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#HalfTheStory
1_EDITED
After the Dish
Creative Outlets
Culture/Travel
Faith
Health
HRW Music Group
Inspirational People
Overcoming Challenges
Sports
Wish Dish Staff Blog

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My Struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder

October 31
by
Erika Evans
in
Overcoming Challenges
with
.

My name is Erika Evans. I am 22 years old. I have been attending college for 4 years now, yet still have the academic standing of a freshman. I have made bad choices. I love dogs. And I have Borderline Personality Disorder.

The last part is something I recently discovered about myself. Or at least the proper noun for what it was I was feeling. I was diagnosed almost a year ago after a bad night where I took a knife to my wrist and cried myself to sleep in my closet over an ex-boyfriend. BPD is essentially bipolar, depression, extreme emotional responses, and a dash of instability when it comes to relationships.

“Treatment” is not what I would call whatever has happened in the last year. I tried therapy and didn’t like it. When I am at rest, I know how to logically handle situations, but when I am all caught up, the only thing I know how to do is make an irrational decision based on emotion. So, when my therapist was just giving me logical advise, my answer was “no shit.” Probably another sign of my BPD.

With the diagnosis came a lot of answers to certain things I was feeling and a lot of questions about everything else.

What does it mean? Is there a cure? Will medication turn me into a different person? Can I afford to treat this mental illness for the rest of my life? And so the anxiety ridden person is thrown another load of anxiety with the diagnosis.

Then summer began and I stopped going to therapy. Probably not my best move. Instead I spent a summer full of erratic behavior that included working every day and blacking out every night. And during those blackouts came eating various late-night calzones and going home with random boys. One of my friends compared it to masturbation just with another human-being instead of your own hand. There was no feelings, even though I tried to stir some up just to see if I could feel something. Nada.

Fall semester was much of the same, although I did try therapy again which included adding another medication to my Prozac that would help treat the depression as well as the anxiety. My parents announced that they would be getting a divorce, and my mom ran away to Iowa for a few months to try and figure out her own mental illness. And the guiltless spending continued on food, alcohol, and uber.

It was taking so much energy to be normal, and I think I finally got tired. So here I am now.

Withdrawn from school and looking for another path. I keep waiting for some kind of ah-ha moment. Some kind of moment of clarity for an answer to just appear to me. Still nothing. I’ve taken long showers, gone for a long drive in the country, taken walks- anything that your typical movie scene moment would include. Except for the life-altering decision to be made.

I’m stuck. But the main thing that I keep reminding myself is that I’m not the only one stuck. Whether you’re about to graduate from college with no idea what career your future holds, you’re changing majors, or you’ve decided that school is all too much like me, there are so many other people struggling with you. And maybe it’s a fucked up thing to say that we’re all clueless as to what we’re doing. But I feel comforted by the fact that there are so many of us aimlessly wandering to figure out the answers in life. And I suppose that’s why I feel the need to write and share my deepest secrets here. So that maybe you won’t feel alone either.

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