Daily life with Borderline Personality Disorder for me means having a constant sense of "fear" in the back of my mind. Having BPD means learning to live with that fear which can be extremely hard on a daily basis.
For me, fear manifests in two primary ways and it means constantly juggling that feeling with many other emotions that come along with being a Borderline Sufferer. I can go from feeling inspired about my writing one minute to panicking that it isn't good enough the next. With having Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety on top of BPD, it makes for a hard battle on a daily basis, having to constantly be mindful of how I am feeling and why.
The primary way fear presents in my condition is the extreme emotion attached to the fear of rejection. As it is described as frantic efforts to avoid rejection whether it be real or imagined, that word "frantic" carries a lot of weight behind it. The fact that I have experienced so much rejection in my life means that emotion gains traction because I have real examples of how rejection has plummeted me into the depths of despair and darkness. Once I am in that place it feels impossible to climb out again. It is due to the fact that I feel emotions at an intensity that is far beyond what someone who doesn't suffer from BPD does. The emotion behind losing someone or experiencing rejection is amplified to a degree where life becomes unmanageable. As one of the leading experts in BPD says; " A borderline is the psychological equivalent of a burns patient, they simply have no emotional skin. The slightest touch can cause immense pain and suffering".
I have nightmares about people leaving me and when I wake up I cannot shake the horrible feeling that goes with it, so before I have even attempted to face the day I am already feeling that sense of fear and suffering. The combination of borderline personality disorder and depression has manufactured a consistently brilliant cyanide capsule that I clench between my teeth in any and every relationship. Sadly it's almost a guarantee that eventually my friendships all get poisoned.
The second and more regular fear I carry is the knowledge that my mood can plummet at any given time, often for a reason, I cannot discern. For example, I had one of my articles published on The Mighty Website today and the feeling of pride only lasted a few minutes. Straight after came the fear that I won't do as well next time. Even though my intellect tells me I should be proud of myself, the emotional side is so strong that it overwhelms all logic and leaves me feeling scared that I will fail.
It is a bit like a strange lottery for me every day when I wake up, for the first few seconds it's like my brain scans things to decide on how my mood will be. I sometimes feel positive and productive and then other days for no reason at all I wake up feeling terrified that my mood has slipped again and it is going to be yet another difficult day.
Borderline Personality Disorder is already such a lonely disease, coupled with that consistent sense of worry and fear it can be a hard battle to fight. The more I learn though, about my illness, my own triggers and how to avoid them empowers me to be able to get through for the most part. But there are many things trigger wise that you simply cannot run from with BPD, so it becomes more about how to manage it when it happens and almost how to learn to accept that that feeling of concern and fear will always be there to a certain extent.
Living this way is difficult, to say the least, although I remain hopeful that through my writing and therapy I will find some peace eventually. I doubt that feeling of fear will ever really go away, it's just so embedded in my personality and the disorder I have that it will remain a constant in my life. At the moment things are very difficult for me financially so that is a real concern that I cannot run from. I will absolutely admit, when I see so many bloggers making money from their blog, I feel jealous. Blogging about Mental Health at this point is not something I can really make money from. So I need to remain focused on the reason I started this project in the first place, and that is to try and help other people in similar situations to myself feel less isolated and alone.