When you are very young you are so full of goals and dreams just like all your peers. Then BPD happens and it all changes. Your peers gradually leave. They go on their journeys towards careers, families, adventures. They do the things they planned, that were once part of your plans too. But you are left behind, floundering, just trying to survive each day.
How do you adjust, reach acceptance and come to terms with the loss?
Because if you have full-blown BPD life will be very different from the one you dreamed for yourself or the type of lives your peers will lead. It will be limited and challenging. If you are a BPD sufferer and disagree, I suspect your disease is mild or you have been misdiagnosed. If someone tells you after a short course of DBT or psychotherapy you can lead a normal life, I’m sorry but they don’t know what they are talking about. With support, you will probably learn to live independently, may survive beyond 30 years of age and with a great deal of help may work and have successful relationships. But I repeat only with the right kind of ongoing support! And in the current political climate, this is not easy to secure.
10% of those diagnosed with BPD will kill themselves and most will seriously attempt to do so. This should be enough to tell anyone just what a hellish sickness this is. Yet I continue to read all over the internet that BPD sufferers are:-
“are attention seeking, relationship destroying, manipulative assholes.”
people believe that only women develop this, when in actuality it comes down to the simple fact that men are socially pressured to refuse help when it comes to emotional imbalance
So not only are we dealing with BPD, we are facing prejudice and sometimes pure hatred, even by those charged with our care. We have learned from childhood ways to help us survive abuse and emotional neglect and these patterns of behaviour are pervasive.
I myself was never allowed to display anger or indeed any negative emotion as a child so I learned to shut down emotions with self-harm and anorexia. Any display of such emotion would result in such outrage and violence from my mother that I feared any strong feelings and would deaden them at any cost. This only resulted in emotional confusion, violent mood swings and an obsession with having complete control over my thoughts, feelings, speech and every other aspect of my life until finally I reached a point where I could not eat, sleep, leave my home or speak. I 
was sectioned under the mental health act. That was 25 years ago now and it has been a long hard road.
Learning to live with a BPD isn’t easy. Having bad days doesn’t always mean being brave or strong or needing to pretend you’re okay when you’re not. I’ve learnt to be more honest with the few people I trust on how I’m really feeling. It helps both me and them.
My life is not easy but it has improved and I have travelled far. I am still in receipt of treatment, I live independently, I have a voluntary job and I rescue bunny rabbits that, like me, have had a bad start in life. Most importantly, I am in a healthy relationship with a man I love beyond all reason and whose happiness is the most important thing in the world to me. And perhaps even more importantly, I feel loved for me, not for who I think I should be.
I am not where I wanted to be when I left school at 18 years of age but, I do not see my life as wasted. I have trodden a different path. I wanted ‘Venice’ and I got ‘Slough’! Oh well, I will explore every inch of Slough!
borderline personality disorder 