Day 04/100 of my 100 Days of Positivity Challenge
Today is Day 04/100 🙂
After having a breakdown yesterday I decided to make this piece for my BPD diagnosis.
For anyone who doesn’t know, BPD stands for Borderline Personality Disorder. I have been misdiagnosed in the past and been prescribed the wrong medications which hadn’t worked for me. After switching between multiple psychiatrists I was exhausted because even then, nothing seemed right. I couldn’t make sense of the things I was feeling, or the way I was acting and I thought nothing would work for me.
After I came to New York I had several episodes in the first year of being here. A friend of mine, a person who’s tried to understand me like no other, was so worried that she dragged me to the therapist at school. I am so thankful to her today because I was introduced to a psychiatrist outside school from there, and for the first time, it just clicked. It felt right. What was so shocking about this was that this new psychiatrist was/is a male. This was the first time ever that I was talking to a male professional about my abuse. I was terrified and I didn’t open about it for a while. He obviously knew because he had been filled in by my therapist at school. But he gave me the time and respected my decisions.
Several months later, maybe a year I think, I was diagnosed again, this time with Borderline Personality Disorder. The more I started to understand about it, the more free and liberated I felt. It felt like a mountain had been lifted off my shoulders. I hadn’t felt like this ever before.
In the past, I wasn’t receiving the help I needed and I was always frustrated and making the wrong decisions. So before I start explaining why it is so important for people to not only educate themselves about mental illnesses, but work hard on creating a support system and not judging the people who are facing problems…
Some facts about BPD: one of the most intense feelings of a person with BPD is the fear of abandonment. We go into a flight or fight mode kind of situation wherein we do something extremely impulsive or reckless without even realizing it in the hope of “saving ourselves”. And NO, it is not because we are trying to attract attention. In the past, I have done this multiple times. We have extreme mood swings and everything is just black or white in our minds. Our minds are like a switch, and flip from time to time.
These are just few of the things we have to go through. People say they “believe” you but would end up saying things like I was doing all of these things as some part of a big excuse or to get attention. For a long time I played these thoughts in my head over and over and hated myself for the things I had done. I had decided that I didn’t deserve anything good and that I didn’t deserve to be in this world. I was reminded that my personality is messed up or that I wasn’t a good person and that I have to change. I got even more scared and started to isolate myself from my friends because I couldn’t remove the thought from my mind that they were out to get me or would betray me. I couldn’t tell right from wrong anymore. The reason I have finally decided to share some of these instances is because I really hope people will one day understand that mental illness is a real thing. You can’t just ignore it or downplay it because you don’t get what you want or because it’s hard for you. It’s like any other problem in this world. Please don’t manipulate people who are facing problems for your own gain. It’s just morally and ethically WRONG.
There are things you can do to regulate it, but with the right help and guidance! I wish more than anything to have a healthy and stable life. I now work hard every single day to express my thoughts, communicate however best I can and try to pause before doing something uncontrollably. I attend therapy every single week, despite my workload or anything else I am going through. But this took a long time, and a lot of practice, patience, forgiveness and understanding.
So this piece that I’ve made today is so important to me, because now I don’t feel ashamed or crazy anymore. I know that I have a problem, but I also know who I truly am or who I truly want to be. The best part is, I can choose to be whoever I want to be because after trying so many different things I finally have a sense of what works for me, who and what I resonate with. And I will walk with my head held high and dance to the rhythm of my soul because I proud of where I am today. I am proud of all my pieces and one day, I will find someone who loves me for all of it.
Thank you for reading 🙂
The Tipping Point 