TLDR Intro; I think my personal account will be able to help people who are in the same situation I am in because posts like this got me to start recovery and have helped me get through some hard times and large doubts so I wanted to share it. 

Trigger Warning: Self harm and eating difficulties 

So generally I haven’t had therapy and I haven’t had a diagnosis yet but I’m waiting for it. However in the meantime I’ve been reading up on mental health for a long time and recently I’ve started to look into bpd over the course of the past couple months while I wait for treatment and an assessment. 
So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I accept that I don’t know for sure that I have bpd but thinking that I do has made it easier to cope with and I feel I have made so much progress. 
I started to write a message in the notes of my phone to explain how I think bpd apples to me so I could explain it to a friend and relieve the anxiety of explaining it to my therapist. 
So then an hour later I got to 2,000 words because I’ve been feeling so clear headed with the progress I’m making and I felt like I should share it. 
When I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me, it was posts of people’s personal accounts which helped me to push myself through getting better and I’m hoping I can repay the favour. 

Here it is;

So the mental disorder that I think I have is called borderline personality disorder 
It’s a result of childhood trauma/neglect that I faced that causes an unstable limbic system in the brain and messes around with the intensity of the emotion that I feel. 
Usually with this people tend to have huge anger problems which cause them to lash out and abuse people which is why I’m initially worried about telling people because it has a bad reputation from that. 

But for me it’s a case of as a defence mechanism because I can’t take the intense emotions that I feel my brain shuts them off, but I still feel them on some level and they influence my decisions but I just don’t know that they’re there at all. 
So often I’ll feel intense emotional reactions to small in the moment things but when it comes to large events I just shut off completely and I tend to disassociate where it feels like I kinda leave reality and life doesn’t feel real. 
Because of the disconnect as well unless people are in front of you it doesn’t feel like they exist a lot of the time because you can barely feel what’s in front of you. This is how my body learned to deal with the trauma I faced and it continued to happen once the trauma was gone (kinda like an emotional version of how the immune system defeats a virus and then keeps the antibodies dormant to fight it if it ever comes back, but my limbic system sends me off constantly at anything perceived to be the slightest threat). 

When I’m like that I can’t feel any emotion behind what I’m doing so I’m constantly getting anxiety about whether I’m doing things because I’m manipulative or whether I’m doing things because I’m a good person and because of the intense emotions I feel, bad things that people say stick with me so I started to believe that I was this awful manipulative person who people only liked because he was controlling them. 
So like as an example if I was to tell someone that something they did upset me, I’d get anxiety about whether I was telling them that to manipulate them into doing what I wanted or if I was just expressing my emotions because I was hurt. 

Because of the anxiety and the disconnect from everything around me I started to believe that I was on a weird different level to the other children around me because I had experienced a lot of strong emotion when had sped up my emotional development and because of the trauma I experienced I’m naturally on guard for any sign that someone is acting in any way that would suggest any kind of negative emotion so that I can protect myself from experiencing that trauma again. 
Because of that I get very anxious when I detect any unexplained change in mood or body language (like it can be the slightest change in someone’s voice when they’re anxious that I notice) and because of the defence mechanism (because my bpd brain will tell me that it’s my fault) I start to shut myself off to avoid being abandoned by the people around me and I overreact or begin to convince myself that there is a reason that this person shouldn’t be in my life so I can abandon them rather than them abandon me. 

Like one of the biggest symptoms is the fear of abandonment, it’s one of the most intense and persistent feelings I can experience and it sets my anxiety off in an instant and I would go to any end to avoid feeling it, but I couldn’t tell that I was doing that at all because I shut my emotional brain off. 

The trauma and disassociation cause big difficulty in being able to have a solid body image, so because of the negative thinking patterns and the feelings of guilt and that everything is my fault (because I could’ve helped because of my heightened sense to know what was happening and I could have done something more and that’s how the anxiety works for me) I always tend to err on the negative which has led to me not eating properly and exercising to drastically lose weight and gain muscle. 
I was already at a healthy bmi and I dropped 10kg in about 5 months by starving and over exercising myself and now I’m about 1 bmi point from being underweight (but I mainly think that’s because of the muscle gain that it’s not drastically lower because I’ve gone days without eating). 

But because of the disconnect from my body, to feel pain is a good feeling because it grounds me into an emotionally numb but present state. So to starve myself was easy, because the pain helps more than it hurts initially, until the hunger numbs and then you only eat when you feel lightheaded or because people expect you to and now I don’t really feel much hunger any more and eat about two small meals a day (but mainly because I’m trying to). 
Because pain grounds me when I get to a really numbed state (because of the heightened emotion), the disassociation becomes too intense and I need to be grounded to feel okay again so I resort to inflicting pain in myself. 
This mainly manifested in self harm for a while until I felt depressed for a while but I wasn’t stressed so I could cope without it for a few years and I stopped because of the guilt that it made people feel worried about me and I felt guilty about enjoying the attention that it would bring. 

Recently my life got quite stressful so I begun to get to that state again and I started exercising and overworking myself until I couldn’t move anymore to feel better. 
I recently self harmed, initially to make sure that if I got to the point where I needed to do it, I wasn’t out of practice and I could do it in a controlled sterile environment because some part of me knew I was having a breakdown and then I could treat the wounds so I felt like I could explain it people without them worrying that it was to cause harm to myself. 
And then I had another break recently where I clawed at my skin and cut myself. 
But generally now I use exercise to ground myself when I’m feeling bad. 

Because I feel so disconnected from my body and I’m constantly anxious about everything; it was a case of I couldn’t tell what my favourite colour was, whether I like someone, if I wanted to kill myself or not and that all creates a lot of stress and anxiety in me but I’m teaching myself how to read my own body language and get a bit more of a stable self image so I can understand how I’m feeling in a situation and I won’t have to be constantly worrying about what my intentions are and who I am. 

Also because of the intense emotion that I feel at things, I’ve always assumed that everyone else felt the same way and felt (what I didn’t realise was) anxiety like I did, so I could understand people when they’re feeling hard emotions but when they’re in a normal state I don’t understand how that feels to them so I assume their intentions based on how my brain works and that causes a big disconnect distancing and anxiety. 

The other thing with the intense emotion is it means it’s difficult for me to hold a level headed opinion when I’m emotional so I tend to flip between extreme love and hate with things and people. 
Like if I feel like someone’s mad at me, I’ll think that they absolutely hate me and the emotion and anxiety will lead me down a negative thought pattern where I think that they hate everything about me and I start to distance myself. 

For a long time I couldn’t deal with the thought of knowing that relationships with people had broken down and because i felt like I was on a different level of emotional understanding to avoid feeling that guilt I developed a level of narcissism to my personality so I didn’t have to take responsibility. 
I also am often too anxious about upsetting people that I can’t think straight and I upset them  by accident or I lie to them and feel intense guilt from it. 

So now I’ve realised this I’m trying to get out of all of the bad habits that I’ve naturally learned to cope with all this and learning to deal with my life. 
Like to deal with the anxiety I became dependant on smoking weed at one point because the universal feeling of each weed strain is that you are still anxious and thinking about things but it removes the emotional hit that it gives out. 
And because of the emotional stress that my body is feeling but my head isn’t, I can’t ever figure out how to relax naturally and smoking it helps me to relieve the emotional stress that I feel until I learn how to cope with it. 
I do feel like I’m at the stage where I’m not dependant on weed anymore and I have a healthy recreational use and at the moment it is a very easy way for me to feel better without causing much long term damage to myself so at the moment I don’t have much intention of giving it up because I do feel like there are a lot of other benefits to it like putting me in touch with the feelings in my body so I can properly experience things or feel music more intensely. Although it will be a case of I wouldn’t want to make a judgement on it until I have a healthyish mind. 
Initially it was a problem for my mental health until I understood the emotional hangover that it causes and could establish that that was not a part of my mental health and it didn’t cloud my judgement. 

There are a few other thing that I haven’t been able to sort out because of a mixture of being taken care by and being dependant on other people and being too depressed to learn. I’m terrible with routines because I never learned  with anything that didn’t give instant gratification because of the neglect I experienced and now I’m having to learn as an adult. 

So that’s me in a short messed up little essay but I’m getting better and I feel like I’m making lots of progress because I can feel it in my soul that I’m right about this and at this stage I just need an educated opinion on what they think of my diagnosis so that I can solidify it with physical evidence (and the anxiety won’t convince me that there’s nothing actually wrong with me which is my main issue atm, that in my head I don’t really feel like there’s an issue with me because I’m numb a lot of the time and the anxiety convinces me that I’m just an arsehole who can’t control himself (which shows what lengths my anxiety will take me to considering everything I’ve just written)) and then I can learn from them how to deal with it. 

So generally I feel positive atm because it feels like the first time that I’ve felt clear in my entire memory and I feel like I’ve found the missing puzzle piece when it comes to communicating with people (thought I was autistic at one point) and I don’t feel as lonely all the time. Because before it felt like I could never let anyone see any flaw in my character because they would start to dislike me but now I’m learning that it’s okay to be flawed and it’s okay to be weird just learn how to live with it around people. 

I don’t know if this is borderline personality disorder but thinking that it has has helped me get a hold of my mind and I wanted to post this so that if anyone can relate to the patterns or start to see them in themselves they can use this post (like I had used in the past) to convince themselves that there is an issue that needs to be addressed and fight back the anxious “you’re just tying to give an excuse for your shitty behaviour” “everyone deals with what you deal with, you relate to them on every level apart form being able to handle life” but when you’re better it’s not like you lose your comfort zone and the protective abilities, it’s that you learn how to expand that comfort zone and you learn how to use and control those abilities to live your life properly and honestly it’s so liberating. I feel enlightened and I feel like I finally have some control. 

There is so much hope and you can get better. It’s scary and you’ll have to face your trauma but once you’ve got through it, the world is your oyster and you’ve developed all these controllable mental abilities to help through stressful situations and keep yourself level headed. 