people are unlikely to experience and it makes me hyper, excited, enthusiastic to see them, like it’s Christmas morning every time.

The more I learn about my disordered thinking, the more I see how it affects every aspect of my life. There is no ‘cure’ for this, only non-destructive coping mechanisms and talking therapies. There is hope though, it’s hard to remember at times, but I’m still alive. As long as I decide that the answer to the question of whether “it is better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all”, is still that the highs of love are worth the lows, I have the strength to continue. 

Anonymous