Testimonial with Sandro
I have borderline personality disorder, and I want you to know that… I never felt normal. That’s the truth. I was born premature, and even in primary school, I had different interests than the other kids, so I was the "weird" one. I would cry at home, clinging to my mother, because I didn’t have friends; the only one who accepted me was António, a boy with cerebral palsy. So, I spent some of my recesses pushing him around in his chair. It was around that time I was diagnosed with ADHD. When adolescence came, I stayed weird. I dressed in black and listened to music by artists who had taken their own lives, and to be honest, I didn’t even want to live. I felt an emptiness and a rage I couldn’t explain like I was seeing the world through a gray filter.
After my first heartbreak at 15, I began showing my first outward symptoms: fear of abandonment, self-harm, substance abuse, and suicidal thoughts. I went to a psychiatrist when my mother saw the marks I’d made on my arms with shards and box cutters. The diagnosis came, along with quetiapine therapy, which I hated even more than the illness itself.
I had a difficult adolescence until I met a girl at a concert (the kind meant for those who don’t want to live) who gave me a stable relationship. She accepted me, my diagnosis (which I was denying at the time), and my scars. I think that’s what I wanted most until that moment—to be accepted.
With a seemingly stable relationship, which was codependence, some of my symptoms got better.
The relationship was toxic from start to finish for different reasons, one of them being my own psychological issues, but it was the closest I’ve ever been to happiness in life. I got a lot worse when my mother passed away at 46—I had intense anger outbursts, broke things, threw objects at coworkers, and again turned to substance abuse, this time with benzodiazepines. I would go to work so sedated that I sometimes fainted.
Everything fell apart when that girl, my favourite person in the world, left me after a psychotic episode in which I said horrible things to her, things I barely remember. That’s when I went back to the psychiatrist, and in an attempt to show her I wanted to get better, I accepted the diagnosis. Now, I’m just at the beginning of my struggle, and I’m going through it almost alone.
Everyone around me thinks I’m only like this because of a breakup. The truth is, I’m like this because I have borderline personality disorder. Living with borderline is hating the people we love because we feel they’ve failed us; it’s not being able to trust our own thoughts, thinking that those we love might be conspiring against us. It’s seeing people around us as either gods or demons, looking in the mirror and thinking, “Whose face is that?” It’s having suicide as a backup plan, driving somewhere and not remembering the trip because you cried yourself into dissociation. It’s going through a mountain of emotions in a single day, having an outburst and saying things you can’t remember saying.
It’s shouting, “I hate you!” and then falling to your knees, begging them not to leave you. It’s calling a thousand times and leaving voice messages you’re ashamed of later. It’s reading microexpressions and feeling hurt.
But above all, it’s feeling an existential pain at your core that drains your will to live. Living with borderline is, as Ricardo Araújo Pereira once said, “better than being dead.” But only just. Only just.
