I think everyone thinks I’m like them. I’m honestly not
Photo by Nick Fancher on Unsplash
I recently had to jump through some hoops to gain access to a dialectical behavioral therapy (“DBT”) program.
The program psychiatrists kept asking me a bunch of ridiculous questions. It seemed like they were trying to make sure I had enough borderline personality disorder to feel secure that they weren’t wasting their precious DBT resources on me. It was frustrating. It was frustrating because this organization is the one whose staff diagnosed me in the first place.
They’ve given me this diagnosis that I have to sit down and break to my boyfriend as if I’m pregnant or something — worse, because you can abort a pregnancy (at least where I live), but you can’t abort a medical diagnosis — actually, let me restart. They’re the ones who have given me this diagnosis that I carry around as a dark cloud I feel I must hide from others, like it’s some kind of curse me and my loved ones both have to deal with; you’ve already handed me this burden, just stop asking so many questions and refer me to the treatment already, please.
I was diagnosed with a personality disorder in 2022.
It came as no surprise. I resonated with the diagnosis as early as 16-years-old when I first learned about it. By the time I was 19 or 20, I was effectively self-diagnosed. Finally, when I was 22-years-old, I was diagnosed by a doctor. (Then again about six months ago). Despite already knowing, I could then, as of three years ago, officially proclaim myself as “having” the disorder.
Personality disorders aren’t uncommon in the United States, per say, but the people in my life certainly do not have one. In that sense, if I chose to talk about my diagnosis, I could absolutely stick out if I wanted to. This is one of the reasons I don’t go around spouting my diagnosis at everyone, and why I honestly prefer to forget about it.
There are other reasons as well, like the stigma and negativity that accompanies the diagnosis, which truthfully keeps me stuck the more I identify with the label and the people in the community, through no fault of their own. The more I publicly identify with my diagnosis, the more awkward, sad, and uncomfortable I feel. For the most part, in my public life, I act like it doesn’t exist. I know it’s real. Trust me, I do. But with my friends, my roommates, my family, my partner, on social media, and anywhere else where people exist, I don’t talk about it: never, or extremely, extremely rarely, with caution.
Photo by Nick Fancher on Unsplash
In my private life, behind the curtains, when it’s just me and no one else, it is integrated into my life. I accept it, and I talk about it with myself in my head and in the mirror. I do talk about it with my therapists as well and with anyone else involved in my treatment, as this feels private and personal. I journal, I take my Seroquel, I open my DBT book, and I Google the information I need about those three words that define my mental wellbeing.
It’s not like getting the diagnosis is what brought my unique mental health experiences into existence. There was a reality of my mental state before I was diagnosed. There are also valid reasons to want to heal without the burden of a label. I have written a separate, soon-to-be published piece on the struggles of having been given a diagnosis by a doctor that is viewed poorly by many and is highly socially stigmatized. Consequently, I support anyone who wants to address their mental health challenges without identifying with a diagnostic name at all. I validate and even applaud myself for not relying on a DSM-5 title to define or explain away the complexities of my life or my personality. I don’t want to do that, even in the slightest.
At the same time, I feel like if I were to say the name of the disorder around others, something in the room just wouldn’t be right. The people in my life seem to think I’m pretty normal. I don’t want to make them feel otherwise. Because the label feels taboo, so does everything I undergo underneath its umbrella.
I don’t like feeling this way, and I feel like, to some extent, I am pretending with others; sadly, even with those to whom I am the closest. I frequently find myself dealing with strange mental health experiences that totally consume me: things to which I don’t think (or I know) others in my life cannot relate. And, because of my diagnosis, I don’t feel like I can talk about it. I dumb down what I am going through to try to make it sound understandable and relatable — “normal” — to others.
I am really tired of that.
Photo by Nick Fancher on Unsplash
I’m tired of it because there are multiple ways my life is different from others that I wish they would understand, and I wish I was comfortable talking about it. Everyone struggles, but I regularly endure so many unique mental experiences that I wish I could shout out to my loved ones so they know just what I go through and how disruptive it is for me. I want them to know so badly that just because I’m “stable,” it does not mean everything is okay inside my head.
I so deeply want to try to detail the painful, concerning, and upsetting moments my brain riles up so often. They don’t need to relate, but I want them to understand, and for that to happen, I need to try to explain. I wish I was comfortable doing that. Because it is true, indeed, that I engage in life in a different way than most, if not all of my loved ones, in multiple ways.
I do not care at all about something until I become obsessed, and I am not familiar with settling on a balance of caring and valuing something without being entirely consumed by an attachment to it. This mysterious balance that seems to come so easily to others in every area of their lives is something I rarely find, and I wish my loved ones knew this about me. By not talking about this, and, more importantly, how hard this is for me, I pretend that it isn’t the case. I hide this part of my life.
I sometimes experience paranoia. There’s no way around that fact. I have anti-psychotics for a reason. “Paranoia” is a hard word for people to swallow, because it falls in the realm of “delusions,” and the word “delusions” makes people uncomfortable in conversations of mental health.
But I can be extremely paranoid at times, and I cannot go on with my normal life when I believe a certain negative vindication about someone or something to be true. I wish my loved ones knew this. I don’t talk about it, because I don’t want them to think there is something wrong with me, but by not talking about it, I pretend this is not the case. It sucks, because this paranoia will entirely affect (ruin) my day, and hiding this reality from the people I care about is perpetually exhausting.
When I am hurt, hurt is all I am. My hurt is so big, and so deep, and so painful, and so encompassing that I cannot go on with anything else like eating, sleeping, feeling empathy sometimes, or normal conversations when I do feel this hurt. The thing is, this hurt can be a result of an incident as objectively small as a friend cancelling plans for a valid reason. I will become undoubtably debilitated by an incident like this. I know the drastic extent of these reactions is not something that is relatable to others, so I don’t talk about how I experience these moments. I am just tired of not talking about it. I wish other people knew.
Photos by Jené Stephaniuk and Alexandra Gorn (respectively) on Unsplash
It’s not that I don’t want to talk about my diagnosis. I want to open up about my unusual experiences, and the taboo diagnosis I’ve been given holds me back. When everything’s fine, I put on the persona that I am more or less the same mentally and emotionally as everyone else, which means I don’t know what the hell to do or how to explain it when something goes wrong and I handle it in a way that must appear strange or “off” to other people. I try to communicate and explain my reactions, behaviors, and emotions in a way that curtails them to appear as [neuro]typical as possible, which is fine, as we are all human; nonetheless, I desperately want to explicitly acknowledge with the people in my life that “I am different from you in multiple ways, and this label can explain it better than I can.”
Why I won’t do this is complicated. The poorly looked-upon label in society at-large complicates the matter severely. I think I cannot make what I go through make sense to others without relating it to a familiar diagnosis, but I also do not feel comfortable explaining what I go through in relation to my diagnosis. What do I do about this? This is the part I do not know. This is one of the reasons I sometimes wish the DSM-5 did not exist.
Nonetheless, I am tired of pretending my diagnosis does not affect me. I’m different. I’m unique. I struggle in a way a sea of people would look at and go, “huh.” Shielding this from others is precarious, yet so is talking about it. I just want to open up, but I can’t risk living a life as someone who makes my loved ones uncomfortable because I apparently have something inherently “wrong” with my personality.
I cannot say for sure that this would happen. I have no idea. It depends on the person, and I know there are certainly people in my life who would never see me negatively because of a diagnosis. Still, there is always a risk, and it’s one I’ve generally avoided taking altogether until now.
My diagnosis makes so much sense to me, but it is also such a tough social burden for me to bear. The reason I want to open up about it is the exact reason I really wish it did not exist. My loved ones are incredible, kind, and open-minded people. Regardless, we are universally conditioned to see personality disorders as “bad,” and the people in my life love me, and they see me as good.
I completely understand why that could be a tough contradiction for them to handle.
I’m Tired of Pretending My Diagnosis Doesn’t Affect Me was originally published in Invisible Illness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.