The Nightmares I Have as Someone With Borderline Personality Disorder

Sometimes it feels like being haunted, but the ghosts are real people who exist. And are alive.

Sometimes it’s not people.

Sometimes I’m being chased by someone… or thing.

Sometimes I’m yelling. I’m yelling at someone I love. I’m yelling at someone who left, or who might leave me, begging them not to go.

Sometimes it’s someone who is long gone, and they’re just holding my hand.

Sometimes I’m begging my husband not to leave me and he just laughs at me. And sometimes he’s chasing me, with a baseball bat.

Sometimes there are two people. But they’re the same person and one is loving, caring and supportive while the other laughs in a face and tells me they don’t want anything to do with me.

Sometimes all my teeth fall out and even after I’m awake, I have to talk myself into believing it wasn’t real.

But every time it is my own personal hell.

The meeting of borderline personality disorder (BPD), which can cause fear of abandonment, anger, self-loathing and my bipolar-induced nightmares, cause me to live my biggest fears and greatest disappointments over and over again in a way I can’t control.

Typically the things I can’t say, the emotions I stuff down or do not know how to express come bubbling up into my dreams. They spill out of my subconscious into the rest of my brain while I sleep. The anger, the hurt and the pain, the things I have tried so hard to forget.

And then I wake up.

That might be the worst part.

Sometimes it’s in the middle of the night and I roll over and snuggle into my husband and try to go back to sleep. He is my rock and my protector. And when I wake up and he is still there, I am OK.

But sometimes it’s in the morning and he’s already left for work and I have to get myself together on my own. Which doesn’t always work as well as I’d like it to, and it puts a dark smudge over my whole day. I obsess over the events of the dream.

Why did that happen? Why was that person in my head? What does it mean?

Sometimes when it’s someone I miss, I think about contacting them but most of the time I talk myself out of it. They don’t care about me, if they did they would still be here right?

It reminds me that, no matter how well I feel like I’m doing, that deep down there is the worthlessness, that sinking emptiness that haunts me from the inside out and I am left tired and emotionally drained for however long this particular stretch of dreams may last.

I am not saying there is no hope, although it may feel that way at times. There are nights that I sleep and it is just a blank canvas of deep black nothingness. And there are days that are bright and happy and confident. But this is something I try to manage that people don’t see.

It is something I try to mange so that people don’t see.

And somewhere along the way you get tried of pretending that everything is OK.

So this is me. And I have BPD and Bipolar. And sometimes it screws up my day. But I am just a person. And that is OK.

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Unsplash photo via Anthony Intraversato