the badlands
living with borderline personality disorder
i exist in ripples. ebbs and flows. broken frequencies. erratic. each one bigger, louder than the next. like the cries of a banshee.
eyes are windows to the soul, they say. so, with steady hands, i give you mine. set them into the hollow of your skull, watch as my mindscape bleeds out and stitches itself into the fabric of the world, permeates it, mutates each fraying thread, moulds and sculpts it; its faces, colours, voices. i call it ‘the badlands’, a barren, carnivorous wasteland. nothing grows here; nothing new survives. anything that is extant here has been since the beginning of time, germinating, metamorphosing, wearing itself into unusual shapes like the shadows i see shifting forms in the corners of my eyes.
‘the badlands’ is a vignette of the world – of life – how it is seen, felt and experienced by me, someone who lives with borderline personality disorder (bpd). a fistful of ink-soaked pages from my journal; a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria of things i feel. i call them ‘big feelings’ – my big feelings – because they are too big for my bones to curl around, to keep caged. they are sentient. lawless, spectral behemoths.
bpd is often described as having third-degree burns littered across most of your body. every touch, sensation, movement is excruciating. we lack what they call ‘emotional skin’.1 i have been called ‘thin-skinned’ since i was a child. i have always been too sensitive, too emotional, too inquisitive, too obsessive, too caring, too loving, too sad, too angry, too paranoid, too anxious, too excited, too loud, too quiet, too strange, too much.
people say they understand but i have learned that, for others, words are nothing more than rusting bear traps disguised as open palms full of promise. promise that was born to be broken. but perhaps that’s my fault; i feel a lot – too much. every emotion – positive, negative or neither – is cosmic. roiling, untameable oceans to which i am just a feeble seaside town cursed with promethean fate; submerged like clockwork, over and over, resurfacing only to go under once again. my feelings are bigger than my body, bigger than any words i could ever string together, and maybe that’s why people never understand. my words are origami butterflies set into flight amidst a storm.
so instead i will show you what i feel, transcribe for you my mind’s voice, paint abstract portraits of my big feelings.
