I’ve read a lot of articles and posts about how many people
with borderline personality disorder have quick changes in mood or emotion,
often influenced by the smallest of events or moments in a day. This is very
true in my life, and I find myself changing my mood and outlook on life almost
hourly some days. What I haven’t read a lot about is the intensity that these
emotions pack and the conflict they often cause with each other. I’ve come to
refer to my emotions and thoughts as “the storm inside” because that’s the best
way I can explain it: there is literally a storm full of flashes of lightning,
booms of thunder, pouring rain, and gusting winds inside of my mind and my
body.
My friends have asked what this “storm” is like, as they
struggle to understand and have not ever experienced emotions the way that I
do. It is incredibly difficult to put words to how we feel, as anyone who has
been through therapy and stared at emotion wheels or charts of feeling words
knows all too well. Here’s the best way I can explain this storm inside of me
every day:
It is crippling anxiety mixed with uncontrollable rage. It is
smiling and enjoying talking to a friend while looking for a way to escape life
because your skin is crawling. It’s pain
that you can feel in your chest, your muscles, your bones that can start and
consume you at any time. It is sharing someone’s happiness while inside your
head there’s jealousy screaming at you with a thunderous roar. It is choosing
to allow the darkness to consume you and shutting everyone out because it’s
easier that way. It’s being so overjoyed
that you can’t sit still but every time you move you find yourself starting to
fill with that emptiness again. Unlike most storms, this constant brew of
emotions never sleeps, never ceases: it can hit you in the middle of your work
day or at 2:00am. It’s a storm that constantly changes directions, something so
unpredictable that nobody can get an accurate reading or track the patterns.
Sometimes I can harness the storm and rein it in, keeping it
to myself. Sometimes I can tune out the storm with music or work. Sometimes I
just choose to sleep it off, meaning I may take naps in the middle of the day
or go to bed extremely early. Sometimes I allow myself to use rage as an outlet
and scream, kick, or throw any object I can find. Sometimes I use self-harm to
ground myself and gain back control over the mixture of hell I feel inside.
Lately I’m trying healthier means like meditation, mindfulness exercises from dialectical
behavior therapy (DBT), or labeling and writing out what I’m feeling.
People seem to think that I’ve suddenly become this way, like
it happened overnight. When I look back at my past, though, I can remember
these feelings as far back as I can remember. There have been times where I’ve
had better control over the storm, that the storm wasn’t so strong. The storm
usually brews inside of me and targets only me, leading to low self-worth and a
very conflicted self-image.
My DBT therapist has told me that my current goal is to not
allow the negative part of my brain that screams during these storms to win
control over me. We are also about to start distress tolerance in my skills
group, which I can only hope will help to quiet the storm. As Kiera Van Gelder
says so elegantly in her memoir The Buddha and the Borderline, “I am determined
to fight for my survival. I do not deserve to be trapped in hell.” I will
continue to battle the winds and rain, sailing through the waves as they crash,
and hopefully someday soon I will find the beach again where the storms are
less frequent and less intense.
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