I'm asked at least three times a week whether I'm trying to be healthy, or doing something for myself, or if I'm exercising. My diet is completely unbalanced. I live off takeout and if I remember to eat half a sandwich, it's a good day. "Take-out" is a nice way to refer to the garbage I eat-really, it's junk food. "Take-out" implies an occasional salad. I haven't exercised once during the whole eight years Barack Obama was in the white house.  Am I using the skills I learn in therapy? What am I even doing?

To quote my childhood friend, "Bitch, I'm surviving!" And I'm hardly doing that. I've made the commitment to go to therapy and group therapy every week, and I've been going for the past six months. My therapist insists I've made significant progress since entering treatment, and while I want to believe that, I have to wonder if that were really true, wouldn't I take a look back at my life and feel more stable? Wouldn't it make more of a difference? Wouldn't my relationships somehow be more grounded, healthier, and wouldn’t I have stayed at my job and engage in a multitude of healthier behaviors?

For real, if I'm on such an upward trajectory, if I've made such gains through therapy, shouldn't I be able to eat more than one meal a day? Shouldn't I be taking care of myself? Shouldn't I have healthy relationships? Shouldn't I be a success? Shouldn’t I feel like one?

I went to therapy because I had a meltdown and yelled at my ex boyfriend that I wanted to kill myself, then began digging my fingers into my arms as if I could somehow extract the pain I felt in that moment. I went to therapy because I then forgot this, and was puzzled when my ex mentioned it to me again later. That this was a traumatic and scary experience for him didn't occur to me, until he told me exactly what happened, and suggested I go to therapy, because something was wrong. I needed help.

I agreed, more or less. Whether I was standing over the kitchen sink in my uncle's house trying to cut my wrists, or choking myself with a belt as hard as I possibly could in my closet, or trying to re-learn how to tie a noose so that I could hang myself like I did in my early twenties, what I was doing on my own wasn't working. My father would call these "gestures of suicide." Cries for attention from an individual with Borderline Personality Disorder, that, according to him, never fully committed to the suicide. Instead, my father suggested, these attempts at self-harming and suicide were not really intended to be more than what amounts to stage theater, meant to manipulate those around them into pitying them.

Later, I would find out that individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder are very likely to commit suicide. In fact, research suggest that they are at much higher risk of suicide. So my father's claim that it's all just for attention or show is the real falsehood. But I don't have Borderline Personality Disorder. I don't meet the criteria in order to be diagnosed with BPD. That I am aware of, my mother has never officially been diagnosed with BPD, either. Yet all my life, my father told me about my mother's Borderline Personality Disorder, and filled my head with all of the misconceptions about the personality disorder that have existed since BPD was introduced to the world of psychiatry, I'm sure.

Like, people with BPD can't really love anyone... People with BPD had a detachment disorder, or didn't bond with their mothers as infants. My father reassured me that, even though my mother could not bond with me as an infant, since she has BPD, he did bond with me as well as my grandmother, so I would never develop BPD... And plenty of other misconceptions and beliefs that were unfounded. Understandably, this made me terrified of ever developing BPD myself, because the ultimate misconception about BPD, was that it absolutely could not be treated.  

My therapist would beg to differ. He's currently at a conference in LA, meeting Marsha P Johnson, founder of Dialectic Behavior Therapy. DBT is widely regarded as one of the most effective treatments for BPD, in conjunction with SSRI Inhibiting medications. Even individuals without BPD can benefit from Dialectic Behavior Therapy. There are different types of DBT group therapies, targeted to either those that externalize and internalize their negative feelings. Recovery is possible. Symptoms lesson, if not disappear. It's possible, my therapist says, that as I continue DBT therapy, the criteria I do meet that lends itself to BPD could go away.

How does this make me feel? It feels promising and good, actually. I don't identify as having Borderline Personality Disorder, although I do identify with many common things individuals who have been diagnosed with BPD report experiencing and feeling. Maybe just because it's not as uncommon to feel or experience those things as we've convinced ourselves. Maybe, just maybe, we're not unique, or special. And that's okay with me.

Some people strongly identify with Borderline Personality Disorder. They talk about their BPD the way young children talk about fairy-tale princesses. Then, there's the people like my mother, who tell me I can't have Borderline Personality Disorder, because people with BPD do not feel empathy for others. Having BPD is, to them, monstrous-inhuman. There's even misconceptions that individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder can't have healthy relationships, or maintain any relationships in which they aren't the abuser.

This obviously isn't okay. I'm sure that right now, my father is at a bar, telling a stranger about his ex-wife who has Borderline Personality Disorder, and his daughter, who he sacrificed so much for in order to raise and protect, who threw it all away to be with a monster. It's romantic. It's superstitious. Maybe, when my father tells people this story, it makes the pain and suffering he felt throughout his life feel meaningful. It's easy to write someone off as a villain and a monster, especially if they've wronged you or hurt you. It's harder to let go of a diagnosis, a label, that he has affixed to my mother himself, not because it's true, or supported by fact, but because it simplifies his worldview, albeit a narrow one in which those diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are just plain evil. 

I thought being married, owning a house, and going back to school would make me happy. Why, then, at twenty-three, did I feel the exact opposite when I achieved all of these things?  Not that I was able to admit this to myself at the time. It's only years later, after selling the house and renting a bedroom in a college town with  green twenty-somethings, a divorce, and long since having dropped out of school, that I can definitively pronounce that I was not happier.

In fact, nothing seemed to make that much of a difference to my general happiness at all. I developed severe depression. Still, I clung to the idea of a happier self, a me that was with the person I loved. I imagined a very narrow set of circumstances that would culminate one after another to create a perfect life, in which I could finally then be happy. Until I saw the person I loved every day, until we rented or signed a lease together, I couldn't be happy. I'm sure it wouldn't have ended there, knowing myself. I wouldn't have been happy then, either. I would have kept repeating the same mistakes in a multitude of relationships, always searching for "the right one," who would not leave me.

I was always doing this, and I never stopped to ask myself why I was doing this and why I couldn't focus on being happy now. I never wanted to think about why I wasn't happy living by myself, or why I didn't take better care of myself, or why I didn't get around to doing all of the things I knew I should be doing. Somehow, I would just be better if I lived with my partner. I would just be happy. They would make me happy. No pressure. My partner was only carrying the weight of our collective happiness on their shoulders, and anything that jeopardized that perfect future caused a collapse inside of me. Too often, I relied on my partner or my friends to make me happy. Even once I realized this, I didn't know what to do about it to change. I felt stuck.