I hate this fucking disorder. I really do. Will I ever be able to control the most destructive traits of this condition? Just when I think I’ve got it in hand – BAM! – I do something stupid and I can’t do anything apart from hope the aftermath is bearable. And the funny thing is, there are people out there that hate me for the things I’ve done recently and even further back, but they’ll never hate me as much as I hate myself.

Sometimes it pays to re-read over the traits and characteristics of BPD, to try and work out where Real Claire ends, and Disordered Claire kicks off. I’ll run down the list of unpleasant things that I’ve noted down, and I feel something similar to a kick in the head when I realise that I fucked up and I didn’t even realise it at the time!

You know when you’re drunk, and your friend tells you to jump from one kerb to the other in one movement – and in your drunk mind, you’re thinking ‘Holy fucking shit yes! That is a Really Good Idea and nothing can go wrong here!’ so you go for it? Then, when you’re sober and lying in your friend’s bed with one hell of a hangover and a tooth missing, you remember what you did and wonder just how stupid you could be to agree to that task.

At the time, you’re intoxicated. Your brain is riddled with booze and endorphins, but there is this one tiny voice in the back of your head going ‘Don’t do that, you’re going to lose a tooth and look like a twat.’ The booze wins though, and you end up slamming into a kerb at 3am in town while your friend laughs so hard they piss themselves a little.

My brain feels like that sometimes with my BPD. I have this constant noise going on, voices telling me different things until it focuses on one idea, one thought, one voice. That can be anything from ‘X is the enemy and I must ruin their life’ to ‘I love this person so much I can’t breathe’ – and there is always the tiny little sober, logical voice right at the back of the static, trying to point out just how utterly mental I’m acting.

You’d think that would be some comfort, realising that it’s the disordered mind that’s making you act a certain way. But it’s not. It makes you feel like you have no control over yourself, that you can’t trust yourself or your own thoughts. I know this is where DBT comes in, to help you recognise the incorrect types of thoughts and fix them, but I am still waiting to be referred to DBT. I know the consultant in charge of my psychiatrist thinks that psychotherapy will be good for me – which is funny, because the psychotherapist thinks I’m far too defensive to use the service. Awesome.

I hate being borderline. I hate feeling this way.

I self-harmed this week, for the first time since January, over something not worth the ugly scars I’m going to get when they heal on my meaty calf. It’s not worth going into, all I know for sure (if I know anything at all…) is that my BPD was a huge factor in it. Hence this post.

There was one revelation this week, slightly related to the above incident. A disagreement happened between myself and a friend who also has BPD – we’ll call her Blue – and it was your typical borderline-type argument where we both got defensive and were looking to blame each other. We took a breath and begun to communicate carefully how we were feeling and what we were thinking, and we came to a rational conclusion to the conversation. Two women with BPD, a condition that is notoriously difficult to contend with during conflicts, managed to repair a friendship that could’ve ended over bitter words.

A light in pitch black darkness, but a light nonetheless.

I am a good person. I know that in my heart – but in my mind, not so much.

(Just a quick note, I have edited my post ‘A breakdown of a breakdown’ as it was noted when I shared the post on reddit that I had confused a bad BPD episode with psychosis – easy enough mistake to make but I don’t want to give people incorrect information.)