          Before I was diagnosed with BPD I had started talk therapy in 2016 when I was living in Dallas at the time. I had a really bad depressive episode that woke me up and told me that it's time I started talking to someone. I've gone through a lot in my life I'm sober now for 7 years, and it seems like everything I've been doing to try and take care of myself up until my BPD diagnosis has led to me being able to cope with it. 
          I was diagnosed with high depression and anxiety, when I first started talk therapy in 2016. In the summer of 2019 I had a gut sinking feeling that there was something else there. I thought to myself you know it could be one of so many things but the only thing that matters is that I get a diagnosis and I go from there.
         I was then diagnosed later that year with BPD traits and PTSD. To receive a BPD diagnosis I had to score a minimum of 32 and I got a 29. I have a lot of the visible BPD symptoms and it's been a struggle and we're currently looking on getting me on a mood stabilizer that won't affect my mental clarity so I can still maintain the work and progress I've done. 
         In dealing with sobriety and mental health, I have told people something that I constantly tell myself that motivates me. "It's never going to be easy but it will always get easier " and that's something I wholeheartedly agree with. We have to learn to be malleable and adaptable, because of what I did in my earlier life that and resiliency were tools that I had honed in on that helped me get a grip of my mental health disorders. 
         I have a willingness to want to get better and hopefulness that I can get better. That doesn't mean that I know there will be rough spots, I fully accept that there are days and there are going to be moments where I feel like shit. And that's perfectly okay it is not a setback, I have not failed, I have not lost all my progress. 
       I've seen a lot of post talking about how they aren't diagnosed and don't feel like diagnosis is important. The diagnosis was really important for me, because it helped validate what I was feeling. Regardless of what I would have gotten diagnosed as it would have validated the feeling that I was having which was telling me that there was something else there that wasn't just depression and anxiety.  And a lot of the people who are struggling with therapist, psychiatrist, and doctors who don't agree with the BPD diagnosis I am so sorry that you have to deal with that. But you have to continue to try and find someone who works with identity disorders or personality disorders. BPD isn't new to the DSM, but it is difficult to diagnose. 
     A doctor once said that the problem would BPD is you could have two clients one who grew up in the perfect environment to produce someone with all of the qualifying factors for BPD, and you could have someone who grew up in an environment that only met two of the factors to produce someone with BPD and this would be the individual with BPD. 
   BPD is difficult to diagnose because it has so many different ways that it's looked at. It's not so much a personality disorder as much as it is an identity disorder and the very amount of comorbidities that can be seen with BPD make it so difficult to diagnose. My full mental health diagnosis is ADD, BPD, high depression, anxiety, and PTSD. The way BPD causes me to react and respond to my environment can look a lot like my PTSD, and high depression. Luckily I'm someone with a great level of self-awareness, and understanding so going through talk therapy for the last almost 6 years has really helped me understand and differentiate what I'm experiencing. I'm also lucky enough to be able to have the access to things like DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) that I might be attending later this year. 
       With DBT it's such a great tool because it helps people with BPD understand the emotions understand how they experience them. it helps people with BPD by just helping them understand what it is they're going through.