Disclaimer: since my childhood, I’ve always been a hypochondriac. For 2 years in middle school I thought I was dying of testicular cancer. Lately, I’ve evolved into diagnosing myself with mental illnesses, mainly BPD.

Growing up, my parents divorced when I was 5 and my mom was often depressed and an alcoholic. She worked so hard at a shitty job, and that combined with being a single mom just drained her. I would say i grew up neglected. The apartment was a mess, sometimes there was no food (mostly when I was in high school), and it was a bit of a shithole apartment. As I got older though, I had a lot of freedom, which was nice. My basic needs were usually met, but beyond that, she just didn’t have the energy I think. When I turned 18, I joined the navy in an act of rebellion in order to escape and try to get my life together. Growing up though, I rarely had meaningful interactions with my mom, only saw my dad a couple times a year. My dad is a doctor and is always paranoid about every mole being a tumor, so I think that, and not having any meaningful medical or dental care as a child (I was never seriously ill though) is where my health anxiety comes from. 

I’ve always been anxious. Never panicky, but just a near constant low level worry. Sometimes it’s about day to day stuff like work or school or bills, sometimes it’s irrational like worrying about my gf cheating on me with her guy friends. I’ve had 2 depressive episodes, one when I was 18 after my first serious girlfriend and I broke up, and another when I was 22 after my mom died, and bouts of mild depression in between. During both depressions I turned to alcohol, was generally a miserable person to be around, and during the second one, I had a lot of suicidal ideation but never attempted and I eventually got some therapy, and with meds, it receded. I also lashed out a lot at my friends, and pushed them away. After the second depression, I drastically cut back on my drinking. Before, I was going out with friends and getting smashed at the bars or house parties every weekend, and after, I have maybe 3 drinks total per week. The past year and a half, i smoked weed almost daily but quit 2 months ago because it stopped being enjoyable.... I started getting bad panic attacks while smoking, and I realized it was such a waste of time. Smoking all the time made me feel like shit, but it felt good when it wasn’t freaking me out. However, I have no intention of going back to weed.

I find that my relationship with my girlfriend of 3 years can be quite unstable. We love each other very much, but our emotions are quite intertwined, and sometimes we trigger each other. In the beginning, you could probably have described her as borderline... extreme jealousy, controlling when it came to who I could see (female friends and stuff), rapid mood swings, grandiose gestures like packing her suitcase and marching down the sidewalk because she didn’t want to go to the last night of a music festival, disordered eating, being overly flirtatious and cheating (ok, not really cheating, but she kissed another guy a month after we started dating and then kept talking to him for 2 years despite my objections) threatening to leave, saying really hurtful things during fights... it made me feel crazy. 

But now, she’s gotten a lot better this past year and a half or so. It feels like the roles of switched. I feel like I’m the irritable one, lashing out, accusing her of infidelity without real grounds (she kissed a guy a month into our relationship.... haven’t really gotten over it, and she triangulated sometimes with new guys on the periphery... but maybe I’m projecting). I find myself having a low tolerance for stress in the relationship.  I’m in university now, and I can handle the stress from school sometimes, but relationship stresses really set me off and I feel like I have an unreasonably angry or anxious response to little things. Lastnight she was upset, and I assumed it was because she was mad at me with no evidence and proceeded into full on meltdown mode. I cycled from blaming myself to being angry at her to accusing her of wanting to leave me, and all these really irrational things. I felt nuts. I feel like I used to be the calm, steady, and collected one earlier in the relationship, and now she’s taken on that role and I’m the needy, crazy, codependent. Before her, I had a social life, then I gave it up to reassure her, and now I feel stuck in a power struggle that I’ve already lost.

Also, I have low self esteem in general. It’s not something that you would think of you knew me, but people who are close, like my girlfriend, know. I hide it pretty well because I am outwardly outgoing but there’s a lot of inner turmoil and self loathing. My identity is fairly stable though, I want to finish my degree in linguistics and then go to grad school for speech therapy. Also I’ve really curbed my reckless behavior, and I’m usually pretty self aware (hyper aware sometimes). As for derealization/depersonalization, i feel that way usually just when stressed. For self harm, during my second depressive episode I tried cutting but it was mostly because I was trying to convince myself I had bpd. I know, it sounds crazy, but I was super depressed. And sometimes during intense fights with my girlfriend, if she says something hurtful I’ll hit the top of my head..... yeah, nuts...

I’ve never had any problems in school, my grades have always been good. As for work, my only real job was serving 5 years in the navy, and no disciplinary issues there, although I ran into some problems during my second depressive episode but I feel like that’s kind of understandable given my mother’s unexpected death, our troubled relationship, and the realization I would never be able to fix things between us like I had hoped. 

Am I BPD? A some other kind of basket case? Just a raging hypochondriac? This is all weighing very heavily on me right now.