What My Life Is Like as a Teen With Borderline Personality Disorder

What does it feel like to me to live with borderline personality disorder?

It feels like constant rejection. It feels like constant uncertainty and unfamiliarity. It feels like dying even when it wasn’t my fault.

It includes relationship instability because I’m afraid of everything, and that includes intimacy. It includes harming myself in various ways because my brain tells me I’ve been terrible and need to be punished.

It includes strange detachments from reality because my mind doesn’t understand how to function under stress.

It includes hallucinations that make me feel trapped and like a fish out of water wishing I could scream but unable to breath because you’re stuck in fear that your loved ones will think you’re “a freak.”

It feels like everything that was supposed to make sense skipped over me, and now I’m trapped wondering what’s “wrong” with me.

It feels like daily uphill battles. And nightmares because I feel like a failure, and nothing can get my brain off the fact someone may dislike me.

Living with borderline is living with a voice deep inside me yelling at me that I’m unlovable, unworthy, underserving.

It is a highly stigmatized disorder, but those who don’t understand it — like the desire to constantly kill yourself, or submit yourself just for a little taste of love — might not realize the damage stigmatization can do.

It’s walking around with a label slapped on my back that I’m “oversensitive” or the “crazy ex girlfriend,” dehumanizing words for someone with a severe mental illness.

I don’t have the option to turn my back and run away, because personality disorders tend to never leave the mind, and that realization scares me while I fight to stay alive.

I am uncomfortable, with pinches of impulsivity and uncertainty mixed in with mood swings and major dissociation.

But none of this makes me, or anyone else diagnosed, any less of a human being.

It doesn’t make us any less beautiful or any less worthy of the gifts life has to offer.

Borderline may have horrific challenges, but it does not make those diagnosed with it horrific. We are brave — and that’s really what matters.

If you or someone you know needs help, visit our suicide prevention resources page.

If you need support right now, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or text “START” to 741-741.

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Thinkstock photo by Yuria Ibarra