I've been in therapy for months now and looking back my therapist has been easing me gently into discussing this with me for weeks. I'm not depressed, I don't just have an eating disorder, I amn't solely anxious and moody. I have bpd. 

This morning I wake at 5.15am. It seemed like I fell out of sleep every time I moved last night, my body fizzled with an energy that was hard to shake. I could no longer lie in bed the closer it got to the alarm going off. So I sit here now in front of the stove trying to tell myself that I won’t always feel like this and that there’s a reasonable explanation for why I feel like this. Trying to tell myself that I'm not a monster.

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I grew up with a loving mother who tried to bully me into an image of her perfect child. I spent years without a stable home after my parents split up, packing and unpacking the ever-diminishing set of possessions we owned through each successive house. The older I got the more independence I sought and the worse my relationship with my mother became. The later years of my childhood were spent in abject misery, crying hard into a pillow every day from an engulfing sadness and anger at yet another unjustified fight with a woman who has never once apologised. 

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I lost whatever self I had in my first boyfriend. An academic scholarship was my first liferaft that promised me something solely for myself and the freedom it brought promised me the escape I had always dreamt of. Unfortunately the attention of someone new in my college course was my second liferaft, and I clambered hastily aboard trying not to sink after scuppering my first relationship. I’ve given too much of myself to these men. I’ve loved them so hard they’ve been consumed. I’ve denied them a normal sexual relationship out of body shame and a wrongly-held belief that if they truly loved me they wouldn’t need sex to stay with me. I used sex to draw them in and once I had them both I withdrew into the comfort of platonic love. 

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Both of them established themselves as my main carers and in doing so fell into my trap. It comes as no surprise that repeated itself when my second boyfriend broke up with me just as my first boyfriend had, citing needing to be alone and to find himself again only to come back begging for me to let them return. No one loves as fiercely as I do, and they both missed it. My first boyfriend cried down the phone to me in the early hours of the morning. My second wrote me a heartfelt letter. I took them both back because without them I am empty. 

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I was nothing short of emotionally manipulative with my first boyfriend. I cried silently in the car on the way home one night as his sister dropped me off one night, sitting in the backseat behind the both of them. It was her birthday and I wanted him to come home with me so I sat there with enticing tears pouring down my cheeks until I got my way. His infidelity and secret messages to other girls only whipped up the high winds of my stormy emotions. I would lie awake all night in agony at the thought that he wasn’t texting me back. I would ring him crying hard down the phone, desperate for him to come running to me and hold me and soothe me. 

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Being with me is an escape down a dark tunnel of comfort and obsessive love.