This is very long, but I think overall hopeful, though fueled by a lot of pain. I just need to vent a little and maybe be heard by people who understand this illness. Maybe I can make others experiencing similar things feel less alone.

I was diagnosed with bpd and bipolar 2 four months ago. I've been slowly augmenting lamictal ever since. My bpd symptoms on this process of augmenting medication and accepting the diagnosis have been the worst they've ever been. I believe the symptoms weren't as severe when my bipolar was untreated because the moods were so intense they dominated bpd symptoms. I at least couldn't notice them or recognize them for what they were.

The other day my friends noticed a self harm scar on my arm and it caused them to have melt downs. My best friend and unfortunately favorite person brought it up when I at least was black out drunk. She told me to come talk to her when I needed to so I wouldn't harm myself. I haven't self harmed in 3 weeks and I really don't want to again. I told her this. Next, she asked me if she was my favorite person. She's incredibly emotionally uncommunicative and has anxious avoidant attachment, so I have been working very hard to undo seeing her as a favorite person. She obviously shouldn't have asked me those incredibly difficult and painful questions when I was so drunk. She changed the topic right away, without letting me speak on the topic at all. I asked her if we could get coffee and talk the next morning, and she responded rather enthusiastically Ya! I just have some things to do this afternoon but before then, for sure. I only texted her one more time after that, if she was home. She didn't respond. I have gotten to a point where this doesn't automatically trigger me, which I have been proud of.

A couple hours later, I come to the living room where my two closest friends/roommates sit, and they're sitting in silence and seeming dread. I told them I loved them. They said I love you too. I told them I didn't need to hear that they loved me as much as I used to. I told them that I need to learn to be okay with them not telling me this. I told them that I was feeling very good today. I told them that calling my family daily has been so helpful. Then they started telling me I needed to go home. That they couldn't help me and that I would find more intensive help at home. This is their third intervention, the second one being intensely inappropriate, not communicating with me at all, and then calling my parents, who I tell everything and are very supportive, in anger and begging them to take my illness more seriously.

I did need more serious help but this was obviously intensely painful, especially since my best friend had involved a friend she knew I had felt very judged by in the past. I decided to forgive the two of them, after sending long explanations of how this was only painful for me and didn't help me at all; that I knew my illness, my family knew my illness, far better than them -- that I didn't need them to act as guardians over me. I had never asked for this. I set this boundary. And they set the boundary of not being able to be there for me as a support. I respected that, though it still hurt. Boundaries I knew were important. I just wanted them to communicate with me.

Anyways this third intervention involved them telling me I had to move out of the apartment, this was a boundary they were setting. They couldn't understand that the self-harm hadn't resulted because I was in an intensely dark place. I told them that I believe I tried it because I was told that this is how bpd people cope with their anxiety. I told them that I hadn't harmed myself in weeks. That it might not look like it from the outside but I've been doing better, and it isn't something that can be fixed from a week in the psych ward or arresting my life and returning to my childhood bedroom, dropping all my classes. That I was happy and so proud to be able to participate in school and want to learn again, after two years of not being able to. They didn't trust me. They told me that I had to head home so I can "face this head on". But I had been, I was in an intensive therapy program for two months, and was getting an individual therapist. I told them that I had to learn how to replace unhealthy coping strategies with new healthy ones. I told them I was starting at a place of disability. For it is a disability, and this cruel intervention by my friends has made me realize this.

I had been respecting their boundaries, calling my parents for support rather than venting to them all the time, and expecting them to understand how I feel all the time. They said "maybe this is selfish, but this is a student apartment. We want to party and do stupid things and drink a lot, and we can't with you here. We're worried about you all the time." One of them told me she had cried for an hour on a call with her mom that morning. Which evoked temporary sympathy for her, but now I am angry with the two of them.

It is incredibly selfish, and they are completely ignoring the boundary I had set with them, and deeming themselves to be understanding of what is happening to me, more than I am able to, despite they're voicing that they can't understand or try to understand because it makes them anxious. They told me I wasn't doing good. I told them it's because I am figuring out my meds. This was a hard dosage but it wasn't unbearable. I had to go through it to get better. I have never stopped wanting to get better. I am doing exactly what they told me they needed me to do. And I am happier. They should be proud of me, and they have never told me they are during this whole process of treatment. I am so proud of myself for getting through these months and learning about this disability and myself as I have never done before. I am proud of myself, and I am proud of other bpd people, including my little cousin. Because it is often so intensely psychologically painful.

I called my family, and they were furious. They know about the past self-harm, but they confirmed that this was so intensely invasive and disrespectful, cruel, close minded, and honestly so ablelist. They are so proud of me. I need people in my life who are proud of me, and don't see me as just my illness.

I told one of my friends, not my favorite person because that fury can't even be worded right now, that I couldn't move back. I had to stand my ground. That I am proud of myself, that I am very strong. That she simply couldn't understand, there was clearly no way to explain it that would make her understand.

I didn't tell her that she couldn't understand because she didn't want to understand. She had told me this in different words months ago and I had respected her desire not to understand. I had seen that it was giving her too much anxiety when I tried to make her understand. So if the two of them acknowledge they can't understand my illness as well as me(they even voiced this in the conversation), I just can't grasp the entitlement that lead them to believe they could tell me what I "need" to do to get better. They wouldn't do this to anyone else in the friend group because they know they wouldn't forgive them for it. They are taking advantage of my bpd--of my fear of abandonment, my desperate people pleasing, my fear of messing up and losing their love--they know I will forgive them.

But I suppose I can't, at least for a while. They have done this so many times and despite the pain and guilt it causes me, they keep on doing it. They fail so immensely to empathize with me, to even try to empathize with me. I need to stand my ground and distance myself from them a little.

I'm fucking twenty and my own human being; I can't imagine doing this to a friend. I don't think many could.

The thing I tried to explain to them is that it won't get better if I head home. I need to learn how to live with people and create healthy relationships. I hadn't been cruel or subjected them to my heightened emotions. I had taken nothing out on them.

What they need to realize is that if I head home, or go into a very underfunded psychiatric ward for a week where doctors didn't feel I needed to be admitted, the problems they have with me won't go away. They will be temporarily lifted because I am gone. The only way is for me to stop being a part of their lives. But I don't believe they want me out of their lives. They just need to understand that my disability won't go away for a while if ever, but that I am working on it. It is their fear and anxiety at play here, and there is nothing I can do to alleviate that. I need to think of my own well being as much as they need to think of their own. They have to stop blaming me.

I never understood why older people in my group therapy talked about how careful they were about letting people know of their illness. But fuck I am now. I wish I had never told my close friends. I guess a positive is I've learnt that I can't share my illness with people even close to me, unless I really trust them, and they are open minded enough and respectful enough to understand my right to personal autonomy. I don't trust my friends anymore.

Even my seventeen year old sister, who has a couple friends who self harm far more often than I, was filled with fury, saying they are very emotionally immature, and are being incredibly selfish. That I might need new friends who want to understand and learn about my illness and me. For it is not some fully evil monster that has stolen their friend. I have had bpd since I was fourteen. It is part of who I am and how I see the world.

It also it isn't all negative. I believe I wouldn't be nearly as exceptionally loving and immensely emotionally understanding if I didn't have bpd. I wouldn't understand as clearly how open and strong love can make people feel so much better in who they are. How reminding them of your love for them in showing up and complimenting them and supporting them when they need it can be so powerful in other people's lives. It isn't just people pleasing as much as many people outside of it seem to believe.  Bpd people are so very loving and wonderful. These positive qualities will not leave us after we recover or get better.

I believe, and I have seen this through my bipolar as well, that when one feels such despair, and then starts feeling better, the true joy of life is far clearer to them. Gratefulness of joy intensifies joy. I feel as much as our intense joy can be a result of our illness, it is also a result of this gratefulness of joy.

All I can do and what my family members have told me is repeat to myself that I am strong, that bpd people are so strong. That I am my own being. This is my life. Not theirs. This is Me. I know best. And what they have done is abusive and ableist and selfish and only makes me more aware of this sick stigma even if subconscious to them.

I suppose it's helped in lowering my favorite person in my eyes. I will have favorite persons again because I have a fear of abandonment and equally am intensely optimistic about the power of love. I live with my arms stretched out. We are in many ways so brave-hearted, aren't we?

This is a song I have been listening to recently and I feel that it's been helping me understand this situation and my rightfulness in this conflict, despite every urge to surrender to guilt, forgive them, and move back home. This apartment is my home as much as theirs.

Somebody That I Used To Know - Elliott Smith