I spent most of my adolescence dipping into the puddle that was therapy in the Caribbean. I got to feel special, I got to be enigmatic. I was told I was simply just bright for my age, as though depression was the punishment for reading above my grade level. I was told I had mood swings, that I should be kinder to myself, that I should just love myself more, that I should be with people who loved me more. At 19, I decided enough was enough. I wanted my clump of symptoms to muddle themselves into a coherent face. An enemy, some company, a comfort. Yet I knew exactly what I didn’t want. I called my best friend before my first psychiatric appointment and said the words, “anything but BPD” (borderline personality disorder).
Wading in my pool of shitty therapy, I picked up biases over the years. Borderline personality disorder patients were difficult, manipulative and monstrous. The internet posited theories on television characters that had BPD based on their intense emotions and deplorable actions. I did not want to be the same kind of fucked up as Bojack Horseman and Anakin Skywalker. A Xerox of a Xerox of a person. The overall takeaway was that BPD patients were hard to love and hard to have around. My psychiatrist spoke to me for about 30 minutes before confirming that I was exactly that.
I desperately wanted her to be wrong, but it very quickly became undeniable. The symptoms of borderline personality disorder: paranoia, impulsive behaviour, self-harm, fear of abandonment and unstable relationships, morphed into the face of what I had been seeking. A familiar face comprised of features I’d known for years. But I didn’t want to be hard to love and hard to have around.
Physical illness affects your day to day in obvious ways. You take a pill, you check your blood sugar at inopportune times, but mental illness sinks into your skin. It’s difficult to know what is you and what is sickness. If you’re just flustered today or are you drifting towards a manic episode. If you’re genuinely worried about walking home alone or if you’ve convinced yourself that if you’re out alone at night the pavement will swallow you whole. Bones and all. You’re fragile, you’re glass.
When I moved to the UK for university, I planned to bubble wrap myself. Glass doesn’t go to the pub, glass doesn’t party. If I did anything outside of my routine I would lose control of my emotions and the cracks would start to show. People would know what I had, they would know I was a Xerox of a Xerox of a person.
My routine in university is simple. I wake up, I get dressed, I go to lectures, on the way home I buy ingredients for dinner, I cook dinner, I eat, I go to sleep. And repeat. It’s all in service of staying steady, keeping my emotions in check. I try not to do anything different from day to day. I speak to the same people, I take the same roads even if they are not the fastest. Or when a rat has been decaying in the gutter for a month and everyone else has started walking a different way. I’ll still be there. If something goes wrong in my routine, I stop doing it. A prophylactic amputation for my own good. Seminars and study groups fall away, exiting the steadiness of my studio seems like more trouble than it’s worth, so sometimes I don’t for days at a time.
A lot of people with borderline personality disorder have made peace with being tumultuous, with feeling everything so intensely it seems like you’re breaking apart. But I don’t know that I’ll be okay with that any time soon. I am trying to feel nothing at all.
Words by Alanna Sabine Wilson-Patrick
