Turbulent Emotions: Navigating Life with Borderline Personality Disorder

A Raw and Honest Insight into a Debilitating Mental Illness

If you Google the question, “What is the hardest mental illness to live with,” the AI overview, which uses a large language model to analyze a vast amount of data from the web and provide a quick, concise answer that encompasses all information found, tells the inquirer this:

“According to many experts, Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is often considered one of the most difficult mental illnesses to live with due to its intense emotional swings, unstable relationships, and chronic feelings of emptiness and distress; making it a significant challenge to manage daily life.”

If we change the wording from “hardest” to “most complex”, the results are about the same but also mention schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and acknowledge PTSD among the ranks.

So what exactly IS Borderline Personality Disorder and why does it make existence so difficult and painful?

From the outside looking in, it’s hard to understand. From the inside looking out, it’s hard to explain. Breaking the stigma associated with it feels “borderline” unachievable.

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Clinicians group all personality disorders into clusters A, B, and C.

Cluster A, which are considered eccentric or peculiar disorders, include schizotypal personality, schizoid personality, and paranoid personality disorder. Individuals with cluster A disorders may display unusual behavior or thinking patterns such as being suspicious, unforgiving, persecutory, or hypersensitive like reading hidden meanings in the actions or dialogue of others.

I am grouped into cluster A with paranoid personality disorder.

Cluster B, including narcissistic personality, antisocial personality, borderline personality, and histrionic personality disorders, are characterized by dramatic, self-destructive, and erratic behaviors. Although there are substantial differences among the disorders listed, they are grouped together in commonalities such as self-harm, impulsivity, and unstable relationships.

Narcissists embody grandiosity (an inflated sense of self-importance and a need for excessive admiration), histrionics have a dramatic need for attention, and borderlines are filled with self-doubt and possess a distorted self-image. A BPD’s fears of abandonment and rejection are deeply ingrained, making it difficult for them to connect with others and the world around them, when what they desire most is just that - connection.

I am also grouped here in cluster B with my primary diagnosis being Borderline.

Cluster C is reserved for those who display anxious or fearful behavior. These individuals are unsettled and excessively wary with diagnoses that include avoidant personality, dependent personality, and obsessive-compulsive personality. Typical characteristics incorporate extreme anxiety, fearfulness, and a need for order and control. Perfectionism, resistance to change, and an overindulgent need for reassurance are common traits, as well as excessive worry and rumination.

Yep, you guessed it. I’m a triathlete in the personality cluster contest. I also have avoidant personality disorder.

Do you feel that stigma? I sure do. I’m a basketcase. A lunatic. A whackjob.

What I am really, is emotionally crippled. Life damaged me and paralyzed me in dejection.

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I am compelled to field questions that everyone around me is afraid to ask. I wish they would ask, listen with intent instead of forming responses, and at least try to see life from my perspective, but it’s incredibly difficult to comprehend why daily existence is so painful when there is no way of sincerely feeling what I feel. The lack of understanding is often what kills me inside.

I have asked others if they can recollect any movie or tv show that shows the tumultuous spectacle of a mental institution filled with committed nutjobs. There is always at least one patient who paces back and forth seemingly lost in madness, or persistently screams in distress over neurotic fears that are undetectable to anyone else. I’m sure you can think of one. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? 12 Monkeys?

That is how I feel most of the time. Like that is exactly what I should be doing. And trust me, I have screamed to the universe many times to just make it stop. To take it all away and just let me be normal and happy. My rational brain knows that I have a lot to be grateful for and people who love me, but I can’t refine it through my derangements.

Think of a time in your own life when uncertainty reigned. Maybe you went through a divorce and were terrified by what the life-changing outcome would be and how you would move forward without discomposure. Or maybe you got lost in the woods, having no idea which way is out or what predator may be lying in the shadows waiting to pounce and destroy you. Perhaps the simple things, like public speaking, a news overload of the horrors in the world, or even small changes to routine have debilitated you.

Now imagine those feelings never going away. Ever. Not when you nailed your public speech, made your way out of the woods unharmed, or found life after divorce. Conceptualize it for a moment. Recall those daunting emotions and contend with them again. It’s not a very pleasant headspace to be in, is it?

That headspace is my reality. I feel it the moment I wake up and it stays with me all day. It’s manageable until it’s not. The littlest of things can drop me to my already weak knees.

My phone vibrates and my heart races because it’s probably bad news or my ex-husband calling to verbally attack me.

I don’t hear from my daughter for a couple of hours and panic infiltrates me, assuming she must have been in a terrible car accident. The images come and replicate themselves while I feel every bit of grief and sadness as though it were the truth.

My husband goes upstairs for 20 minutes. It must be because he can’t stand to be around me anymore, or has to text someone that I am not allowed to see. He’s working later than I thought, so he must not want to come home to me. If he talks quietly in the next room over, he’s obviously talking about something that I don’t deserve to know, or worse, about my neuroticism and how I’m too much to handle. I’m such a burden.

Then I remember how he unintentionally harmed my well-being when we quit drinking together and his actions through that time, though coping mechanisms, affected me detrimentally and I can’t forgive him for it. I ruminate over the past until I am so overcome with anguish and resentment, that I cannot duly listen to my heart rationally, remembering that we conquered a mountain together and that I too, drank away my problems, placing me in the unfounded place I’m in right now. He was healing and now I’m mad at him because I didn’t. I’m angry with him for taking control back over his life while mine crumbled under his feet.

But what is love and commitment if not seeing each other through these demanding and arduous times in life? He hasn’t gone anywhere yet and works diligently to follow my reasoning and support me to the best of his abilities. My heart knows that, but my brain can’t listen.

A stern or assertive tone of voice can render me silent, wondering what I have done wrong. A less-than-pleasant facial expression will spiral me into questioning what kind of agitation I generated for such a countenance. I blame myself for everything until it paralyzes me and I disassociate from reality altogether. Lost in my own world of pain.

Feelings of unworthiness, emptiness, aloneness, and complete disregard of my being is my normal. Hell, I don’t think I even know what a normal thought process feels like. It must be blissful.

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Essentially, living with Borderline Personality Disorder is like being on an emotional rollercoaster that never seems to slow down. Every day is a battle against overwhelming feelings of emptiness, fear of abandonment, and uncontrollable mood swings that can leave me feeling lost and disconnected from reality.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff, constantly teetering between overwhelming love and intense anger, never knowing which emotion will push me over the edge. The isolation and fear of rejection are suffocating, as I struggle to maintain stable relationships while constantly battling the irrational fear that everyone I love will eventually leave me.

The intense self-doubt and self-loathing can feel like a never-ending storm cloud, making it nearly impossible to see through the darkness. It's a constant internal struggle to find a sense of identity and to quiet the relentless inner critic that whispers of my unworthiness… but I refuse to let this disorder define me.

I hope now, that you can somewhat comprehend why living with borderline personality disorder is so defeating and considered the most difficult mental illness to live with. Everything in life is a threat, even our loved ones.

My hope, I believe, is the hope of all of us who live with this crushing disability.

My hope, for each other, is that the stigma will be broken and society will come to realize that we live in a constant state of internal conflict with dysregulated emotions that feel very real to us despite seeming irrational or even preposterous to those outside of us. It doesn’t change the fact that what we feel is our reality.

For some reason, it’s easy to be conscious of this in schizophrenics by accepting their dysfunction and feeling empathetically troubled for them. As you now know, personality disorders are in the same vicinity of mental illness, the only difference being that we don’t hallucinate or encounter visual delusions. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder, not a personality disorder, but they are both characterized by distorted thinking, altered perceptions of reality, and disrupted behavior. Our realities are skewed, our trusts are broken, and our self-worth is AWOL. Prisoners of the war inside our own heads.

“Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.” - Bill Clinton