Although tempted to begin by qualifying myself as a borderline — telling the story of how I was diagnosed; listing the diagnostic criteria; describing how and when I started cutting myself, how and when I started drinking, how and when I became crazy, how many times I’ve tried to kill myself, how many times I’ve been hospitalized — I’m instead going to begin from a place of reclaiming. I’m writing for the borderlines who are sick of clichés, who are looking for new ways to describe ourselves, to dream ourselves. I’m writing for borderlines who wish to recreate our own meanings.

Rather than beginning with an origin story, I’ll begin with a suggestion, a dare: Let’s imagine the diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder as poems that were written about us, but not for us. Let’s imagine we were used as muses for the professionals who wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Let’s imagine they’ve been at their easels and keyboards and sketchbooks and guitars for too long; now they’ve set down their artistic instruments and are in the next room taking a break. Here’s our chance to escape.

Let’s resituate ourselves. Let’s become the artists. Let’s escape their studio, rewrite their poems, and live our own meanings.

This essay is an invocation, one more piece in the unsolvable puzzle of reclaiming borderline. It is a contribution to what I’ve named borderline-thought, borderline-imagination.

The term borderline has always felt comfortable to me. It’s felt malleable, adaptable, unfixed. And I like words that are difficult to define. I’ve wrapped myself up in my cozy little diagnosis; it’s become a security blanket, tear-soaked and blood-stained, warm and soft and familiar. The diagnostic criteria has offered a problematic but still useful coherence to my psyche. Borderline is paradox and contradiction, noun and verb, forever changeable and in flux. Just like our moods, just like our co-existing selves.

Many folks with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) attempt to distance themselves from this term. Some feel confused, conflicted, or even repulsed by it. What’s soft and comfortable to me is sharp and itchy to others; what’s visionary to me seems dangerous to them. For as long as the diagnosis has existed, there have been attempts to rename it, reframe it. I won’t bore you with another list of every alternative name and definition that’s been proposed, but I will say I worry that they oversimplify the complex experience of borderline. I worry that renaming the so-called disorder is an expression of internalized ableism being externalized on those of us who still feel borderline, who still wish to claim and criticize and cultivate borderline. I worry that renaming the diagnosis without more critical thought is a sanitization and sane-itization of the madness of BPD.

For some, borderline makes one flinch, cringe, avoid. For some, borderline feels restrictive, obstructive, rigid. The diagnosis also has a long history of misogyny and saneism, the knowledge and experience of which I carry with me as I nonetheless reclaim it. Still, I love this word, this patchwork quilt of pain and care. I want to hold it, listen to it, and keep it safe.

Even the act of reclaiming borderline risks being viewed as pathological. Merely to have BPD and write about it garners accusations of narcissism and attention-seeking. To discuss pain, to describe not wanting to live, leads to accusations of manipulation.

Sometimes we’re described as lacking empathy, other times as overly empathic. We’ve been described as both over-sensitive and empty shells. We’ve been described as both highly imaginative and creative, both parasitic and self-absorbed.

I want to shift borderline from constricting to liberating, from given to taken, from victimhood to survival, from destructive to creative. I want to acknowledge the spaces between and around each of these words, and resist black-and-white thinking in my reclamations. I want to resist categorization and classification. I want my identities, my feelings, and my dreams to be a constellation or whole cosmology, necessarily contradictory.

I’m reclaiming borderline. This word belongs to me — it could belong to you, too. Let’s dream new meanings into it. I’m using the word borderline with affection, care, and reverence. I want this word, borderline, when I speak it, to conjure emotional sensitivity that sometimes looks like self-destruction, yes, but is also used to create criticism and compassion. I want it to conjure art, care, friendship, and resistance.

What do you want the word borderline to conjure? What do art, care, friendship, and resistance look and feel like to you?

People with BPD often distance themselves from words like manipulative or narcissistic, sometimes going so far as to use them as insults. But I’m fascinated by these particular words, fascinated by what are or are not socially acceptable ways of seeking attention or asking for support; I choose to embrace these words and explore them in my own odd ways.

I don’t wish to distance myself from the so-called negative traits of BPD, but to be honest about my experience with them. In embracing borderline, I acknowledge the unpleasant truths and realities as well. The suffering is real. And these particular words are contentious, I know. So this is not just a reclaiming, but potentially a provocation as well. Because I know those diagnosed with BPD and those not diagnosed might squirm as they read this piece. I’m okay with you squirming, as long as you listen.

Reclaiming borderline isn’t about being likeable. I like unlikeable characters. And I know that I’m not exempt from having caused harm. I’m living a messy, imperfect, mad life. Reclaiming borderline is about inhabiting opposites and multitudes. It’s about resisting the sane gaze. It’s a form of resuscitation and regeneration: anointing words like borderline, and recovery, and [fill in the blank with your own imagination] with new political significance — the way we have with mad, queer, crazy, crip/cripple; the way we’re doing with witch. It’s about locating the spaces between and around hope and futility, and reorienting ourselves.

Having been in and out of mental health treatment since childhood, and in and out of inpatient psych wards about a dozen times over the last decade, and then being diagnosed with BPD more than five years ago, my manifold and overlapping perspectives of how and why I was/am “crazy” are constantly shifting. Today, they continue to multiply. While BPD is often, and rightly, criticized as a form of pathologizing moods and behaviors that patriarchal institutions and those employed by them deem “too feminine” (for example: intense mood swings, a preoccupation with oneself, seemingly irrational behaviors and fears, irresponsibility, over-sensitivity, disturbing and uncomfortable feelings and ideas, rage or jealousy or paranoia that seems disproportionate to the situation, etc.), these are only a small portion of my borderline experience, and it’s also, to me, both a real illness and a valid way of being in the world.

I’ve experienced enough invalidation, either directly while attempting to access care, or through microaggressions and lack of understanding or compassion, both inside and outside of institutions, to know that borderline is a term I must reclaim, rather than abandon. (But as I said, I am not here to tell “the borderline story,” but rather to reimagine what that story could look like.)

I dream of borderlines — those I’ll know and those I’ll never know, those I’ve known and not known simultaneously — living their lives; I think of borderlines with and without access to diagnoses, with and without access to meaningful and competent care. I dream of borderlines who feel unsure of the word borderline, borderlines abandoned again and again. I dream of queer, disabled, lonely borderlines; crip, chronically ill borderlines; femme, feminist, trans, and non-binary borderlines.

I dream of borderlines who’ve died and who will die, who make a tough and conscious effort to stay alive each day; suicidal borderlines, artists, witches, weirdos, writers; borderlines who are out and borderlines who are not, alcoholic and sober borderlines, sensitive, crazy, hysterical borderlines; self-destructive and self-creative borderlines, shy borderlines, healing borderlines, borderlines who work and borderlines who can’t and borderlines who don’t want to. I dream of borderlines on social assistance, medicated and unmedicated borderlines, neurotic and psychotic borderlines, uncool and unpopular borderlines, survivor borderlines . . . and all us whose identities are overlapping, locating ourselves in the opposites and intersections.

What does it mean to identify with a diagnosis when the “goal” of “recovery” is to no longer qualify for diagnosis? What does it mean to be diagnosed with a condition that, for decades, if literature was available at all, was often — and sometimes continues to be — about how to eliminate us from your life, how to divorce us, how to recover from us, how to treat us, and how to no longer be us?

What would it mean to make borderline a desirable place to be? Is it resistance to pathologization and medicalization that compels one to resist the current borderline label, or is it internalized ableism and sexism?

What does it mean that so many of us are living in circumstances that feel unbearable? What does it mean to recover with borderline rather than from borderline? What does it mean to recognize there’s nothing inherently wrong with borderlines, but everything wrong with the cultures and systems we’re expected to endure? What would it look like to be able to talk about suicidal ideation without being called manipulative? What does it look like to resist the sanitization and sane-itization of mainstream narratives of BPD? What does it mean to not want to be post-borderline or ex-borderline? Can we reclaim borderline while resisting pathologization, ableism, classism, misogyny, transmisogyny, transphobia, and queerphobia? What would it mean to imagine, and to become, borderline elders with mad histories and lineages?

I want not only to provide hope, but to reimagine, reinterpret, and redefine recovery, healing, coping, creating; to renegotiate diagnostic language, and the inherent -isms and stigma contained within medical and diagnostic terms; to resist narratives of battling and overcoming and transcending and triumphing. I want to share my process and continue moving beyond stereotypes of BPD while acknowledging the times when I’ve knowingly or unknowingly conformed to particular stereotypes.

I want to claim borderline again and again, to move through my own preconceptions regarding what it means to be a borderline, what I might be capable of. And I wish to capture some of my visions in words, and encourage other borderlines to dream with me.

“When you’re dealing with the borderline situation, any imperfection feels like a complete threat not only to the relationship, but to the sense of identity and the sense of safety in the world. It can go in one direction or both directions. In other words, it could be the parent transmitting to the child: If you don’t complete me, I’m going to fall apart. Or the child could take it on and feel the same way: If you don’t complete me, I’m going to fall apart. Of course, the worst of all possible worlds is when it goes back and forth.”

By Diana-Ashley Krach

I have never been a fan of glossy, commercialized fairy tales, nor one to choose the princess role in a game of make-believe. What I thought stemmed from a natural tomboy resistance to all things sparkly and ethereal, I realize now was really a rejection of the darker sides of these fanciful stories. Those parts were all too familiar: the servant being verbally abused by her family, the girl locked up in a tower, the daughter sacrificing herself to save her helpless parent.

The wolf blowing down my house of brick wasn’t fictional — she was my mother.

My mother has borderline personality disorder (BPD), although I didn’t always know this. Even into adulthood, all I knew were our falling-outs, her suffocating narcissism, her undermining me, criticizing my marriage, pitting my siblings against one another.

It wasn’t until a friend gave me Surviving a Borderline Parent that everything started coming into focus. Written by Kimberlee Roth with the help of Freda Freidman, Ph.D., LCSW — a therapist with an extensive background in counseling BPDs and members of their families — the book explores and elucidates the sides of fairy tales that I was acquainted with. Each page peeled back a layer of my upbringing, pulling on the messy ball of string that I once thought was my life; I wanted to dance out the overwhelming feeling of validation.

I learned that borderline personality disorder is a mental illness associated with unstable personal relationships, volatile mood changes, eating disorders, and rage outbursts. An individual with BPD lacks a clear sense of self, and often projects their behavior onto others. BPDs “split,” which means they see things as all good or bad, black and white, no in-between. People with BPD have a core wound of abandonment, often stemming from a traumatic childhood event, which leaves them with an arrested emotional development. This keeps BPDs from interacting in age-appropriate ways, and creates a “parentified” child, meaning that the BPD parent counts on the non-BPD child to assume the adult role. Children of BPD parents tend to feel severe anxiety, and as adults, report missing chunks of memory from their childhood.

On the relationship between a BPD parent and a non-BPD child, psychiatrist David M. Reiss tells me:

Janet Zinn, a psychotherapist, adds that BPD parents exist in their own constructed realities, which can be challenging for a child to navigate: “It’s so confusing for a child, because we get our reality in some ways from our parents, and if their reality is skewed, the child is always trying to figure out what is real, what is not real.”

As it turns out, for the children of borderline parents, fairy tales can play a role in this sorting out of reality from fiction. Understanding the disorder, how it manifests, and how it shaped one’s upbringing is, in fact, central to healing. To this end, Surviving a Borderline Parent explores how BPDs can have personalities that fall under four primary fairy tale archetypes: The Witch, The Queen, The Hermit, and The Waif, a concept originated by Christine Ann Lawson, Ph.D. Each type personifies the various traits a BPD can possess at any given time. Some people may only ever see one personality type, or some may see different ones emerge depending on the situation.

My mother was always a combination of The Queen or The Witch, but the other types also made frequent appearances. These were the characters in the tale of my upbringing.

The Witch

Witches feel white-hot rage and harbor a deep fear of abandonment; it’s because of this fear that the Witch acts out in deeply vengeful ways, without a shred of regret. They are often domineering and intrusive, their mindset black and white — “If you’re not with me, you’re against me!” — which results in their blacklisting even close family members. This type is the most resistant to therapy; they possess a deep self-loathing and despise being viewed as “weak.” Children of the Witch live in fear of triggering the mother, developing anxiety and, in some cases, PTSD.

***

A couple of years ago, I wrote a personal essay about the death of my biological father. My mother was the only troll in the comment section. She flooded the comments with claims of my dishonesty, my weakness, my inability to write. We’d been estranged for over two years, so I chose to contact my editor about the harassment rather than give her a personal response, which is what she wanted. Prior to our estrangement, she would explode in rage, for whatever reason, and I would respond like a scared puppy — always begging forgiveness for something beyond my control.

Once she noticed her comment being deleted, she pushed back even harder, creating alternate profiles and posting intensely private information about my husband and my sister. Threats of exposing information that would make my life easily hackable almost provoked me to respond, but I fought the urge and was able to have her comments deleted.

Days went by without incident, but a week later, I saw her name pop up in my email inbox. “BLOODLINE” was the subject and the message read: “I WILL ALWAYS BE A PART OF YOU NO MATTER WHAT.”

The Waif

Waifs tend to complain, but refuse help; they fish for compliments and then reject flattery. A Waif may present the image of a helpless victim, but can be very manipulative. Common complaints of life being unsatisfactory are typical with this type; they feel as though they will never get what they want out of life.

***

When I was about 6 years old, I walked into my mother’s bedroom to see her sitting on the bed, weeping openly. This shocked my system to its core; she was a woman who preached the virtues of getting over things quickly, no whining. She told me that she hated her life — everything about it — so I jumped to her side and promised I would make everything better one day. Because of that promise, I took on her responsibilities until well into my young adult life: paying bills, babysitting, cleaning, budgeting — whatever she couldn’t delegate to another family member. It wasn’t an issue of her competence; she just expected it all to be done for her.

To those who only knew her on a superficial level, she was the picture of independence and strength — no one could comprehend how she managed it all on her own. My siblings and I never received an award for doing the daily adult tasks; there was never so much as a thank you for making her life manageable.

The Hermit

The Hermit sees the world as a dangerous place, and views people as inherently untrustworthy. A Hermit’s unyielding distrust often stems from childhood trauma, and with 75% of people diagnosed with BPD being women, many of those traumatic instances include sexual abuse.

***

My mother made me painfully aware of the trauma she experienced at a very young age: Before I was in kindergarten, I had read children’s books on sexual abuse, and I was hyper-aware of strangers, always on guard for potential danger. My mother’s one consistent message was: Don’t ever trust anyone, especially men — including your husband. This created an anxiety that was only amplified by the extreme measures she took to drill this lesson into me. She followed me home from school pretending to be a stranger, and I would be in big trouble if I answered the door for her. No matter what she said or did, I was not to answer the door, so I hid behind my couch as she screamed at me through the window.

The Queen

Queens are disingenuous and ruthless; they have no issue bending rules to favor a personal agenda. Impatience and irritability are frequent: The Queen requires nothing less than fierce loyalty in everyone, and sees any difference in opinion as insolence. Partners and children of the Queen know it’s easier to acquiesce than fight her; she will never admit when she is wrong, always refusing to take responsibility for anything. Children are but a reflection of the Queen — she expects her offspring to behave only as she sees fit, even into adulthood.

***

My mother never once apologized for making me cry or hurting my feelings; she is a wizard at deflecting blame. She also demanded that my siblings and I put her first, even before our spouses. Because I chose to put my husband first, she disowned me on a semi-monthly basis. Because I chose to meet my biological father in person, I betrayed her, and she disowned me for several months. Because I felt protective of my sister’s feelings, my mother viewed me as being disloyal to her, and disowned both of us.

She disowned me more times than I could ever count.

A Different Ever After

Both Reiss and Zinn agree that in order for an adult child of BPD to heal, they must mourn the loss of the childhood they felt they should have had. In most cases, the only way for the non-BPD to move on is by extricating themselves from the toxic parental relationship. Reiss says that an important step in healing is differentiating between abuse and disappointment. Up until a few years ago, I was unable to recognize my mother’s toxic and abusive behavior. With the help of online support and BPD resources, however, I’ve learned how to spot similar traits in other people. I still have a long way to go — the most random song or smell can trigger a panic attack at any given moment — but I finally feel like I’m moving in the right direction.

Before I found Surviving a Borderline Parent, I would use humor to deflect details about my past, skating around the truth just enough to keep from alarming anyone. There was always a tiny voice — her voice — somewhere in my mind echoing a common refrain from my youth, chastising me for complaining “when others have it so much worse.” No matter what I do, that voice will always be there to some degree, but now I know how to confront it.

This isn’t about complaining, it’s about healing.

I realized long ago that I am not looking for someone to rescue me, pity me, or give me a happy ending. My fairy tale as a child was unconditional love from a mother, maternal support without expectation. But now I understand that is exactly what it was — a fairy tale. My shot at happily ever after requires that I understand and accept this.

***

Lead image of John Anster Fitzgerald’s “The Fairy Barque”: flickr/Sofi

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