Letter 3

I was diagnosed with BPD, panic disorder, major anxiety disorder, and two eating disorders by 16. I fell in love in that time, with my best friend. I wrote a book about it, if you'd like to know deep detail. Anyway, I loved her from the moment we met. A phenomenon for BPD people is having a favourite person, or FP, and she was mine. From the moment I saw her, like one of those cliche stories where you just know youre in love because the world fades away. But it isn't romantic. It is torrential and tumultuous and horrid. My very life depended on her. We absued each other in many ways, her family targeted me and tried to have me shipped off to a school for the criminally insane and I was under the scope of too many adults who'd come to my home bearing gifts of letters written by their daughters blaming me for everything wrong with them. That destroyed me. My mother eventually took to burning them. We didn't have the money to sue. We didn't have the power or resources they did. So I attempted suicide in the change rooms.

After the abuse and before the perception. Pills in my body, writhing on the bench. I don't remember anything past ambulances and stomaching pumping and charcoal down my nose. I don't remember much of any of that time because I quickly turned to drugs. Cutting with refined blades. Destroying myself how everyone else ever has.

I was eventually forced, with stipulation of returning to school into dialectical behavioural therapy, group therapy and personal therapy three times a week. I was put on my first medications, and I hated it.

It saved me. It changed my brain chemistry and I got better. Not cured- you cant cure BPD, just manage it. And I didn't really manage it, but I did much better than I used to. I was still a horror to know- manipulative, selfish, uncaring, emotionally abusive. Id date people I never loved or was attracted to for attention, and threatened suicide when they left and all but physically stalked them. I called these trysts family, and abandoned my own. The people who were there and loved me because they had fallen apart and were struggling and I could not be suffocated by the pain of it all.

So I swallowed liquor and smoked and took things from people I didn't know just to dull the bluntness of life.

It was a horrible time. Until a few years ago, really. I traumatized so many people but refused to accept responsibility. I would hurt people and blame them for tiny faults in the grand scheme. I chose the wrong people to care for. The wrong people to trust.

And I spent many of those months in doctors offices, and within white walls barred off with prison doors and limited visitors who couldnt look me in the eye. I expected too much from children- that friends would visit me in a terrifying ward after doing something they couldnt comprehend. I made it their issue. I made it anyones I could. I bled, and I bled, and I took pills and cried until I was a shell of that little wrinkly, wet baby.

I hated everyone. Because I hated me.

I grit my teeth remembering these things. I have been told for years by numerous people I should write a memoir because the things I told them were unbelievable. And I don't know if I will ever be able to rip off the scab on my heart and talk about them properly, so for now I give you this.

Im still not okay. Because I have sick family members and a broken heart from too many things to count and though my tattoos cover most of the past, when its hot the past raises on my flesh and I can feel it. It's tangible and horribly in reach. But I am doing better. I went to University though I was told I never would. Ive found people who love me, as fleeting as they may be, despite being told no one would. I let people touch me despite the trauma. I take my medications- five times different from the original, but they work. And I haven't hurt myself in almost two years. I am not kind to myself, but I am lenient. I am trying. And I am so grateful for my family and loved ones and I will get better, because at this very moment I have never been so good.

I still feel like a little girl, trapped in a body I never properly learned to conduct so every sound is a jagged note. But I try.