Living with Depression and Borderline Personality Disorder 👥

An honest account of my recent struggle with mental health (TW CW suicide, suicidal ideations).

That bad mental health is life-destroying is obvious enough, but we must remember that it does so on several different levels.

There is, of course, the ever-present risk of suicide, which literally destroys your life (and does immeasurable damage to those you know and love). But persistent ideations alone can obliterate your sense of self-worth and fatally fuck with your ability to function, especially at a job. The kind of emotional labor required to spend an evening thinking about harming yourself and dealing with customers the very next morning is titanically draining, and the feelings of being overwhelmed engenders more suicidal ideations.

It’s a nasty cycle.

Generally speaking, depression is nothing new to most people, and there are plenty of healthy, real-world reasons to feel depressed. Especially of recent.

But clinical-depression is not something most people are anywhere near as familiar with, and its intensity and longevity can be just as taxing on the individual as it can be on everyone else in their life. These episodes can last months, and my last one was almost three.

Depression like that evokes a kind of attrition usually only seen in trench warfare; a slow and grinding obliteration of all sense of time and desire.

Now being trans and suffering from Major Depressive Disorder only would be quite enough in terms of a struggle, and until only recently that was the assumption I was operating under.

For MDD and Borderline Personality Disorder are frequently symptomatic in tandem, and the latter is often missed and misdiagnosed for bring the former, only. This makes BPD relatively hard to catch, much less to begin to properly treat.

Until about a month or so ago, I was dealing with the aforementioned bout of really nasty mental health, the worst—and longest, three months—manic-depressive episode of my life. And a lot of it looked like clinical depression, especially the persistent ideations and the constantly low—and fluctuating—moods. Only in hindsight does the borderline of it all come through, as it also does for seemingly much of my life.

However, when you’re oblivious to the signs you should be looking for, or even what such signs mean or look like themselves, you cannot properly articulate in your mind’s eye what it is you need to be mindful of in terms of patterns and repeat behavior.

Knowing that I have clinical depression, I stopped drinking (and haven’t drank since) as soon as the episode started, knowing all too-well that alcohol is a depressant. But I didn’t have an equivalent for the BPD; I saw the behavior patterns, of course, but I couldn’t see their meaning.

I quit my steady job and then in desperation got another one in the thick of the manic-depressive fog, and it went badly. The classic array of borderline tendencies and symptoms were on full display, as heightened and chaotic as they have ever been. This month-long job became a microcosm of what the disease is, a show that played out before a staff of coworkers totaling a hundred-plus; I charmed people and then overwhelmed them, and then I burnt out.

This is how my entire life feels, to some degree.

I was diagnosed only after I quit both jobs.

The insecurity, of course, is that the many people you’ve dealt with while sick—friends, coworkers, strangers, customers, all—think that you’re crazy, a word I would never use on anyone save myself. Because you certainly feel crazy in those moments. A lot of the time reality only fully clocks in in retrospect, and everything feels like a bad waking dream.

Experiencing this alongside the experience of being a trans femme, dealing with violent harassment and the full spectrum of men’s anger and hostility, is life-crashing, and it certainly crashed mine.

And I make no excuses for my behavior, which is what makes it so particularly heartbreaking —you’re watching yourself make habitually bad choices and respond to people poorly time-after-time again. And even though it doesn’t often feel like you, it is you. You are responsible, especially when you do not prioritize or reject treatment, and neglect implementing healthy coping practices.

I have been guilty of this; of rejecting treatment, and of not taking my meds every single day.

And you know what? It always makes things significantly worse, that’s the reality of the situation. Part of the reason I’m doing significantly better now is that I have finally found—with the help of professionals—a good combo of meds (to treat both disorders) and by taking them every single day.

But of course before getting to this point, I watched and participated in ruining my own life. And I did it repeatedly.

And now I don’t have much aside from the broken pieces, and it breaks my heart knowing what a pile of wreckage I’ve left in my wake. It often feels like I’m living in the giant crater of my own extinction-inducing comet. But where there is a lot of grief and worry, there is also hope.

Small, but it’s there.

To name the thing is to know the thing. And to know the thing is to better treat the thing. Money may be nonexistent, but I still have resources, including all of the incredible people still in my life.

A life I am desperate to build back.