Polaroid of a life with Borderline Personality Disorder

Validation was my drug

Hey there, young lady

with your head in your hands

you say this wasn’t supposed to be part of your plans

but we’ve been where you sit

and we’ve lived to tell

that they’ll be some good times as well

if you take your heart out of its case

no, don’t let that thing go to waste

don’t be afraid to use it

lend it and lose it

it’s not there to just take up space

take your heart out of its case

- Meggan Waltman

After many years of writing personal essays online, I stopped in 2019. I needed to quiet my brain, get off social media, reevaluate who I had become, who I wanted to be and how I want to spend my time.

It was the Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis in 2021 that brought me back, leading to my first essays here a couple years ago. The diagnosis changed everything. Suddenly I had a lot more to share through an entirely different lens of understanding.

I am so lucky to have received the diagnosis. Until then, I feel like I lived most of my life blindfolded, oblivious to the science behind the mysterious high tides of my intense emotions that usually led to unnecessary drama. The drama sucked and caused me and others a lot of pain and loss, but it was also familiar and comfortable.

The diagnosis was a game-changer. It saved me. I previously wrote this here but it bears repeating:

For all of my life, I thought I could think my way out of my perceived “brokenness.” Intellectualizing the bad things that happened to me or that I caused to happen was a way to make sense of my world. But as much as thinking has been a tool on the path to my liberation, it has also been a weapon of my destruction.

You become confused by over-analysis, get tangled in false narratives about yourself or others and perpetuate negative bias patterns and other unproductive thought loops that keep you wandering in a lonely wilderness for years.

For all my intellectualizing, it never occurred to me that a scary childhood filled with neglect and abuse permanently altered the way I perceive life. That the very brain I am using to interpret existence is an issue. Specifically, the fundamental ways in which I view and perceive relationships has not been healthy.

The diagnosis was a devastation and then it was a revelation. I grabbed onto it like a life-preserver because that’s what it was for me. The diagnosis gave me an instruction manual for me. A kind of workaround for the maladaptive social functioning of my brain.

Owning your own toxic behaviors and insecurities, cultivating raw, brutally honest self-awareness, admitting when you’re wrong and making necessary changes is where it’s at for me.

It’s hard.

There’s a lot of nonsense disguised as empowerment or self-love/self-care floating around online these days and all it does is keep people stuck in toxic echo chambers of their own creation, blaming others when things don't go well in relationships with spouses, parents, children siblings, and coworkers.

Understanding how BPD has shaped my life and relationships has allowed me to assess my past without the knee-jerk defensiveness that had been an integral part of my being for as long as I can remember.

The more I learn about the unfortunately named “borderline personality disorder,” the better I feel. Epiphany after epiphany has allowed me to reflect on a life of emotional overreaction and difficult relationships and understand what was actually happening from an almost clinical perspective. I can refer to the common symptoms of BPD, recognize and mitigate my reaction.

It’s exactly the same feeling as not realizing your vision is failing, putting on your first pair of prescription glasses and fully comprehending how much you were missing. Holy shit, this is what it’s like to see?!

I have spent a couple years deconstructing my past from this new post-diagnosis vantage point and it has been nothing short of mind-blowing. One of the most startling realizations is how much my opinion of myself was based on what others thought about me, specifically the men with whom I had relationships, whether father, brothers, boyfriends or my ex-husband.

It’s something I still struggle with; feeling overly invested in people’s perspectives or opinions of me. Which is why writing about a mental disorder is so difficult, especially when the stigma surrounding Borderline Personality Disorder specifically is still so high. In addition to the stigma, gaps in knowledge about BPD cause people to confuse it with bipolar disorder or stereotype those of us who live with it.

when i need to wipe my face
i use the back of my hand
and i like to take up space
just because i can
and i use my dress
to wipe up my drink
i care less and less
what people think

-Ani DiFranco

With this new, compassionate perspective of who I am (I am not my emotions) and who I am capable of becoming, I often feel so raw and wide open to the stunning, terrible beauty inherent within human existence that I can hardly bear it.

During these rushes of emotion, I feel in love with existence in that painful yet celebratory way you acknowledge the passing of someone who lived a long, accomplished life and died peacefully in their nineties.

My heart vibrates in my chest, the lump in my throat aches, I am overwhelmed, joyful, anxiety-free. The stupid shit that squats rent-free in my head dissipates like morning mist as the sun rises and everything about being alive and human feels obvious and so simple.

Within this adrenaline rush, this life high, for lack of a better term, I become wildly impulsive as I contemplate humanity’s potential and feel compelled to hurl myself at the feet of all the people I have loved as well as learn more about those with whom I regularly interact or cross paths with but don’t know very well. Human connection seems exciting, hopeful. It’s all so easy, I think to myself.

Where I typically retreat from social scenarios, during these life highs I long to break through my fears and shyness and become friends with that person from work who seems extremely cool behind their professional demeanor; have the courage to ask my gym crush if he wants to grab coffee; message the ex-boyfriend from my twenties - the one who almost died in an avalanche in Utah, a thing I found out while crossing the Verrazzano Bridge into Brooklyn the blustery March day I moved into my New York City apartment and spent several agonizing minutes thinking he was dead until it was confirmed he broke his back - and tell him what a good person he was to me in spite of my volatility and that I still think about Wolf and Biggie and Ani DiFranco, Crowheart, Phil Hendrie, Edward Abbey, Melbourne street and the box of orange Certs from Maverik that first night and I want to profusely apologize for, among other things, the time I slapped at his face in his car after an Ani DiFranco concert (I still burn with shame over this memory of a floundering, lost, 26-year-old me) and let him know his integrity, his stoicism, kindness and his impact on me more than twenty years ago was profound; I consider texting my dad after all these years to see if anything feels different or better; and even after all the BadBadBad, I think of ways to make everything right with my kids’ dad, no matter what it takes. I can do it, I know I can.

It all feels possible. So hopeful! And feeling hopeful is a reprieve from the abyss ever swirling inside of me. But this is the trick Borderline Personality Disorder plays on me. Here I am seeking validation from others again.

“People with BPD often talk about feeling empty, as if there’s a hole or a void inside them. At the extreme, you may feel as if you’re ‘nothing’ or ‘nobody.’ This feeling is uncomfortable, so you may try to fill the void with things like drugs, food, or sex. But nothing feels truly satisfying.”

These days, reality shatters my illusions - delusions, some might say - and I do nothing, reach out to no one. Which is, I think, the right call, but not my instinct because emotional dysregulation makes me impulsive. Well intentioned, but needy and impulsive.

Needy and impulsive are a dangerous combination and have fucked me over in life more times than I can count.

While asking a gym crush for coffee or taking steps to make a new work friend are harmless and things I am working toward, messaging exes or dredging up other complicated relationships, especially in this almost-manic state, is ill-advised. But the abyss that swirls inside of me is desperate for the interaction.

Validation is my drug.

Also, I want to feel free of regrets, liberated from the past and those who still haunt my thoughts. But, I am learning this burning desire to reach out to people who have caused me pain, through their actions or my own, is actually an emotional spiral that happens when I’m triggered or feel helpless by something in the present that ignites emotions similar to those I experienced, in some cases decades ago, within or in the wake of those relationships; rejection, abandonment, embarrassment, confusion.

No imagined resolution from my past can save me now, only I can save me in the present. I don’t know the boyfriend from my twenties anymore, or my dad or ex-husband. They aren’t the same people they were.

And neither am I.

Why do I care so much?

Why can’t I let things go?

How do other people seem to instinctively know how to move on, how to stop over-analyzing ever damn thing to death?

Is it my tendency toward nostalgia? Is it a need for validation from the men I trusted with my heart?

As I wrote this, I realized that all the people, usually men, I feel compelled to reach out to in these moments of emotional overwhelm have rejected me in some form; my dad’s lifelong physical and emotional neglect, the boyfriend from my twenties was the only guy who ever broke up with me and my ex-husband, who disappeared me many years ago at a time when I thought our post-divorce relationship, though always turbulent, was better than it had ever been when married.

This is an emotional flashback, I recognize. This is textbook Borderline Personality Disorder stuff rearing up.

You can handle this. You aren’t your emotions, you’re the awareness behind the emotions. You’re the blue sky and these emotions are just storm clouds passing through. Wait out the storm.

But oh, the waiting is an itchy, uncomfortable time. If you’ve ever experienced trying to stop drinking and that time of day arrives when you typically enjoy a cold one you’ll know exactly what I mean. That niggle, that itch that needs scratching, the white lies you allow into your brain to give yourself permission to inch closer to doing the thing you know you shouldn’t. The need to do something to relieve the pressure of the swirling abyss inside of you is overpowering, almost claustrophobic. All you can do is wait it out.

The people from my past who haunt my present only exist in my head because I invite them inside. Life is messy, complicated, confusing. People change. Exes don’t want to hear from me, my dad probably hasn’t changed and if he is different I likely would’ve already heard something meaningful from him.

Other people are not medicine.

Like catching an enormous fish, I work hard to reel myself in, to get a handle on what’s happening, to do nothing other than continue to observe my emotional reactions with compassion and remind myself that this sudden, powerful need for resolution or absolution regarding people from my past is a temporary flailing triggered by feelings of uncertainty or discomfort in my present.

Often borderlines will experience triggers. Things in the here and now that are just like situations and or experiences from the past that were very painful and or traumatic. Situations that create dysregulated emotions that those with BPD do not have effective coping skills to deal with in age-appropriate ways.

It is here that the real work must be done. Each time one is triggered, it is crucial to work through the reality that what you are feeling from the past, while very real, is not necessary in the present. If you have BPD, you need to learn how to take personal responsibility for those feelings and how you react to them. You do not have to be re-victimized unless you allow that to happen.

It is all a matter of not playing out and re-playing out past patterns. It is difficult and painful to make changes to these ingrained patterns but it is not only possible but necessary if you are to leave your past behind you. - The Mental Health Center of America

It’s difficult to recognize when this is happening because you’re all caught up in your feelings which are very big and feel very real and valid. What’s actually happening is pretty simple: Something occurs in the present that triggers a traumatic experience from the past. Your emotional reaction to the present becomes all tangled up with your emotional response to the past trauma which has been amplified by years of conditioning.

“Your past can produce real pain and flashbacks for you in the here and now. The challenge that you face is not so much trying to control that but letting it happen and then taking care of yourself in response to it,” the Mental Health Center of America notes. “The past truly only has the power (now) that you give to it. Refuse to continue to give your past more power than your here and now. The difference in giving the “now” power is that you will find yourself and know yourself and learn to believe in yourself.”

Recognizing what’s happening is the hardest part. The emotional dysregulation is familiar, comfortable even, because of those years of conditioning. We’re drawn to what we know so I flounder in emotional overwhelm, conflating shame and rejection from the past with a present experience causing me discomfort or pain. I thrash around and try to fill the emotional abyss that feels like it’s swallowing me whole by seeking validation from people from my past.

That’s how it seems to go with me and the lingering BPD. I’m like a scab that never heals; oozing blood as I rip at myself, flail around, lash out and then wonder why people, some who may even legitimately care about me, might pull back with distaste.

Regardless of the BPD and the emotional dysregulation, I like these well-intentioned bursts of love for humanity and the people around me that I regularly experience, even the painful ones from my past.

I am a bruised, oozing, bleeding heart who desperately wants you to love me. I am excited to get to a place where I don’t care if you love me, but I’m no longer embarrassed that I long for validation, it’s just a BPD thing and like a toddler learning to walk, I am slowly learning the only validation I need is my own because, for the first time in my life, I trust myself (mostly!) to make the right decisions.

Longing for connection or attempting to make things right with people I was once connected with isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. I want people who meant a lot to me to know how much I still care, that meaningful relationships aren’t disposable to me and I will carry a little bit of them with me, always. I just don’t want it at the expensive of my mental health.

So I practice letting go of the image of the person I knew and try to release the secret hopes I harbor that one day any kind of reaching out will be the magic bullet that resolves everything and I will no longer have any weird shit with anyone I once loved.

There will always be weird shit and I am understanding this is a huge part of life’s beauty. Resolving past weird shit doesn’t necessarily make life beautiful, accepting weird shit with people is a part of life is where the beauty can be found. Life is messy and people are gonna people and there is nothing to be done about it.

Still, one can dream a little bit. Or experience a nostalgic relapse from time to time.

This is hard for me to write about. Borderline Personality Disorder. I feel so embarrassed about it even though I know it’s not my fault. Mental illnesses, disorders and neurodivergence in general are still so stigmatized and constantly used against people, especially women.

Words like narcissist, bipolar and borderline are regularly hurled as deliberate insults to hurt or shame and by those not realizing that many people they know and love deal with these painful issues whether they have a diagnosis or not.

Either way, armchair diagnoses lobbed as grenades are horrifying, painful and humiliating, particularly for someone with an unstable self-image, intense fear of rejection and regular feelings of emptiness.

Here are a few things I want you to know about BPD:

• The National Alliance on Mental Illness estimates that 1.4% of the United States population has a BPD diagnosis, with 75% of those being women. Men may be equally impacted, but get misdiagnosed.

• People who have this disorder experience “​difficulties regulating emotion,” NAMI says. 

• “In essence, borderline is a mental health disorder that really makes up the way a person thinks, how they feel about themselves or other people around them,” explained Laura Downey, founder of Lexington’s Trauma-Informed Counseling Center. 

• Shannon Sauer-Zavala, an associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s Department of Psychology, said there are more than 200 different symptom combinations in BPD. That means two people can have BPD and it may look very different in each. “The presentations are so, so varied.” 

• A person with BPD usually has long-term patterns of instability or turbulent emotions, Jana Wilson, founder of Paducah’s J.F. Wilson Wellness Center, said. “A lot of times, their experiences or their symptoms will lead to impulsive actions.” They may demonstrate compulsive tendencies, “chaotic relationships” and a lot of issues within those relationships. 

• Because BPD can vary so much person to person, it’s often misdiagnosed as PTSD, depression or other trauma-related conditions, Wilson said. 

• BPD is sometimes stigmatized even more than other mental illnesses, Sauer-Zavala said. That’s because “there’s a lot of myths about it that aren’t even accurate.” For example, BPD is often associated with a person being difficult and angry, but that’s a generalization.

• “Many, many people that have BPD,” Sauer-Zavala said, “don’t endure some of those symptoms.” 

• Most people she deals with who have BPD, she said, are anxious about the status of their relationships. Because of this, “interpersonal anxiety disorder” is a more appropriate name, she said. 

• The current thinking, said Sauer-Zavala, is “it is a transaction between biological vulnerabilities and early learning experiences. So nature versus nurture? No, it’s both.” 

• “Folks that are more at risk to develop not just BPD but really any mental health condition, tend to experience emotions really strongly,” she said. “And that’s … a biological disposition.” 

• They also tend to be more willing to take risks and more impulsive. 

• Folks can be further sensitized, she said, if they were emotionally invalidated during their childhood. That could range from sexual and physical abuse to disregard. 

• For example, “You can imagine a child being like, ‘oh, like, I broke my bike, and I’m really sad’ or ‘I lost this prized possession’ and a parent being like,’ that’s a stupid thing to be upset about.’”

The phrase interpersonal anxiety disorder caused me to fall out of my chair because it really nails my experience without the stigma the words “borderline personality” introduced into the mental disorder lexicon. (There is apparently some momentum behind Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder).

In those raw, shimmering moments of gratitude for existence and the ability to recognize the awesomeness of aliveness on a regular basis in spite of the difficulty inherent in the art of living, I feel happy to be me. Fucked up, over-thinking, emotionally erratic, needy, impulsive, interpersonal anxiety disorder-having, oozing scab Monica.

There is an art to living that has nothing to do with the happenings within a life but rather, how one conducts one’s self as the happenings go down.

Some people move through life in ways that inspire. I’m not talking about amazing triumphs or overcoming incredible odds, I’m talking about everyday living and the ways people move through it.

Some people are curious, some are mysterious, some are incessant complainers and whiners, others are stoic, solid as rocks, observant and aware while most seem to steamroll through their days ignorant of their surroundings and the constructs that keep us all in line, focused on getting to the next thing.

I strive to move through the happenings of life as aware as possible with a dash of stoic swagger. Most of all, I want to keep my heart open to all possibilities.

Knowing about the BPD and the anxiety and confusion it threads throughout all my interactions with people, it would be easy to close down, batten down my hatches and seek less socialization. But I want to remain open to all the possibilities in life the older I get. Aging is a privilege not everyone gets and I am determined to make the most of it, make up for all the years spent lost in a wilderness of confusion.

Within the uncertainty, I want to let my free bird heart soar and experience everything deeply because that’s just who I am, BPD or no. And I like that about me. I like that certain people from my past - whether it ended badly or not - are a part of me now and have taken up permanent residence in my heart.

No, don’t let that thing go to waste

don’t be afraid to use it

lend it and lose it

it’s not there to just take up space

take your heart out of its case

---

Day 259

Note: A super-duper special thank you to new paid subscribers and those who recently renewed their paid subscriptions. It means so much. You helped get me through a really tough year mentally, emotionally and financially. I am so appreciative of the support and love y’all so damn much.