I know that a big part of BPD is having an unstable sense of self, and I definitely get that. I don’t feel like I know who I am, what I like, what I believe in, etc. I tend to become interested in things that the people around me are interested in, except for the occasions where I become completely obsessed with an obscure topic for a few days, weeks, or months before moving on. 

But I’ve also noticed that I feel the whole unstable sense of self in how I physically look as well. I’ve struggled with low self esteem and hating how I look and my body for basically my entire life. (TW: ED) This started becoming a problem for me in high school (~4 years ago) and I’ve lost probably at least 40 pounds total since then solely from essentially starving myself for long periods of time on and off for the last few years. As I’m sure many of you can relate, I’ve also drastically altered my appearance several times (changing my hair, tattoos, piercings, changing my style, etc). 

I would say that I’m pretty obsessed or at least very fixated on how I look, and usually not in a self-admiring way. I could look at myself in the mirror for hours studying what I find wrong with what I see at that time. Sure, there are also times when I really like how I look and I feel like compliments I receive are actually true, but it’s not a majority of the time. I want people to admire me and find me beautiful, and depending on what kind of emotional phase I’m in at any given time (it changes a lot lol) I can put a lot of effort into trying to control how people perceive me physically, and I can spend a lot of time thinking about what I look like to other people.  

I guess what I’m getting at is that I don’t really feel a connection to who I am physically. Obviously I know what I objectively look like, but my evaluation of that is constantly changing. Sometimes when I look at my face in the mirror I think I dissociate because I can’t seem to connect to the fact that the person staring back at me is ME. That is what I look like walking around in the world, that is the person and face that my friends and family see when I interact with them, that is what I look like. Which I know is very obvious, but I just feel disconnected from it. It’s like I recognize my basic physical identity in how I look, but I don’t recognize MYSELF as in who I am as a person in that form. I’m sure that’s also one of the reasons why I change how I look so often. 

I don’t know if this is a BPD thing, but DAE get this sort of thing? 

I literally have no idea if that made any sense. I’ve been in a weird and kinda bad place today and I’m not sure if my thoughts make sense. So if you’ve made it this far, thanks for coming to my TED talk