The Bruised Borderline
[Trigger warning: talk of self-harm]
I flirted with the idea as I fiddled with the razor blade between my fingertips. My legs were bare, and I was eyeing up the juicy chunk of upper thigh. That was always safest, no paranoia about long-sleeves and the very real possibility of them tumbling upward mid-conversation to meet the bulged out eyes of whomever I was talking to. My therapist and I had agreed I could wean myself off the four pills I took daily, so long as I continued to write and practice self-control and do yoga twice a day. I’d been good about that, mostly. But here I was again. Treading down and breathing deep into the familiar scars on my legs — and peeling them back open.
Cutting, for me, began at the ripe age of fourteen. I was a studious little art kid with a penchant for everything seedy. I liked boys with cars and stealing caffeine pills from the grocery store. I was ensnared in a wild romance with an older boy, my grades were top line, and I was generally happy, save for the odd bursts of self-destruction. I was nervous that my friends secretly disliked me, that my inner crazy was palpable despite the lengths I went to conceal it. It was in a Photography class one day when an acquaintance caught sight of the patchwork on my wrist when a sleeve rolled up lifting my pictures for a better view. He tossed me into the shark tank.
I provided all the usual justifications for my actions to the guidance counselor, and then my family: “It feels better than everything else,” “It makes me less stressed,” “It’s just like a little painkiller, it takes the edge off,” “I’m not trying to die.” But I really didn’t know why I was doing it, or why it’s been a rare indulgence for all the years since. I understand that injury releases endorphins, but I don’t recall ever feeling particularly relieved or euphoric during the experience. I think it’s more the aesthetics — the magic of watching a tiny piece of you plunge outward, stream down; the peculiar comfort of being alive.
“I’m not trying to die.”
As a result of this “little melodrama,” as it was trivialized by nearly everyone, I was effectively forced into therapy. It did not revolutionize my life and it did not save me. I wasn’t ready for that. My doctor diagnosed me with depression, handed me a prescription, and pawned me off to the pharmacy. Within a few weeks, I noticed the difference. I stopped sleeping. I would stay up entire nights busying myself with petty art tasks, pacing my bedroom for hours, and agonizing over my relationships. I was convinced my boyfriend was cheating on me with my best friend and I was plotting my revenge.
But I still believed I was fine.
It would be years before the full extent of what was wrong with me finally manifested itself in all its true blue self-destruction.
Years down the line: he was scarcely an inch taller than me but packed all the intimidation he needed in his shoulders. We’d been together a year and it’d be a year more before I’d leave him. I was standing over the stove, hands over the boiling water, our primary heat source. He was yelling, loudly, attacking my hairstyle and my attitude and my existence because I had been with another man that week. Yelling at me for being with someone else despite the fact he had always been with someone else. I wasn’t worried about his rage escalating into a violent explosion because he’d done that earlier — yanking my hair and hurling me to the wall. It was an occasional thing he did. Punching my arms, kicking my stomach, forcefully lowering me to the floor. You’re not worth your height, he liked to remind me of things.
It never felt good and I know there were hours and days I’d spend in painful anxiety dreading what he would do. The last time he learned of me being with someone else, he smashed my car’s windshield and broke the electronic car key before wheeling around and clutching my throat, in what I try to fondly remember in more sarcastic minutes as an impassioned neck hug. But I went back not out of fear or because there was some financial or emotional obligation, but because I loved him and I wanted to. I was spellbound by the fire.
On this particular day, my hands sat poised above the boiling water, listening half-absently to his sewage of insults and indignation and everything ugly, and then I plunged deep. Crammed my hands into the water. Fire, fire, fire. I don’t remember much, but I remember how his voice stopped, and I remember imagining my hands burning down into little nubs, nothing left but the quintessential core. The only good part.
I had spent the better part of my life rolling my eyes and scoffing at the idea of having a “mental illness.” I’d been off-and-on antidepressants, and then a cocktail of colorful pills when it was declared I wasn’t depressed, but bipolar instead. I’d go through spurts of religious-attention to my illness, abstaining from alcohol and drugs, setting reminders on my phone to take the proper pills at the proper times. I’d get bored of this. I’d get wild with this. Friends who had no real knowledge of how I felt inside my head would encourage me to quit the regime, arguing, “Just be yourself. You’re an exciting woman! Don’t let the pills dull down who you are.”
My intellectual self, versed as I was in mental illness, knew this logic was faulty. But insatiably filled to the brim with emotion as I always was, I would feel the words to be truer than true: It seemed like my life had been a constant struggle to flatten myself out, to smoosh down, to contain and manage, to suppress, rather than to just let myself be. I know this is a sentiment felt by most medication-skeptics, and I fell into the trap of it like a pothole in the road.
After the boiling water fiasco, after waking up in my then-boyfriend’s bed with his warm hands on my face, suddenly loving, I knew it was time to be sincere about what I’d let myself dissolve into. I’d been nothing but a liar. I lied to my family at our weekly dinners — “What’s new?” “Oh, work is great; I’m saving up to do some traveling this summer with friends.” I’d quit my job in a moment of fierce boredom and I didn’t have loose change for travel. I lied to my friends about my propinquity for painkillers — “No thanks, I don’t do them,” in the same breath I’d be sneaking off to the bathroom to funnel a few. I lied to my therapist, and canceled most of our appointments, only showing up when I felt she was on the verge of notifying my parents. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m doing really good, just a glass of wine with dinner sometimes, no parties and no pills, no stealing, no abusive relationships, no recklessly driving donuts in the middle of the highway, no none of that.
I met with my therapist the next day and let myself unravel. It came only as a result of my severe distress and her persistent coaxing. The most important thing in my life had been keeping my desire to self-destruct at arm’s length from anyone else. There was nothing more paramount to me than shielding my parents from the whole gory truth, ensuring my friends only saw my camera-ready sweet side, that nobody ever bear witness to the self-medication I’d prescribed.
Forty-five minutes into our session, she told me it’s possible, based on the behavior I’d described, that I’d been misdiagnosed for a second time. I might be bipolar, but it also seemed apparent that I had borderline personality disorder. I was aware of both disorders and their frequent misdiagnosis based on their overlapping symptoms, but it hadn’t ever occurred to me that I might have been part of that misdiagnosed statistic.
Livid, I bee-lined for the door. I felt sudden, intense disdain for this woman I had trusted with my well-being, who had coached and encouraged me for years, all through the unforgivable veil of a false diagnosis. She explained to me why she felt the shift. She ran her mouth up and down the diagnostic checklist, looking to me for traits I recognized.
While bipolar and borderline share many of the same traits: distorted self-image, bursts of emotions, unpredictable moods, and instability in relationships, there are also very defining characteristics unique to borderline, such as this pointed little inconvenience: a chronic fear of abandonment. An individual with bipolar will experience mood swings in response to situational influences, but mostly it’s an internal shift of brain chemistry:
“The true bipolar has mood swings that are to some extent affected by situational events, but are largely a matter of problems with internal regulation of mood that probably has a biochemical basis, and often occur uncontrolled…The borderline mood swings are very directly related to situational events and particularly events that are occurring within relationships” (Reiss, 2015).
And there’s the clincher. My unpredictability was often in conjunction with the upheavals of my relationships. The paranoid fret I’d endure believing my friends didn’t like me, the inclination to date a fiery, abusive boy because I thought it made me more stable — when it really just compelled me to package it in even more — until I was heaving my hands into the fire. The desire to destruct immediately following a conflict: “he hates me, I’ll get wasted.” Individuals with borderline are often written off because their symptoms do not frequently manifest in the beginning stages of a relationship, but instead rear their ghoulish facade when feelings deepen and individuals grow to depend on their partner, and feel weakened by this dependency while simultaneously clinging to it.
Unfortunately, while conversations regarding an individual plagued by bipolar are increasingly common in today’s realm, the insight on borderline remains scant and marginalized. Because borderline is a personality disorder, it’s easy to relegate these people to simply being lousy, tumultuous, and emotionally immature as a trait. It is (erroneously) widely believed that borderline is a disorder accrued through an individual “personality” proclivity in childhood and not at all inheritable.
This is not true.
While environmental influence does contribute to borderline’s onset (with a tragically high number of borderline patients having experienced childhood trauma), it is not necessarily the ringleader of its development. An unusually enthusiastic amygdala, the key regulator of emotions in the brain is, at least in large part, responsible for the heightened emotional reactions that are a borderline individual’s all-consuming nuisance. It is possible that being born with the genetic predisposition of a hyper-sensitive amygdala, and then later confronting childhood difficulties and abuse create the perfect poison for this disorder’s evolution, but abuse does not exist in all cases.
I have been told, since my diagnosis and subsequent decision to be open about it, that I must have the emotional capacity of a three-year-old. Throwing tantrums and manipulating others into my clutches must be my native arena. It goes without question that hurting others is my prime pastime, and that love, in my book, must be harmonious with emotional abuse. There are those with borderline who do indeed seek shelter in these unfortunate habits. These are the people who have been deprived of the opportunity to receive help, to learn about themselves and become aware of why it is they feel compelled to rip into their own skin, to secretly take trips to the bathroom to guzzle Tequila, to look upon other people with bedazzled eyes only to find them exuding cancerous bile the next. It’s confusing. It’s a sad, sorry attempt to grab onto everything beautiful while also willing it dead.
While everyone is responsible for their actions, the conflicted interior life of the beautiful borderline person should be taken into account. We are not monsters. We are often orienting in worlds that seem to have no focal point, no ‘self’ — we are petrified of losing the things and people we love so much so that we usually wind up losing them. But this isn’t a hopeless state of being. With the right therapy, Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), only a small sliver of us diagnosed in our late teens and early twenties will meet the diagnostic criteria for borderline by middle-age. DBT is a type of therapy that zeroes in on teaching people about emotion regulation and how to cultivate cognitive control over behavioral patterns. The psychologist geared toward this therapy will educate on emotion-control techniques and potentially prescribe medication to help regulate possibly triggering and difficult anxiety and depression problems. In Borderline Personality Disorder, the DBT and therapy is primary, whereas with Bipolar Disorder, the medications are necessary and augmented with other types of talk-therapy, such as Cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT.
Therapy is not a cure-all. And it might take a long time to get there. It took me six years of emotional mayhem to find my fist rapping at the door, finally ready set the weight of it all down. Being honest was the hardest, most hurtful hurdle. I didn’t want to listen to myself spout all the ugly bits I’d rejected acknowledging on my own. The ways I’d hurt myself, the ersatz abuse I nicknamed love, the disregard for what would happen when the sun met the pavement and the wine was all drunk and the alarm clock rang. I couldn’t meet my therapist’s eyes, or even her shins. Not when I entered the room and not when I finished mumbling and stuttering out my truths. But there is never a shortage of compassion for the people who seek change, who can drop to their knees and eke out the gaps and find there is room to stretch. The demagogue of self-defeat can be reigned in, destroyed with time and (albeit cliched but effective) a hearty tryst with self-love.
If you need help or you are worried about someone in your life, you can always contact The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline for help.
Image was from Morguefile.com
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