I had a violent, emotionally invalidating, performance-intensive, spartan warrior childhood. I was restricted from forming an independent identity in every possible way. 

I fought my way out, went to college, then ran away from home after a violent incident.

When I sought help from the mental health professionals they told me I could trust them, then locked me in a ward and cut off contact from me, never returned my calls or pleas for help or an explanation. Being tricked into getting locked up made me very, very upset. I did not believe in medication. These two factors got me diagnosed with BPD.

'Friends' of mine made promises to help me out and declared love and undying loyalty. Convinced me to take a chance and move to a different city to be closer to their support.
then they left me stranded. did not spend time with me. acted emotionally withholding when I needed to cry and feel safe. Told me that my behavior was making them uncomfortable and then ghosted me. complained extensively about their own problems and told me I wasn't doing enough to be a good friend to them.

I became very angry. I self harmed. I smoked pot to deal with the emptiness inside. I made increasingly frantic efforts to get my 'friends' to just make human contact, or let me hear their voice over the phone, or send more than a five word text. I started to lose my patience and became upset at being ignored for weeks at a time. They started treating me as if I were toxic.

I broke. Shattered. I was a blithering idiot when my old high school friends practically airlifted me to safety. For the next year I screamed, I cried, I had nightmares and flashbacks, auditory hallucinations. But this time my people were with me, and stayed with me. Made time. Included me in their normal lives.

Then I got better. Then I realized I was a deeply empathetic person who was very easy to get along with, a very low-maintenance person who is readily satisfied with life.

Because it turns out i WAS the biggest victim and I WAS being abandoned, and everyone I was speaking to severely lacked empathy, and projected that onto me, then blamed me for being such a victim. My identity was being constantly rewritten by authority figures, who accused my of 'black and white thinking' simply when I disagreed with them. I'd been told how to think, how to act, how to feel, what to need, what to be every step of my life. And in returned I got the cold frigid silence of never feeling loved, or listened to, or treated like the person I try to behave and present myself as.

So I started listening to the PARANOIA(they tried to trick me into thinking this was mental illness too). the PARANOIA showed me that I need to kick almost everyone I've known completely out of my life.

And I've made new friends and family. I have volunteer work. Soon hopefully I will have a job. No BPD symptoms. zero. My relationships are super stable, communicating is easy, rifts mend quickly and love and attachment are consistent. Very boring. Very drama free.

*So I am finally in a place where I feel like I can make an assessment of what my BPD diagnosis means to me:* 

Three years ago I entered a kind of special hell that actually felt worse than suicidal despair, which I didn't think was possible. Just smh in disbelief at the insane farce of it all. I was lost in an entire COMMUNITY of socially fucked up people. Obviously I'm not a perfect person and i have my share of demons, but i didn't deserve to be treated that way just because bad things happened to me and I had strong emotions about it. i didn't deserved to be lectured on my 'negative attention seeking behavior' or my 'victim-playing' or 'irrational impulses and explosive temper' which basically adds up to "your problems and feelings are manufactured to manipulate me into feeding your neediness", which is a deeply fucked up thing to communicate to somebody who is trying to escape a severely abusive family and has no support system in place.

So personally, the 'cure' for my 'BPD' was just surrounding myself with people who don't tell me I'm crazy. Almost 18 months have gone by since I've decided I'm not always the problem, and life is only getting better.
