“Hi! My name is Vhairi and I am wearing grey for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) awareness.
BPD is a personality disorder that affects your relationship with yourself and others, with unstable and extreme mood fluctuations. Other symptoms include risk-taking and impulsive behaviours, dissociation, chronic feelings of depression and anxiety, “splitting” (switching from strong love/adoration for someone to strong hatred/annoyance, without any clear reasons why), and more.
Since I was about 6, I never felt comfortable in my body, and the hatred for myself only continued to escalate. Ultimately, this, as well as other factors, led me to developing depression, anxiety and an eating disorder.
I lost the majority of my teenage years to my mind - unable to enjoy things, avoiding social situations, starving and harming myself, wanting to kill myself, etc. When I started to receive treatment, I was quite stuck in my ways.
In high school, I was hospitalised for a suicide attempt and never quite returned to school after that. After hospital, my therapist and psychiatrist brought up the possible diagnosis of BPD, which gave me hope and made me feel like I could start to understand why I was the way I was.
Although I felt this diagnosis fit me perfectly, I was faced with family thinking it didn’t fit me at all. This made me think that I was “looking for a diagnosis”, that what I was feeling wasn’t real because “they didn’t see it”. It took me years to be able to say that I had it, without feeling like I was an attention-seeker.
I moved to the Netherlands when I was 19, and it got better, for a while. However, I started to receive help again in 2020, and I won’t sugarcoat it. I’m not doing well and treatment is flippin’ hard, especially with the pandemic. In 2020, I also started up a blog to share my stories/thoughts and bring more awareness to mental health.
I can’t promise you it always gets better, but I can promise you that there will always be someone willing to help.” @vhairiannoyed
BPD is a personality disorder that affects your relationship with yourself and others, with unstable and extreme mood fluctuations. Other symptoms include risk-taking and impulsive behaviours, dissociation, chronic feelings of depression and anxiety, “splitting” (switching from strong love/adoration for someone to strong hatred/annoyance, without any clear reasons why), and more.
Since I was about 6, I never felt comfortable in my body, and the hatred for myself only continued to escalate. Ultimately, this, as well as other factors, led me to developing depression, anxiety and an eating disorder.
I lost the majority of my teenage years to my mind - unable to enjoy things, avoiding social situations, starving and harming myself, wanting to kill myself, etc. When I started to receive treatment, I was quite stuck in my ways.
In high school, I was hospitalised for a suicide attempt and never quite returned to school after that. After hospital, my therapist and psychiatrist brought up the possible diagnosis of BPD, which gave me hope and made me feel like I could start to understand why I was the way I was.
Although I felt this diagnosis fit me perfectly, I was faced with family thinking it didn’t fit me at all. This made me think that I was “looking for a diagnosis”, that what I was feeling wasn’t real because “they didn’t see it”. It took me years to be able to say that I had it, without feeling like I was an attention-seeker.
I moved to the Netherlands when I was 19, and it got better, for a while. However, I started to receive help again in 2020, and I won’t sugarcoat it. I’m not doing well and treatment is flippin’ hard, especially with the pandemic. In 2020, I also started up a blog to share my stories/thoughts and bring more awareness to mental health.
I can’t promise you it always gets better, but I can promise you that there will always be someone willing to help.” @vhairiannoyed