Living on the Borderline

This week, I learned something about myself.

I have borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Coming to the realisation that I have BPD felt like a lightbulb turned on after years of nothing but darkness. In the blink of an eye, so many things in my life made sense: a pattern of intense and frequently changing moods, financial recklessness, a history of an eating disorder, suicidality, unsafe sexual behaviours and relationships that build quickly and intensely, then disappear in a maelstrom of devastation.

According to the NHS and other medical sources, an invalidating environment is one of the main causes of BPD. I never realised how much childhood neglect affected me: growing up without my father and mother (both of whom also never lived together); feeling confused by my grandparents’ equally dysfunctional relationship and separate living arrangements; being a non-Chinese speaker but also non-Western person in a city where there is a huge chasm between the expat and local communities.

The aforementioned are all symptoms of living on the borderline, along with the intense curse of feeling things a hell of a lot more than most people. These feelings, which I largely couldn’t explain, affected me in my bubble, while the world around me continued, oblivious to my trouble and content in carrying on at its own speed.

The problem with BPD is that it’s so incredibly stigmatised. I never realised it before but there have been portrayals of the condition on TV and characters are often depicted as unhinged and dangerous: think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, Winona Ryder in Girl Interrupted or Michelle Pfeiffer in White Oleander. BPD has become associated with unruly females. These are scary women you can’t trust. The situation is a lot more nuanced than that, but it’s true that when you live with BPD, it becomes an inescapable aspect of who you are — which is, unfortunately, an asshole.

Like others with BPD, I have difficulty regulating my emotions. I experience feelings of emptiness and go through periods of intense anger, anxiety, panic attacks and self harm. I find it difficult to accept any sort of “grey area” in my personal life and relationships. There’s a constant feeling in my belly, somewhere deeper than one can find the words for, a clawing desperation to fill that emptiness inside. When that emptiness grabs hold, it makes you forget everything you know about being a decent person, the way if your house is on fire you just desperately want to put out the flames.

As a result, I make a lot of really, really bad decisions.

“Unhinged,” “psycho,” “manipulative” and “slut” are just a handful of words that have been used to describe me over the past few weeks. Undiagnosed, I can see why I’m that archetypal Crazy Ex Girlfriend. My own boss thinks I have a “reputation” for being “wild.” Suddenly, I’ve become an attention seeker, a chaos merchant, a kiss-and-tell mistress. I’m the girl who stitches up defenceless men. Maybe, briefly, someone will try to fix me, but eventually I’ll just become another crazy-bitch anecdote.

A friend once said it was “freaky” that I have the ability to “compartmentalise my feelings.” Living with BPD means constantly having to regulate your emotional polygraph, which is infinitely more sensitive than a neurotypical human, and that’s where it’s utterly terrifying. It can take one big incident or several small ones to send it haywire; all sense of balance goes out of the window and it can take a variety of elements to restore stability again. This can happen in just a few seconds, but those few seconds can completely destroy the world around you.

Having BPD also means having to rebel against what feels like every natural fibre of your being every single day. The difference between self-pity and self-awareness is forever hard to discern. Some friends have told me, “you always see the best in people.” That’s because when bad things happen, you wonder if your emotional response is appropriate. You wilt, you try to remain objective and you begin to ration your emotions for fear of irrevocably tipping the scales again.

I may be socially awkward, self-centred, needy and even eccentric at times. Recent events have exposed the tenderest, rawest parts of me — parts that society will demonise. Not everyone has the reserves or capacity for acceptance and being able to differentiate between a personality and a personality disorder. But with so many negative traits associated with BPD, it feels like I’m always at the centre of fault. (You could say I am at fault.)

Turning to Google for a solution doesn’t bring much clarity. Articles come up about how nobody should ever date me. Other articles say I’m very likely to kill myself and that “treatment is slow and often difficult.” Right now, it feels safer to stay emotionally isolated than to risk destroying any more relationships than I have thus far. Yet, simultaneously, I feel like I need some kind of understanding and support more than ever.

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