I started DBT in April 2017. A month or two before that was when I started really learning more about borderline and accepting that this is how my brain works. It was exciting and relieving and intense and awful to discover how much I classically fit this diagnosis. Exciting and relieving because (like everyone else here) I finally had a name for it, an explanation for it, and treatment options. Intense because I began reframing my entire life and my relationships as I started to understand the disorder. Awful because I remembered an old therapist mentioned borderline 10 years prior and when I brushed it off, he never brought it up again. I could have started getting real treatment when I was 18 and instead I suffered through so many years of torment and ignorance, wasted tens of thousands of dollars on therapy and medications, yet this dark mess still lurked in the corners of my mind, unnamed and unknown.

DBT is great and boring and confusing and effective and frustrating and life changing. Meeting other people with borderline (IRL and on here) and seeing parts of me reflected in others, parts that even my other mentally ill friends couldn’t relate to, was soul affirming. I saw other people I respected and admired dealing with the same insane shit I was and I realized that if they weren’t bad awful embarrassing people, maybe I wasn’t either. I read and watched the most compassionate and driven clinicians/researchers explain how borderline develops, how important validation is, what recovery entails and looks like, and how much more support needs to be given to people with BPD in the mental health community to break the stigma.

I also met my boyfriend, who has his own issues, who helped me figure out the borderline diagnosis when we were just friends, who has been so unbelievably honest, supportive, loving, and validating. I would not have been able to accept this kind of love from another person a year ago because I would have thought it was a joke, some offensive prank, that he clearly didn’t know me. But his friendship was so genuine that I took a chance. The first 6 months we were together I was dumbfounded that this person was real and this relationship was real. I am finally the kind of partner I always wanted to be - not perfect, not totally sane, but honest and loving and more patient and generous with my heart than ever. I am inspired by how kind he is to me, and we both work hard at maintaining healthy communication and boundaries. We are both committed to mutual respect and support, which is not something I’ve experienced before.

The next frontier is focusing on stabilizing my career, and continuing to learn to handle crashes/splitting on my own, more skillfully. I still crash but far less often, and every crash is an improvement, a work in progress. This has definitely been a two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, five steps back, ten steps forward kind of experience. If I focus just on my day to day experience it’s easy to only see the smaller ups and downs. Not much has changed externally. Internally, I am a different person. There are parts of my life that feel normal and “whatever” now that I could not have imagined being reality a year ago.

Thank you guys for being a big part of it.

https://youtu.be/UDD92jNR_f4

https://nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html