I need you to understand something that most people will never truly grasp: living with Borderline Personality Disorder isn't really living. It's surviving. Every single day.
Since I was ten years old, I have wanted to die every single day. No one should know what that feels like. But when you feel pain on an amplified scale, when even the smallest things make you feel like you might die from the emotional pain, only another Borderline knows how to die every day like I do.
Dr. Marsha Linehan, who created Dialectical Behavior Therapy and has a PhD in psychology from Loyola University, described it perfectly: "Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering."
That's not poetry. That's my daily reality.
What Trauma Does to a Developing Brain:
BPD doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It's carved into you during the years when your brain is supposed to be learning safety, love, and connection. For me, that carving started early, and it was brutal. I’ll gloss over the gruesome details and some of the horrors too terrible to subject others to having to stomach. But when you're abandoned at two, discarded behind a dumpster with your siblings, surviving on rotted food until paramedics describe you as looking like Auschwitz survivors, that rewires everything.
Your amygdala
The part of your brain that processes fear and emotion, becomes hyperactive.
Your prefrontal cortex
The area which is supposed to regulate impulses and provide that critical pause between feeling and action, gets overwhelmed and weakened.
The HPA axis
Your body's stress-response system gets stuck on high alert. Your brain learns to treat normal stress to others instead as a mortal threat. A raised voice becomes a siren. A look of disappointment becomes proof of your worthlessness.
And the most devastating part?
Your mirror neurons fire so intensely that you also absorb other people's emotions more powerfully than they even feel them themselves.
The result?
You grow up with no sense of self. No armor against the world. Just raw nerve endings and a distorted lens through which everything you learn gets filtered and warped.
The Paradox of Who I Became
Here's what breaks my heart and fills me with something like hope at the same time: despite everything, the abandonment, the abuse, the three separate times I was discarded at the most formative ages of childhood, I scored as an ENFJ 1w2 on personality assessments.
Do you know what that means?
It means that after being abandoned, broken, brutalized, and betrayed, I still chose to care. Still chose to lead. Still chose to love.
I organized my entire personality around doing what's right and helping others heal, even though I desperately needed to heal myself first. Like those pre-flight safety briefs about putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
I became a reformer, a mentor, a light-bringer. Not bitter. Not cruel. Not a mirror of what hurt me.
That's not weakness. That's a kind of strength most people will never have to summon.
The Daily War
Here's the truth that needs to be said:
Having that heart, that desire to bring joy and light, it doesn't stop the biological mechanisms that fire off when I'm cornered or triggered.
When someone hurts me, my brain doesn't give me a vote.
The amygdala hijacks the show.
Fight-or-flight kicks in before rational thought can catch up.
And suddenly, I'm reacting from a place of pure survival instinct, not malice, not manipulation, just a nervous system that learned decades ago that threat equals death.
And then?
I'm left holding the pieces.
Being called a monster.
Being labeled dangerous, unstable, manipulative.
They see the fire.
They never ask who set it.
The Cruel Irony of Reactivity
Here's something most people don't understand: reactivity isn't a sign of instability. It's evidence of a pulse.
You know who doesn't react?
Sociopaths.
Psychopaths.
People who can calmly discuss dismemberment or watch someone crumble without blinking. Emotional absence isn't strength, it's a void.
When I cry, when I rage, when I collapse under the weight of betrayal, that's not dysfunction. That's proof there's still a soul fighting in here. Still someone who cares deeply enough to ache when things go wrong.
The world rewards composure.
But composure isn't character.
Stillness isn't sainthood.
And emotion is absolutely not evidence of guilt.
What I've Done to Heal
I'm not hiding from my past.
I'm confronting it.
Learning from it.
I’m always seeking to evolve beyond it.
I've completed:
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT).
Kaiser's full addiction and substance dependency program.
Ongoing individual therapy.
I'm actively pursuing entry into the VA's Men's Trauma Recovery Program.
I haven't touched alcohol since February 2022.
I practice alpha brainwave meditation.
I use creativity, music, poetry, storytelling, not as hobbies but as lifelines.
This isn't performative healing.
This is sacred, brutal work that most people will never have the courage to do.
Every day I choose not to become what hurt me.
Every day I rewrite the neural pathways that trauma burned into my brain.
Every day I prove that healing is possible, even when the world tells you you're broken beyond repair.
To Other Borderlines:
You're Not Alone
If you have BPD, I need you to hear this:
Your mind is lying to you 24 hours a day. You feel everything way stronger than anyone around you can comprehend. You're being fed lies from your own brain, and you have no built-in filter to separate truth from distortion.
You deserve grace.
You deserve empathy.
You deserve space to heal.
Yes, we're difficult to deal with.
But it's far more difficult living as one.
Because we have no armor, no sense of self to ground us. We're powder kegs in a world that feels like it's constantly trying to light the fuse.
And yet:
Many of us, at our core, want nothing more than to bring joy and light to the world around us. Unfortunately, because of an intolerant world and an inescapable stigma, it's our darkness that gets brought out most often. That furthers the stigma, enforces self-hatred, and in far too many cases, leads to lives cut short.
The suicide attempt rate for people with BPD is 87.5%.
We're not dangerous to others, we're dangerous to ourselves.
The Fight for My Children
I'm in a custody battle right now. My ex-partner has cut off all contact between me and my daughters since February 2024.Only since the court stepped in on my behalf at our first custody preceding a few weeks ago did that change.
518 days without being able to see my babies.
One who will soon turn five, and the other who will soon after that turn four.
12,432 hours that I didn’t even get to see my baby girl’s darling faces.
No calls. No video chats. No visits.
She frames herself as protective while creating a hostile, obstructive environment.
When it was she, not I, that was arrested for domestic violence.
After striking me while I was holding our youngest child who wasn't even 1 yet.
When I set boundaries, when I calmly stated that our calls were meant for my time with the children, not for her manipulative commentary, she escalated by cutting off communication altogether.
This is what reactive abuse looks like.
Triggering a reaction, then blaming the person for reacting.
And my daughters?
They're caught in the middle.
Either they're told false narratives about why Daddy isn't there, or they're being conditioned not to miss me at all.
Both scenarios are forms of psychological harm.
My children deserve both parents. Not a villain and a hero. Not a rewritten history. Just two imperfect people committed to healing, cooperation, and honest reflection.
I had more to say but ran out of room.
But if you need help please call 988
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