I've had behavioral issues since I was a young kid, along with off and on depression and anxiety. I've been to multiple psychiatrists over the years because of these issues and most of the time I was diagnosed with some combination of bipolar, general anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder and ADHD. I assumed for a long time that I did have bipolar and an anxiety disorder, mostly because I had virtually no knowledge of personality disorders. 

I stayed in trouble at school when I was younger and I routinely behaved in inappropriate ways but other than being in trouble often, I was mostly a normal kid. It was in my late teens and especially my 20s when things took a really dark turn. I gradually felt like I was losing control over my own mind. My emotions were all over the place and nearly impossible to control, my anger was becoming more and more explosive and I would basically throw tantrums in the form of screaming and breaking things. I couldn't hold a job for very long, I've had around 15 jobs since 2005. I experienced periods of severe depression along with anxiety that got worse with each passing year. I turned to alcohol, weed and benzos to try and numb the constant mental pain I was experiencing. Of course, I just ended up abusing all of those things which made my life far worse. I had multiple car wrecks in the past because of reckless, intoxicated driving. One of those car wrecks nearly killed me. I developed a gambling addiction that I have only just recently gotten under control. I've made a thousand terrible, impulsive decisions over the years, some of which will haunt me for the rest of my life. This is just a very short explanation of my life, it isn't even close to being exhaustive. 

What has me livid though is I've told multiple mental health professionals about these things and they all failed to grasp what was really wrong with me. I knew they were missing something. I spent a long time reading about various mental disorders, especially the ones I supposedly had. I learned pretty much everything you could possibly know about bipolar and that's why I knew my doctors and counselors had made a mistake. I knew that something was seriously wrong with my thinking patterns and my personality. So I started researching personality disorders and I had some symptoms of a bunch of them but none of them seemed like they fully explained my situation until I read about borderline personality disorder. Once I read through all of the symptoms, I said to myself, "this is it." I knew that I had finally figured out what was wrong with me. I had most of the symptoms but the one that absolutely made me realize I had BPD was the unstable sense of self. I knew for years that my personality and my thinking patterns were in constant flux, I was in a neverending state of confusion about who I truly was but I was never able to properly describe how I was feeling to anyone. I knew that I had serious problems, I knew the way I felt and thought wasn't normal, and not knowing what was behind all of this terrified me. In a way it was a relief to figure out what I was suffering with, just so I wouldn't have to keep wondering.

Armed with this new knowledge, I went to my most recent psychiatrist and explained that I felt I had been wrongly diagnosed and instead of being bipolar, I actually had BPD. After a few lengthy discussions, he agreed with me that I in fact had BPD. I was glad to finally have the proper diagnosis after all these years but it also caused me to lose faith in my doctor and the mental health system in general. I couldn't believe that I myself had to be the one to figure all of this out. So while I'm glad to finally have an answer, I'm also pretty angry over the entire situation. If I had been properly diagnosed sooner, maybe my life wouldn't be a total trainwreck. 

Anyway, I'm just here to connect with others who are in a similar situation. I have pretty much nobody in real life who I can talk to about this stuff. I've ran a lot of people off and I've also cut a lot of people off and at this point a lot of them just think I'm crazy.