Role Tag
Stories written by people who live with Borderline Personality Disorder themselves.
3 stories
Everyone talks about the crises. The self-harm, the hospital admissions, the relationships that imploded. Those are the parts of BPD that get written about, dramatised, warned against. What nobody mentions is the quiet periods — the weeks or months when you are, by most measures, fine — and how disorienting those are.
People hear "fear of abandonment" and they picture someone clingy, demanding, unable to let their partner out of their sight. That is not what it is like for me, and I suspect it is not what it is like for most people with BPD.
I was thirty-one years old when a psychiatrist first said the words Borderline Personality Disorder to me. I had been in and out of services since I was seventeen — depression, anxiety, "emotionally unstable personality traits", a brief and terrifying inpatient admission at twenty-three — but nobody had ever put a name to the whole shape of it. The diagnosis landed like a key turning in a lock I had been pressing my ear against for years.