Having BPD is like a confusing roller coaster. I watch videos about it, I try to understand it as much as I can because even though I have it, it's a part of me that I have never analysed deeply until I was diagnosed. I want to understand myself I guess because yes even I don't understand my own mind at times. There are parts of my bpd that I knew were there, but never ever thought of them as traits of a mental illness. Even now when I am going through the roller coaster of ups downs & all my emotions it's like I completely forget all them thoughts are my diagnosis and not me. It's one of the most difficult things for me to separate the two. I guess the only way I can describe it is like, when your daydreaming, you don't realise you're doing it & even when you snap out of it you just think about the next thing. Our brains will think of certain things but never really stop to analyse why we were thinking it, we just jump from thought to thought and feel the emotions in the moment. Really this is a trait that I'm sure everyone has with thinking, you could be walking down the street & think to yourself 'I need to ring ----- at 2pm' and then your brain leaps to the next thought to the next to the next, you have them thoughts but it's not like you stop to think about them & from my own personal experience that's what I am like with bpd, they are just my thoughts, constantly changing and I forget to analyse them which can be scary, because when it comes to the negative thoughts, I believe they are real.
My negative thoughts are very frequent, I can go from happy to hyper to sad to angry to suicidal probably between the space of a couple of hours or sometimes less. Imagine a graph with a straight line, someone without bpd/mental illness could have a few bumps in this straight line throughout a normal day, depending on what happened. If they are stressed it could be more than usual, it just depends on how good/bad their day is. Someone with BPD (my own personal experience) will have a line that has bumps constantly going up & down. The line will never be straight, it's a constant change of emotions going from high to low. I often find myself feeling these emotions internally, there are a lot of traits of my bpd that people can't spot because I don't express them to others. The only traits people will see is me becoming very emotional if something has hurt me & I cant hold my tears back, a lot of the time when I do cry I really don't want to cry in front of anyone else because I feel extreme embarrassment afterwards. Another trait people will see from me is anger, this anger usually comes out whilst I am crying. I have never been physically violent, but I have been violent towards myself. I take all my anger out on myself which a couple of people in my life have seen before. That anger turns to me either self harming or expressing emotions of feeling suicidal. I have hurt myself a couple of times in front of people before, when I was younger I felt like I had a lot less control over it and also found it harder to control my emotions in front of others. It's hard for me to admit that I have hurt myself a couple of times in front of someone else because it's always made me feel like a bad person.
*TRIGGER WARNING SELF HARM & SUICIDAL THOUGHTS*
most the time I have only ever self harmed alone & when I did do this alone, I wouldn't tell anyone because I didn't think that I even needed to. A lot of the time I felt embarrassment & shame, so I wouldn't tell anyone, so whenever I did this around somebody else I would feel so embarrassed, guilty & ashamed that I would want to harm myself again when I was alone. I have never tried to take my own life around anyone else, but I have told people that I tried taking my own life like therapists, doctors & my parents because even then I am still so embarrassed & feel so much shame. When I would self harm, a lot of it was caused by anger & frustration about my life, my situation or hating myself. It's like a vicious cycle because the self harm would make me hate myself even more especially if I ever did it around anyone else. I think I learnt to keep near enough all self harm & suicidal thoughts a secret over the years as a defence mechanism, because the older I have got the more afraid I have got of abandonment. I don't want anyone to hate me, I want to please everyone so now I just keep near enough everything to myself. Which I know is unhealthy and dangerous, but that seems to be how my brain has trained it's self to work over the years, I guess it's like something I feel like I have control over. I have control over what I don't want people to know about me, because I don't want to lose them. I only feel 100% confident opening up about this sometimes to my therapist & people who understand because as bad as this sounds, I know that they won't abandon me because they also accept me for my flaws or even want to help me.
When I have negative thoughts it can often be triggered by what someone has said to me, or how somebody acts towards me. I have dealt with so much paranoia especially when my mental health is at its worst. If someone does say something that I find hurtful or I think they are acting off, again I won't say anything because I fear that they will leave me. Another part of it is fearing that people will think I am an attention seeker or will hate me for being so sensitive so my brain starts to over think everything and I just beat myself up internally, I start to think that person hates me, gets annoyed by me or thinks I'm weird. This then leads to me isolating myself from that person or distancing myself because I don't want to annoy them. A lot of the time I cant tell if this is my anxiety or my BPD, even if someone hasn't acted off towards me I find it so hard to reach out to people in fear that they will find me irritating. The thing is most of the time I don't tell people I feel like this, so then I worry even more that they will think I am rude. It really is torture thinking like this because I could have more relationships with people in my life but I can't because my brain has trained me to isolate myself.
I find black/white thinking & love/hate relationships towards others so difficult to understand to, I never really know if someone is being offensive towards me or if their intentions weren't horrible.
Someone could say something to me which annoys me, I won't tell them it annoyed me but I will think about it for days, over analysing what they meant & I will decide I don't want that person in my life, so I will just try not to be around them as much as possible. It's confusing, upsetting & lonely dealing with these thoughts because I can't seem to just socialize like a normal person and have a lot of friends. There has been one time in my life where I have been in a big group of friends & the only feelings I have towards that is feeling triggered by the way they acted towards me, but then I doubt myself and think were they in the wrong or am I just over thinking it again.
The thing that gets me the most is when people say something that offends me, I am called overly sensitive or told that people have to walk on egg shells around me. So I just feel like a horrible person. I don't want to be offended easily I want to be strong minded and fit in that's what I have always wanted but I will never be like that. When people have made comments even about my appearance I change the way I look because I don't know myself or I don't know how I should look, I want to look a certain way to please others but I don't do it to please myself, it's like I change my appearance so people accept me. I have changed my style, hair, everything about myself over and over again since I was about 13. I would sit in my room for hours after school trying to make myself 'prettier' & finding ways to make myself look a certain way so I can fit in. I have changed the way I look in hope that the person I like at the time will like me back and I have done stupid impulsive things because I wanted to be liked or loved back. A lot of people on twitter have said I am insecure, but issues with identity is a common trait with bpd, maybe I am insecure or maybe it's my diagnosis but honestly I have felt offended when people have said I am insecure because I know that, I know I have a lot of issues with my self image, I know I have a distorted view of myself & sometimes looking back on how much I have damaged my body in the past it makes me so emotional because I did all that just because I wanted people to like me. I used to take diet pills, I started taking drugs and I would starve myself or only eat once a day because I loved losing weight and people telling me I look prettier & thin.
I have never had a stable job & it's for multiple reasons. The first being my black & white thinking, with a lot of jobs I know everyone has to go through this but there will always be a couple of people that talk down to others, which of cause annoys everyone even people without bpd, but because the feelings of someone with bpd are so intensified, being spoken to like you're garbage everyday really starts to make it a very difficult environment to be in. I have been in a lot of situations where I cant stay in work because I am paranoid no one likes me, I would cry on my lunch breaks because I would actually feel scared of people, not scared in a sense they would hurt me but just scared of how opinionated people can be and how many strong personalities were around me when I felt so weak. I can't seem to deal with being around people that come across like they are bossing me around or are bitchy/mean towards me but I have to be around people right? because that's how the world is in every day to day life, you speak to people & interact with them. So why can't I just socialize like everyone else? It really frustrates me, I want a good life, I want a job, I want a group of friends but I cant have it because every time I get so close to that point my black & white thinking starts, people will say things I take offensively and I won't want to be around them, but deep down I do want people around me & to not feel alone. It's like a constant fight within myself going from wanting to live a normal life, from my illness telling me all these horrible things about everything & everyone and it's hard to know who to believe, my illness or myself? because sometimes I can't tell the difference. I could write for hours about it and I still wouldn't understand it. It's just draining not being able to understand my own head. I just know I don't want to keep going back and forth with love/hate relationships especially to the people closest to me, I could be so far in recovery with my anxiety and depression but I will still have these traits of BPD which stop me from doing so much in my life & also stop me from building relationships with others. I wish they had a cure for it, so many lives would be changed.
I also wish bpd wasn't so stigmatized, I know it can be hard to understand, I know that completely because even I don't understand it at times but people living with BPD aren't bad people, we don't want to have black & white thinking, we want normal happy lives, we want to be able to control our emotions & not feel paranoid about the things people say. Most people living with BPD have experienced past trauma themselves like abuse or being bullied, or some people have BPD genetically. I also think sometimes it could be a mixture of both, so you could have BPD genetically but then as you get older more things happen which cause trauma and then makes the BPD even worse. What I am trying to say is people living with borderline aren't evil, manipulative or abusive, yes someone can be all them things and have bpd but that is because they are them things. Being abusive or manipulative is separate from BPD, for example someone without BPD can also be abusive and manipulative. I hope that makes sense. Most people with borderline are empathic, loving, giving & caring and just want to be liked by others. If you know anyone with borderline please try to not invalidate them or make them feel bad, they already feel guilty about having this illness & doubt themselves so much. If you can just let them know you are there for them, hug them & research about it so you can get a clearer insight on how they feel, I know that would make them so happy, we just want to be accepted.
