To the Boy from the Party who (Accidentally) Called Me Crazy:

Here is everything I wanted to say to you, but couldn’t.

I don’t blame you. You don’t know me. Maybe you know someone else with BPD, or maybe you’ve read the horror stories online. Maybe when you were doing research for your psych major you’d typed “borderline personality disorder” into your Google search bar and watched your screen fill up with headlines like “Saving Your Life After Loving a Borderline” or an Amazon link to a book titled “Girlfriend from Hades: Dating a Borderline and Surviving”. It’s not your fault, really; hundreds of thousands of people think the way you do. And I doubt you’d wanted to intentionally hurt me; you probably just wouldn’t have expected that the quiet girl sitting on the couch wearing a Harry Potter costume would be one of the “craziest ones”.

You don’t know that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder about four years ago. You don’t know that I’ve been in therapy four years and counting, and on medication for two. You don’t know that I once spent months waking up shaking and sweating from hyper-realistic nightmares, and three days regurgitating everything that touched my stomach — all side effects of the anti-depressants I have to take. You don’t know that I have to take them anyway, just so I can feel the slightest bit closer to normalcy.

You don’t know that I have scars scattered across the landscape of my left arm. You don’t know that everything in me aches to destroy myself every time I do something that makes me think I deserve to be punished. You don’t know how often I think I deserve to be punished.

You don’t know how often I have had to put my razor or my voice or my hands away, and replace them with my mental catalog of distress tolerance skills I’ve picked up in workshops and workbooks. You don’t know how, a lot of the time, these skills (all with helpful little acronyms like TIP or STOP or ACCEPTS) make me feel like toddler learning how to walk, but I have to do them anyway, because the alternative is being a burden, a curse, a disaster that needs to be “survived”.

You don’t know what it feels like to be demonized, and reduced, and forcefully stuffed into a box of people with a diagnosis scrawled in Sharpie over it. You don’t know what it feels like to have your existence and feelings constantly taken apart at the seams by everyone in this world, including yourself — especially yourself. You don’t know what it’s like to hate being inside yourself so badly that you want to peel off your own skin. You don’t know what it’s like to have your mind constantly turn against itself, an ouroboros of self-loathing.

You don’t know the first thing about me, or what I’ve been through. You don’t know how much work I’ve put in and how many ghosts I’ve had to claw my way through in order to get here. You don’t know about the panic attacks I’ve strangled on my own using the 4–7–8 breathing technique. You don’t know how hard I’ve fought to prove to myself that I am doing everything I can to be worthy and deserving of love.

But I do.

So really, this letter isn’t for you at all.

To my people: I know. I see you. I hear you.

I know.