On The Border of 34

As another birthday approaches, we often find ourselves taking stock of the year before.

For me, that often includes another year before that. And before that. And before that, all the way to the rebirth following the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder.

This year is the first one that’s hard not to view as a stumble. As I’ve written before, you’re never quite sure where BPD is ever going to leave you, but you know that it will never, ever leave you.

On the outside, it’s been a successful year. Yet the ability to camouflage an acute pain becomes natural to us, burying it in the fog of professional success and social prowess. Denial not only happens on the outside, but it’s reflected inward too. It’s just a blip. It can’t be happening again.

But it isn’t and it can. Insidiously this time, more so than ever before, because everything seems perfect. Stability reigns but excess prevails, a non-stop work life where the alternative is to potentially sit in the net of anxiety for months. The desire to constantly help others and build platforms to discuss mental health, without giving due attention to your own.

Some days you convince yourself you’re Superman. Until you’re cruelly reminded that Superman probably didn’t have Borderline Personality Disorder.

This year I learned a lot about my mental health and how it can be affected even by the mirage of perfection. You start to question why the life you dreamed of doesn’t feel like enough, only for that thought to contort into a semi-permanent mindset and pollute your brain. In those moments, you fall. You fail.

Failure is what it feels like for a man who constantly shouts about his experiences and victory over BPD to suddenly realise that maybe he hasn’t won at all. Or maybe this lifelong ebb and flow is only really the truest form of consistency he’ll ever know. You feel disappointment to all those who have always rooted for and been proud of you, and you feel like a fraud for fronting events that use your story as a hook to inspire others out of their darkness.

But it’s because of those events that I write today. To continue to jettison the stigma around mental health, its black-and-white illusion, and to hold one’s own hands up and say that things broke down, with the same voice that once brightly said the opposite.

“It’s ok not to be ok,” is the modish phrase. You should always talk. But another lesson in the past year is that, in the face of BPD, people don’t often know what to say. For a mental health advocate it’s often assumed that they’ve asserted dominance over their condition, that they’ve got their proverbial shit together. And while it’s true that the best help for Borderline sufferers is a trained therapist, it often isn’t enough to balance the sense of loneliness when you do admit to people that something is wrong and they have no idea what to do, what to say. “I’m not ok” becomes a silent scream, a repeated bang on soundproof glass. The guilt of being a bad friend, lover, brother, son, flatmate, and colleague soon suffocates all of that too.

Inertia takes over. You’re content to live it out with as little fanfare as possible, agreeing to as little as possible, knowing that making it back to basecamp will be enough to survive another day. You turn up because you have to, because you cannot afford to let people down — not again — and somehow your view of success becomes once again tainted by virtue of capitalism. And in that respect, the admission that you’ve forgotten who you are and where you’ve come from becomes all the more painful. All the more shameful.

But as always, I commit to paper what I cannot say out loud, and by doing so I also acknowledge the hopefulness of the years and pieces gone before. Having your mental health together doesn’t mean you always will, particularly on the uneven terrain of a freelance industry. And approaching a birthday doesn’t necessarily mean having to celebrate the victories of the year before, but sometimes acknowledging the losses.

It’s also, unoriginally, about forgiveness. The bombardments against your race, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity that add to an already taxing existence make it no surprise that this kind of thing can happen, and keep on happening. That a personality disorder is a fate not chosen and certainly not one that anyone can be equipped for. That any perceived failure is transient and not by any means the summation of a life, and that this time I walk back with specifically tailored armour that has weathered all of this before.

People keep asking how I’m marking my 34th birthday. My mouth inevitably forms the words ‘I don’t know’, but my mind yearns for a quiet and unremarkable ticking of time. A tacit gratitude to still be here, to still write, to still have the presence of mind to fight. To know that those inclined will ask ‘are you ok’ with the weight it deserves and, however few that number, that will be enough.

Perhaps by admitting this so publicly I have a lot more to lose than most. Or perhaps it’s part of a continuous journey in learning how to live with BPD and truly be free, and in a subdued way helping others to do the same.

Either way, I’ll let you know how it turns out this time next year.