The Long Road to Diagnosis
How many here wrestled for years, maybe decades, before getting a diagnosis that helped?
I was 22 when I got married to the most wonderful person I'll ever know. I'm 49 now, and we separated 6 months ago. For the vast majority of that time, to friends, family, and my dear partner and child, I was simply "the grumpy one." I would get annoyed at the slightest things, and let the huge problems of the world overwhelm me and influence my behaviour for days, weeks, months. When I would ask my doctor, whom I'd been seeing since I was 11, he'd tell me that I "just need to relax."
Yeah.
About a decade ago, I went on an antidepressant because we thought maybe that was the problem. And, as with many meds, it helped for a little while, or it mitigated enough of the symptoms that I thought maybe I'd found a fix.
A few years later, as things were getting worse and I was being very verbally abusive to my spouse and child, I had it suggested to me that I should look into ADHD. Which I did, and was medicated for without any kind of diagnosis. I was over-medicated and I ended up in the hospital, beaten and restrained by security and police.
I was diagnosed with BPD, the first diagnosis in my life that has made any sense of the chaos, 5 months ago, after my separation and a suicide attempt, well after I'd done what looks like irreparable damage to the vast majority of the important relationships in my life.
I am nearly 50 now and finally have a set of tools that put the disparate parts of my life in some kind of order. I despair that I didn't have them decades ago, that I wasn't handed this little cheat sheet so that I could avoid the damage I've caused both to others and myself. I despair that the time left to me is not going to be enough to fix what I've damaged or to build something new.
I took me so long to get here, so long to figure out how to be a human being in my own inimitable fashion. I just want to be able to share the real me, the one not overwhelmed by the monster, with the people I love, without them fearing me.