The Story Of A Borderline Personality Disorder: The Girl With The Bracelets

How do I start when I want to tell this story? It’s my story. How can I explain to you that I had everything but lost everything – without knowing how it happened. How can I get you to understand: I am not to blame for anything that happened. The only question was: all or nothing. I wanted to be loved. And tried to escape the loneliness I felt day after day. Yes, I had it all, but this circumstance, known as borderline personality disorder, gradually made me lose everything – until I became the girl with the bracelets.

Maybe you won’t understand me Just like most people. It’s very hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t act like most of the others, how they think or feel. But I’ll tell you a secret: even if we who have this disorder don’t think or act the same as you do, it doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings.

Here I am simply asking you to listen to me and try to slip into my skin. I want to tell you my story, even if I don’t know when it started or ended. I want you to know what it feels like to have a mental disorder. When nobody understands you Then you feel lonely and rejected.

The only thing that separates you and me is a diagnosis. But this label takes away my humanity. Because this label is on me, I think you’d be a better person than me.

The story of the girl with the bracelets

I already said that I don’t know exactly when it all started. Maybe when I moved to another city to study. I had never lived alone in a place that was new to me before – always in the same place with the same people. I’m worried. Because I imagined that I couldn’t be one of them. It came from the terrible fear of being alone.

That’s why I tried to become a popular student right from the start. That meant I had to be slim and always appear perfect. At least that’s what I thought. I started vomiting up on food whenever I thought I had eaten too much. I skipped entire meals and tried not to eat in front of others. I drank too much until I was out of control. Because I assumed that people would be more likely to accept me that way. If I were less shy

And then I met him. The boy with the perfect smile. My dream types. The purpose of my existence was to be loved by him. I didn’t care that he had someone else. I didn’t mind that he didn’t like me. I loved him and would have done anything to make him notice me. Nobody would ever love him like me – or so I thought.

I found out where he lived. Then I started putting love letters in his mailbox. I imagined we were the main characters in a wonderful love story that I assumed would come true. I kept trying to convince the whole world that his girlfriend was the opponent. And that the two urgently need to break up with each other. My sole focus was on him, and so it became my purpose in life. However, this world that I had imagined with him did not exist. This grew the emptiness in me.

The bracelets that hide the marks of my shame

I lost control, including my own feelings. Everything seemed either black or white to me. I loved or I hated myself, I only focused on extreme realities and never saw the “golden mean”. I turned into a whirlwind of emotions. But my cyclone also had a calm eye; it reflected the emptiness in me.

The growing emptiness in me changed the picture I had of reality. It changed so much that I couldn’t feel anything. Then I started to cut my arms open just to feel anything. At that moment I became the girl with the bracelets. Because these bracelets hid what I didn’t want to show.

But bracelets don’t cure anything. They were just hiding what I didn’t want to show; they were hiding the part of me that I had no control over. The part that made me the target of ridicule because everyone thought I was crazy. But I just wanted to belong and feel good. That’s why I decided to ask for help.

I know there will be a long, long way to go, but there is hope for me. I owe that to the treatment I’m undergoing. This includes my clinical psychologist and the drugs my psychiatrist has prescribed for me. I’m starting to feel like my old self again.

I was brave and asked for help. That’s why I’m telling my story here. If you feel the same as me, or if you know someone like me, please don’t laugh at these people. They are just people who feel lost. And maybe hide her pain and shame under some bracelets.