CW: mentions of suicide attemts, self harm

I was told a few days ago and I just needed to get these thoughts out somewhere, so I thought that this was the best place to do it. If its not or I'm breaking any rules, let me know and I'll remove it.

I'm currently on my fifth hospitalization, first time on an adult unit. My second day here my doc started asking me if I thought I was angry. I get frustrated and irritable, but its always contained. I never express it to anybody else because I know its not their fault. I wondered why she asked me that? I already had my diagnoses: major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder, with a touch of OCD and ADD for spice. And one of the hospitals I was at told me the times I didn't know what was going on, couldn't talk, couldn't move, were just absence seizures. Nothing that had to do with anger.

About a week and a half after I got here the fire alarm went off at night after we had gone to bed. Since it's a locked unit we had to wait in the dining room until we absolutely had to leave. I've never liked loud noises (I also have an auditory processing disorder) but I've always been able to remove myself from the situation before I shut down. They handed out ear plugs to the patients but it wasn't enough for me. I shut down.

After I became aware of what was going on again, before I was verbal, staff explained that they thought I'd dissociated for about 20 minutes. Did I want to do an ice dive? Did I need a weighted blanket? How about peeling a frozen orange? Since I couldn't talk, I couldn't tell them that I didn't dissociate, I had an absence seizure. Their certainty without my input made me wonder if maybe they were right? The seizures all had psychological triggers and I never had them as a child, plus there were times, sometimes for days on end, where nothing felt quite real. It felt like I was walking around in a dream. Sometimes I'd cut just to feel something, anything.

I really only started dissociating when I was at IRTP and they basically left me alone while it happened, sometimes for hours, and just had a staff watching me to make sure nothing bad happened. After I came back around they just let me go to my room to deal with it on my own. They were kind of a chain reaction and if I didnt keep myself busy it would happen again. I figured out that if I kept myself busy, I could keep it at bay. Watch a movie while making origami, listen to an audiobook while making a puzzle, anything that kept my hands and mind occupied. What the staff here suggested, especially ice dives, helped. If I didnt stay busy, it would still happen again, but it took less to keep myself occupied. 

Then, two days ago, my doctor gave me a packet. "Read it," she told me. "Mark anything that seems like you."

The cover page said "A BPD Breif, An Introduction to Borderline Personality Disorder, Diagnosis, Origins, Course, and Treatment." What a catchy title. When I started reading it I was hesitant. That couldn't be me. I knew what BPD looked like. A few of my best friends in hospitals had it and they were loud, something small could set them off and they'd be shouting, throwing things, punching walls. That wasn't me. 

Reading through the first page: DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic Criteria. 
1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. I wouldn't say my efforts are necessarily *frantic* but I do try to keep people from leaving me, even if consciously I know they aren't.
2. A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. Check.
3. Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image and sense of self. Check. Even the way I talk is completely dependent on who I'm with.
4. Impulsively in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating). Check on sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating.
5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior. Big check. I've lost track of the number of times I've tried to kill myself and I've been a cutter for years.
6. Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphagia, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days). Check.
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness. Check. Whenever someone asks me what I'm feeling, I usually have to search for some emotion that I'm feeling a tiny bit because I know that "nothing" isn't the kind of answer they're looking for.
8. Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights). This one I'm hesitant to check off. I feel angry and little things make me disproportionately angry, but I always contain it. The worst I can remember doing in a fit of rage was slamming my door, and that's only happened once. I'll say half check.
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms. Check. That explains my absence seizures that aren't actually absence seizures.

Looking at that list, and exactly how well it describes me, it makes me more pissed than anything. Why did it take 5 hospitalizations, the longest of which was 13 months and DMH stepped in and sent me to a state hospital, for someone to finally put two and two together and realize that I have BPD. Meds have never helped, which can be explained by my having BPD. I've lost track of all the meds I've been given, but new doctors are always shocked when they get my medical history. My doctor at a hospital I was at for 3 months *told* my parents that he had no idea what was wrong with me and nothing he tried worked. The signs were all right there. If he had made the connection 5 years ago, I wouldn't be in this hospital right now. I could've started intensive DBT and learned to manage it. Instead, I had to wait years, silently dealing with it because if I told anyone how bad I was I'd get hospitalized again. Once I started a new therapist and decided I would be completely honest in my answers to her questions. I didn't offer up any information that she didn't directly  ask for, but she still ended the appointment within 15 minutes and told my mom to take me to the ER to wait for a bed and not even let me go home to pack. I learned my lesson: be honest, but not too honest, or else the choice to be hospitalized gets taken out of your hands, even though I knew I could keep myself mostly safe.

5 years went by between my 13 month hospitalization and my current one. I dealt with everything to the best of my ability. Then, my second day here, my doc started to put it together. She figured out in five minutes what my therapist and psychiatrist couldnt figure out in five years. Once she told me, I started to research, and it all made sense. I even joined r/BPDmemes and felt like my soul was being attacked (in a good way). I mentioned it to my ex and he agreed. It even gave a reason for a lot of the issues in our relationship.

This is kind of a long winded story, but I needed to get it out. I'm not really a writer and I can kinda ramble on but I wanted to thank everyone who read this far.