The Broken Pottery Division

 This is one of the first pieces I wrote about my struggle with BPD in 2022. It's a nice reminder to myself that no matter how I feel at the moment, I am not a monster.

The Broken Pottery Division

In the Great Lockdown of 2020, one of my friends invited me to join a small group of neurodivergent people on Facebook. It was a safe place, they said. We’ve got memes!

I accepted, but secretly I worried that despite my anxiety and depression, I wasn’t neurodivergent enough. “I’m boring and normal,” I lamented to a different friend. “And sad.”

She hastily reassured me that of all the things I was and would ever be, normal wasn’t one of them, and I wasn’t boring, either. As for me being sad? That was true, and we both knew it.

The group was warm and welcoming, and the promised memes flooded in. After a while I noticed something strange. “Why are people posting things and saying it’s about ADHD?” I asked. “Those things are normal… I do that all the time!”

Around the fiftieth time this happened, I thought perhaps I should look into ADHD a bit more—clearly one of us was wrong, and it was likely to be me.

 🖌

I had little to no previous experience with ADHD. When I thought of ADHD, I thought of the two boys in my primary school, at two different times. They were hyper and disobedient. They were medicated. They were… weird. 

I was weird, and I had moments of hyperactivity, but I was not often disobedient. It caused far too much anxiety to be actively disobedient. Therefore, I reasoned, I couldn’t possibly have ADHD. Later, I learned that ADHD presents differently in women. I read article after article about adult ADHD in women, and one lightbulb went off over my head, and another lit up in my heart. I felt so… vindicated. I went to bed that night at 95 percent sure I had ADHD.

If we were all pieces of pottery, this meant I wasn’t part of a faulty batch of teacups. I was just made from a different material.

“I’m nervous.” I admitted to my boyfriend one afternoon. “What if I don’t really have ADHD—” I leaned around him and pointed over his shoulder, “—look, is that a rosella? I saw one in the city the other day!” I returned to where I was curled up on the kitchen chair and continued my sentence like normal. “And I’m just some kind of batshit?”

He laughed, but not unkindly. “You just interrupted yourself to point out the bird behind me. You have ADHD.”

 🖌

A short time later, I received the time and date for a session with a psychiatrist. I went in with a storm of butterflies in my chest, despite being confident about the outcome. At the end, she confirmed my suspicions: ADHD.

Yes! I was elated. Not batshit after all! 

Then I realised she was still speaking. She was asking me how I would feel if she said I also had BPD—Borderline Personality Disorder. 

My world shuddered. 

Static filled me, numbing my lips and my fingers. The elation I’d felt had melted and I couldn’t think. I couldn’t feel. Or maybe I was feeling too much. It was all too much. “I think… I think that would make sense,” I heard myself say from a great distance away. “I wouldn’t like it. But it would make sense.”

Inside, I shattered, like clay fired at the wrong temperature.

  🖌

On the way home from work, I cried in the Uber. The driver was the nicest man, and I could tell he was sad that I was sad. He told me funny stories, and then he told me about how he used to be a pharmacist before he came to Australia. In the safety of my house, I let down what little of my guard that remained, curled up on the couch, and bawled. 

I’d already texted my friends to tell them it was ADHD. And now I told them about the BPD. “I’m a monster,” I wailed.

“What?”

“I’m a monster,” I repeated, choked up on snot and emotion. This realisation made me cry harder. Despite the name, BPD is an emotional dysregulation disorder. Later, I learned that for me, it meant I had no emotional middle ground. There was no logical progression or regression to my feelings. It was either all or nothing, and right then I was turned up to eleven. 

“… Did you Google BPD?”

“Yes.”

That was huge mistake. Instead of telling me I was dying of cancer, as Googling illnesses is wont to do, the Internet told me I was a human cancer—and that me and others like me were the worst kind of people there is, right up there with actually terrible people, like murderers and rapists. 

The pages blurred together. There was nothing nice to say about BPD. Nothing.

‘Manipulative’ was a common descriptor. ‘Destructive’ was another. Then I read: “… a death sentence on a relationship…’

I thought I couldn’t possibly panic any more than I already was, but I managed. I’d just told my boyfriend about the ADHD and the BPD, and because he’s not the world’s fastest and most engaged texter at the best of times, I hadn’t yet received a response. 

I found myself gasping for air, the numbness once again spreading through my limbs.

I’d never thought of myself as manipulative; I’d never tried! I wasn’t known for my subtlety, and my lack of tact had gotten me into hot water again and again over the years. I didn’t manipulate—I attacked. 

Obviously, he hasn’t responded because he’s trying to figure out how to break up with you, my brain supplied. It likes to think it’s being helpful. He’s going to break up with you because you’re a monster and he didn’t sign up to date a monster. (Hello, Patented BPD Fear of Abandonment! Fancy seeing you here!)

During this argument with myself, four words I had heard over and over and over again in relationships and friendships gone by began flashing through my mind: Too much. Not enough. Too much. Not enough…

“It’s my fault,” I continued to sob, “everything bad that has ever happened to me is my fault. I’m the drama! I’m the cause of those failed friendships and relationships! I’m the cause of the fights and explosions. I’m a monster.”

While we didn’t know what I was experiencing was called a BPD episode, it wasn’t the first (or last) time I’d had one. My friends took it fairly well in stride and reminded me I wasn’t the only one at fault in those situations. While I didn’t always start the fight, I was often the one who finished it, and the fallout was never pretty. 

They told me they loved me no matter what, that the BPD wasn’t the be all and end all. I was still me, still their friend, and now my mental illness had a name. It didn’t change who I was already.  They gently avoided pointing out I was being selfish by taking on all the blame that was not mine to take.

My phone buzzed. My boyfriend replied, and with the same inexorable kindness and patience he often responds to me with, he reassured me I was still the same person I had been earlier that day. I just had new labels.

  🖌

The last seven months haven’t been easy. Receiving the diagnosis, strangely, did not fix everything, like part of me hoped it would. There have been some wonderful highs and some incredible lows.

Generally, I’ve told people as I’ve felt compelled to. Sometimes it’s because I’m a chronic oversharer, and sometimes it’s out of necessity. I have never felt wrongly judged or dismissed by these people I have chosen to let into my life. Only once have I regretted sharing, and that was because I was essentially bullied into it. They threatened to stop speaking to me, to lower our rate of contact because they felt I was being ‘toxic’ by withholding my diagnosis from them. This threat triggered the Patented BPD Fear of Abandonment, so I gave them what they wanted. Angrily. 

Afterwards, I was a flurry of rage. I wasn’t ready! I told myself. I wasn’t ready. 

I admitted to my psychologist I felt like a failure because I hadn’t managed to keep that part of me safe. They reassured me I was not a failure, and that we’re working on progress, not perfection. A fitting mantra.

  🖌

Since receiving my BPD diagnosis, I have learned that although I may feel it, I am not alone. I have learned there is hope with this illness, and it’s likely that I’ll recover. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be pleasant, but it is not a death sentence for a relationship, or a friendship, or for myself. 

And though I may be a fragile teacup held together with gold and ink, I am loved, and I am beautiful, and I am whole. 

I am not a monster.