How Borderline Personality Disorder Can Be a Gift for Creativity

Whether I like it or not, I haven’t yet gotten to the phase where I can say I have found my peace with my diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD).

I have been living with it for around five years. While I like to think my best hope would be to get to this level — to embrace myself the way I am — I dread the moment when I will actually accept I have to live with this. I will never be able to get rid of it. I will never have the chance to feel what it’s like to live without it, without needing to accept my troubled reality as a destiny not to be changed. To know and not resist the thought that I won’t ever have the possibility to say “that’s it, I’m done.” Oh yes, I dread this moment. I tremble when only thinking about it. Emotionally, I hate the logic of my conclusions, though I am grateful that at least my logical thinking hasn’t abandoned me, contrary to my emotional balance which will be destined to fail me again and again. I won’t even be able to accuse it of something to relieve my frustration.

And yet, despite all this, I recognize the enormous privileges I have gotten with that exceptional disorder. Its sunny sides, when they come to surface, are true gifts for a creative spirit like me. In these moments, they seem to me like facilitators to reach the depth of my soul, to discover my inner self in an instant. It takes me only a short period of time to enter into these places and almost no effort to travel from one sphere to another, while for others it might require a lifetime.

It can be spiritually felt, and it can be felt physically. Sometimes, when I become close to someone or something, when I hear a melody and it makes my heart bounce stronger or read a rarely heard sentence in a book I chose; when I listen to a dear person speak a truth I can identify with, I feel my heart wanting to burst inside of me; something like a heartache but more than this, like a wave, coming closer and overwhelming me, showering me in its gush of spray, pushing me forward to a shore I do not know but which I long to reach. I don’t know who there is, waiting at that shore; I want so much to be someone there who will receive this wave of emotion, a never-ending flow of gentle happiness and love which this precious experience arouses in me. And most of the times, there is no one to wait for me to arrive and pour all this richness over them. Or the shore, eventually, is too far away.

And so I float, slower and slower, and just beg God that He may keep for me this excitement, to allow me to remember it for a longer time, to make me learn its lessons — just please, don’t take it away from me. Help me to be satisfied even if no one is around to listen to my satisfaction nor to share it with me. It is so precious, so stunning, so relieving, so vitalizing. Please, let me keep it. Please, make it useful for something. Please, do not let it pass in vain.

This is my life; this is who I am. It is such a beautiful part of me. Let my beauty shine. Perhaps someone, someday, will want to warm himself in this light.