Next up in my Mental Health Week blogs is Borderline Personality Disorder.
BPD is probably the trickiest of my 'conditions' because half the psychiatric world don't believe it exists so explaining something that half the world doesn't accept is a little challenging...
BPD is also known as Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, a label that I absolutely detest. I find it almost insulting that a complex disorder is described as being 'emotionally unstable' when there is so much more to it than that.
BPD can take a long time to diagnose, it's commonly misdiagnosed as Bipolar or depression and whilst it comes with depressive elements they are part of a big mix of symptoms.
People often generalise BPD as being the result of abuse or traumatic experiences, and whilst being sexually assaulted and bullied both in school and the workplace certainly didn't help, I realise that I've always had certain traits of it. Things that wouldn't phase a 'normal' kid such as a supply teacher for the day would completely freak me out, being put in different groups to work was hell. As an 8 year old you just figure that everyone feels like that, the same suprise that I had as an adult when I discovered that not everyone's mood can go from sky-high or rock bottom in under a second. I'm still having to work hard to 'forgive' myself for the things that I did and felt in my teen years that I can now attribute to BPD but at the time were excruciatingly embrassing oddities.
Living with BPD can be exhausting. It has control of both my anxiety (see Monday's blog) and OCD (coming later this week), it's the reason that my attempts at CBT to combat my OCD failed as it worked its way around my attempts to 'challenge' my thought processes. Waking up each day and having no idea which direction your thoughts and moods will take throughout the course is pretty unsettling. Without exaggeration I can go from pretty chill to manic to terrified to suicidal all in the space of a morning when I'm going through a bad patch.
It makes interactions with others, in the workplace especially, tricky. You want people to see you as a rational, professional person and you can understand their confusion when the bubbly brightly dressed person they met the day before drags herself into work in her baggy black dress surrounded by a moody silence. I feel bad for putting people through this, more so my family and friends. I have a lot of anger that I carry with me, anger at the people who bullied me and assaulted me, anger at those who screamed at me across the office, worst of all the anger at those who stood by and let it happen when they could have stepped in and finally anger at myself for not 'dealing' and allowing the disorder to inform my life this way.
One of the hardest things I have to ask myself is the catchy "is it me or BPD?". It is hard to see where the BPD ends and Jen begins (and vice versa), your personality is unique and saying that it is 'disordered' raises the question do I think/feel this way/do this because it's me or because of my BPD? Is it Jen that cares lots about her family and panics if she doesn't hear from them or is it the clingy element of the BPD?
I could go on into far more depth about my BPD but I did promise mini-blogs!
In the next blog I'll be delving into the mystical world of my OCD.
Love Jen
XxxxX
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