If I lived in a cave alone the struggles associated with my BPD diagnosis would not exist

So why haven't I run away to live alone in this cave then?

It's a question I've been discussing in depth with myself and a couple of people I trust. I know the answer, it's obvious: because the need for—and the pleasures of—connection outweigh the fear—and the pain—of rejection.

Every human has felt, and feels, rejection. It's a part of being human, and it's especially a part of being human if you experience any facet of yourself of yourself or your life differently to those around you. It's even more so if your need to show who you are became, at some strange turning point in your life, stronger than your need to hide.

Like mine. It's scary to live like this, to be like this, sometimes. But when I started the countdown to my relocation to another city, I decided to explore opportunities to show more of myself to people I thought might possibly be open to that. People who I thought might see differences as a source of creative energy in the world, rather than fear. People who I intuited might be able to cope with something they didn't initially understand— something ambiguous, contradictory, unfinished, not fully formed or even fully expressed.

Because this is me and my relationship with mental health problems and with myself, my identity and with this confusing world. Sometimes I oscillate between binaries of joy and despair, trust and fear, confidence and myself as an apology. This to me is the true 'borderline' in 'borderline personality disorder'. It's not everyone who can, or wants to, see or know ambivalence, contradiction or complexity.

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As someone with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, sometimes I feel like my very existence is a transgression. Like I've crossed a line simply by being me with these emotions, these needs, these longings, these desires. And isn't crossing a boundary something to celebrate when the line was restrictive anyway? Of course, but how hard that can be.

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About seven years ago, I had an emotional breakdown, panic attack, whatever I should call it, at home in front of my housemates who were all good friends. They were watching Ru Paul's Drag Race and I still can't hear the theme tune without the memory of this episode flooding my mind.

This episode left me with the harrowing sense that I had stripped myself, involuntarily, of every shred of dignity and privacy. Stripped myself to the most vulnerable and terrified kernel of myself, in front of people who didn't ask, or even give their permission, to see the utter abjection that I felt inside of myself that night.

It brings me out in hot shame to think about the horror of this still. I can only imagine how hard this was them. Few people ever have any preparation to know what to say or how to react to someone who is so distressed. How to witness, let alone, help someone who does not know how to contain an emotional bomb going off inside of them, uncontained neither by the walls of their body nor the thin walls of the bedroom in this house share of friends.

One of the friends who witnessed this, along with other similar instances (me sobbing as I arrived home from winning a poetry competition, me panicking in the kitchen after various therapy sessions that left me reeling), assumed that if I could I would wish this away then, with a click of my fingers, then I would.

I told him I don't think I would though. This was very confusing for him to hear me say this, and I guess at the time it was confusing to me too.

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Seven years later— with this life, with my husband, with our girl, moving through this world with more ease and less concealment than I ever dreamt was possible back then— I am starting to articulate why I said I would not wish this away.

How could I ever wish this away when this is who I am.

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I'm tentative about writing the following because I'm worried I have no claim to write, or think, in this way. Here goes anyway.

I've been inspired by autistic writers and writers with ADHD, as well other types of neurodivergence, who have been reclaiming their identities on their own terms. Countless autistic people are standing up and saying that they are autistic, not that they 'have autism'. Being autistic is who they are, autism is not something they have that can be separated from them as a person.

I think this articulation of self as comprising, or as suffused by something, rather than as 'having' something, might be how I'm coming to understand myself. Everything I experience in relation to my BPD diagnosis feels inseparable from who I am: emotional, passionate, excitable, curious, needing strong and concentrated connections.

What I can separate from myself is not all of these facets of who I am, but the painful ways I developed in response to who I am in a world that was/is not always understanding or responsive to who I am. These separable parts I'm referring to are my struggles with self-harm, feeling suicidal, intrusive, paranoid thoughts and my distressed ways of moving through the world and of being in relation to myself and in relation to others.

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From the age of about age nine, I felt that some aspect of my self was one immense open, oozing sore in a world that did not know the salve.

And here I am now, in my thirties. In love with my life, and trying my best each day to soothe this wound. Is it more of a door now, than a wound? Sometimes I think of this openness as an aperture, or an opportunity.

[I've recently been discovering the etymology of the word 'opportunity'. It's really interesting and I will write more later].

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Over the coming weeks and months, I will continue tentatively re-imagining what it might mean to be a person with a BPD diagnosis.

This might continue to be inspired (if that's okay?) by others who are also reclaiming what it means to be a person with other forms of experience and identity that have been shamed, marginalised, othered, told to change or the subject of disgust.

Talking about all this feels hard, but I might try with some people if I feel able to.

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If I lived in a cave alone the struggles associated with my BPD diagnosis would not exist. And neither would the riches it brings me, either.

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This post is written with gratitude to all people in my life who let me show something of myself to them. I wish I could have shown my younger self the self I am now. She would have been able to hold onto hope like it was a stone in her pocket, not a breath on a pane of glass.

-Rosie x