One of the Most Challenging Ways I've Tried to Better Myself as Someone With BPD

Everything you read online about people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) that wasn’t written by people with borderline seems to eventually translates to: “They’re good people who are just in a lot of pain and have no control over it, but you should keep your distance from them anyway.” Which is redundant information to share, because you don’t need websites to tell people you think you’re not good enough.

Somehow people manage to figure that out all on their own.

I can’t change the information that’s being shared about me that’s not entirely accurate, but I can change the way I think about how it makes me feel.

I know I’m not an easy person to be friends with long-term. Most friendships I start never make it past the honeymoon stage — once the jokes take pause, the music stops and the sun goes down, the spotlight comes out and illuminates all my imperfections in ways that people aren’t able to handle. Mental illness leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths, and a worse one in our hearts.

I understand why people run from me, I only wish I had the same luxury. The flip side to that is that I am a good person and despite the emotional avalanche I am constantly and consistently crushed by, my heart is immune to frostbite. I love my friends and family with such ferocity and devotion and there is nothing that could convince me to ever do otherwise. There is no line someone in my life could cross that would ever make me cut them off, which is a painful truth to have when you are scarred by the scissors of others.

Rewiring the way I think so that it’s separated from the way I feel is one of the most challenging ways I’ve ever tried to better myself.

Learning to ignore the knife stabbed in my heart that screams, “They cancelled because they don’t want to be around you! They hate you!” — I instead take a breath, and teach myself to understand they cancelled because they worked all day and they’re tired and it’s cold — and not because of the fight we had four months ago.

To have the self-confidence to turn my music up on public transport instead of down when I think people are talking about me and laughing about me.

Asking myself if maybe the reason I don’t know who I am is because I’m always trying to be someone else.

Pushing aside the pain from the pile of bricks crashing down on my head when I see evidence of my friends with other friends and trying to see beyond how I feel, because they don’t have to invite me everywhere they go. They’re not going to forget about me or replace me with people who are better. I don’t need to panic. Just because they have other friends doesn’t make me any less important to them.

People won’t forget me overnight, I don’t have to constantly remind them I’m here and in pain. They know, and they’re sorry.

Maybe they didn’t pour my alcohol down the sink and flush my drugs down the toilet because they wanted to make their life easier, maybe they were trying to make mine easier.

Perhaps calling my parents and calling the police wasn’t them trying to ruin my life, maybe it was them trying to save it.

Maybe they didn’t all leave because they hate me, maybe they left because I hate myself. 

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