Hello!

Thank you so much for visiting my blog. I hope you like what you find here  – even more importantly, I hope that it’s helpful to you and provides a sense of understanding and support. Reading others’ blogs on mental health issues has been hugely helpful for me in gaining more insight into my difficulties, and in gaining support, understanding, and a sense of community with others who are going through similar experiences. I hope, therefore, that this blog will, in a small way, serve a similar sort of function for others who are struggling with Borderline Personality Disorder or other mental health difficulties, or for those who are supporting them.

As for me, I am a wife and a working mum, and I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder a couple of years ago. I also have a history of Panic Disorder. I have been in therapy of various kinds on and off for a few years, and the process has helped me to understand that despite a relatively symptom free six years, much of my life, since my mid to late teens, has been a cycle of ups and down, depression, anxiety, panic disorder, turbulent periods, impulsive behaviour and intense relationships. The period in which I would say I was in ‘BPD remission’, came to an end with the massive life change of the birth of my first child, which launched me back into all the symptoms I had been familiar with for many years before. I am hoping that being therapy will enable me to slowly move towards ‘remission’ once again, and that I will have learnt enough through that process, to prevent a similar return to BPD symptoms the next time I encounter a major life event.

Learning more about BPD and reading about others’ experiences has finally made sense of so many things and so many events, thoughts and feelings in my own life. I am now trying to accept and very slowly move forward with the task of finding out who I am and putting together a ‘new person’, piece by painful piece. Not someone who is a collection of other people’s expectations, hopes, values and interests, but someone who can be a  ‘beautiful contradiction’ and who does not need to feel part of the fabric of another’s existence, in order to feel happy and secure. Sometimes it seems impossible, and sometimes I feel hopeful. I hope this blog will chart both the highs and the lows, and thank you again for looking in on my journey. xxx