It Takes All My Strength to Keep It Calm: Managing Borderline Personality With My Second Skin

“I have to tell myself, it’s better just to breathe”

This issue of GIRL MUSIC is different than the rest; it’s still about an artist, but this time it’s me. 

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Words: Juno Rylee Schultz (she/her)
Edits: Morgan Shaver (they/them), Nathan Miller (he/him), and Bex Stump (she/her)

Source: I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me: Third Edition: Understanding the Borderline Personality by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus 

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It was June again, and I found myself in another miserable, tragically familiar situation.

Twisting on the floor and crying, I had no control over my body—physically or otherwise. Choking and screaming, I couldn’t breathe. It felt like there was no bottom, no lid, to anything I was feeling.

I had accidentally hurt someone I love—badly—and I did it all while thinking I was helping and being loving. They wanted space—a break from me—and told me they had no idea when they would be back in my life. They needed time to process how much I had hurt them. The fact that it was an accident only made it more confusing for us both, and more painful for them.

All I could feel through their completely valid request of “I still love you unconditionally, but you hurt me and I need space” was: “Why do you hate me? Why don’t you love me? Space? Where are you going? I can’t imagine life without you. I love you!” All of it wrapped inside a storm of rejection and abandonment—none of it real, all of it imagined.

Cut to me—uncontrollably throwing up and shaking on the living room floor—while my wife gently tries to coax me up, saying, “Hey honey, your Momma and I both think you have Borderline Personality Disorder. Let’s get you back in therapy, get a professional diagnosis, and off this ride you’ve been stuck on.”

Within a few days, I had finished I Hate You—Don’t Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality—a book my wife, Mom, and I were all reading to understand the storms that were attacking me inside my head.

I was back in therapy within a week and given a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)—I had all nine symptoms—along with the tools necessary to tackle the roller coaster that had taken me hostage sometime around the age of 11.

It made sense for my brain to have developed Borderline Personality Disorder when I was younger given the considerable amount of sexual abuse and violence I sustained as a young girl—especially since I was forced to pretend I was a “boy” by abusive, rotten branches of my family tree.

Eventually, I broke away from that family tree—cutting myself free from it entirely—and transitioned into the beautiful, sweet girl that I’ve always been. This came with the support and unconditional love of my actual Mom after finding my Momma in Oklahoma. But my brain and body still carried all the wounds I had sustained growing up without the means to navigate feelings, or myself.

Even though my present and future were different from how things started out for me, I was still shaped into a fight-or-flight version of myself. My body continued to react to things that weren’t there—imagined feelings and paranoid delusions of abandonment—with emotional storms that could overtake me in an instant. I was happy, unconditionally loved, and safe, but my nervous system didn’t know that.

Psychologically, I was still a small child twisting and screaming on the floor. The moment abandonment—perceived or imagined—touched my missing skin, I shattered.

After receiving my diagnosis from my therapist, and learning about the roller coaster that I’d been trapped on, I spent six weeks dedicated to researching everything I could do to manage my nine symptoms. Through these efforts, I’ve finally reached a point where the things that used to make me spiral and choke now push me to make me reach for affirming statements that I know are true.

“I’ve thought about it, hell, about a million times

It takes all my strength just to keep it calm

I have to tell myself, it’s better just to breathe

Holding it inside will only help to do me in

Each time I close my eyes I see another chain

It’s one I can’t forget, something I can not break out of

I need a second skin, something to hold me up

Can’t seem to get out of this hole

I’ve dug my soul right back in

Just to wake up tells me, hell, I must be brave

It hits me like a drug shot into my vein

It’s not as delightful, delightful of a pain

Immobilizing me, almost makes me think I’m dead

Well, I need a second skin

Something to hold me tough

Can’t do it on my own

Sometimes I need just a little more help

Well, I got that chance to give every drop that’s left in me

Well, I need that second skin

Something I can not break out of”

“Second Skin” by The Gits

Lyrics by Mia Zapata

Music by Mia Zapata, The Gits

Before getting into the more granular details, the simplest way to explain what BPD is like to someone who doesn’t have it is that it’s like having “missing skin” or “emotional hemophilia.”

People affected by Borderline Personality Disorder “lack the clotting mechanism needed to moderate spurts of feeling,” and feel emotions in a much more visceral way than many others do. This is only further complicated when feelings stemming from imagined situations enter the picture.

As Dr. Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus explain in I Hate You–Don’t Leave Me: “For someone with BPD, much of life is a relentless emotional roller coaster [and for family, friends, and anyone treating someone with BPD], this trip can seem just as wild, hopeless, and frustrating.”

Someone with BPD can teleport from pure joy and bliss to despair and “everyone is leaving me, what’s happening” within a matter of seconds because of this “delicate skin” that’s so easy to prick and cut. It’s a vicious cycle for everyone involved, and because of how BPD looks to everyone around the person with the illness, the fears of loneliness often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is hope, however, despite there not being an easy pill or solution for the tentacles of such a deeply embedded illness—and it starts with understanding the illness, and how it works within individuals.

I can’t control how fast I think I’m going, but I can control how I respond to the things I think might be happening.

Mood changes come swiftly and explosively, carrying the borderline individual from the heights of joy to the depths of despair. Filled with anger one hour, calm the next, they often have little inkling as to why they were driven to such wrath. Afterward, the inability to understand the origins of the episode deepen the feelings of self-hate and depression.

As previously mentioned, a borderline individual experiences a kind of “emotional hemophilia,” meaning they lack the internal mechanism needed to regulate intense emotional surges. Prick a passion, stab a sentiment in the delicate “skin” of a borderline personality, and they bleed out emotionally.

Sustained periods of contentment are foreign to those with BPD. Chronic emptiness depletes them until they become desperate for any means of escape. In the grip of these lows, they’re prone to a myriad of impulsive, self-destructive acts—drug and alcohol binges, eating marathons, anorexic fasts, bulimic purges, gambling forays, shopping sprees, sexual promiscuity, and self-mutilation. They may even attempt suicide, often not with the intent to die, but to feel something—to confirm they are still alive.

Not everybody can be cool like me and have all nine BPD superpowers or whatever, but as long as you have at least five of the nine symptoms present, you can be diagnosed with BPD.

According to the DSM-V, BPD is diagnosed by the presence of at least five of the following nine criteria:

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real (or imagined) abandonment.
2. Unstable and intense interpersonal relationships.
3. Lack of clear sense of identity.
4. Impulsiveness in potentially self-damaging behaviors, such as substance abuse, sex, shoplifting, reckless driving, binge eating.
5. Recurrent suicidal threats or gestures, or self-mutilating behaviors.
6. Severe mood shifts and extreme reactivity to situational stresses.
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness.
8. Frequent and inappropriate displays of anger.
9. Transient, stress-related feelings of unreality or paranoia.

It’s easy to look at this list of seemingly negative traits as unrelated and intense, but once you spend more time understanding how BPD works, the more clearly you’ll see how it all fits together—and how, with effort, you can bend the illness into a superpower.

Just like an infant, the borderline individual cannot “distinguish between the temporary absence of her mother and her extinction, the borderline individual often experiences temporary aloneness as perpetual isolation.”

This extends into every other part of the borderline individual’s life, causing them to become “severely depressed over the real or perceived abandonment” of anyone they love—or anyone they think is causing this feeling or imagined situation. These feelings can merge into the individual’s sense of identity and alter how they perceive the world around them.

This phenomenon can actually be measured inside the brain of someone with BPD. In one study, positron emission tomography (PET) scanning was used to demonstrate that “women with BPD experienced alterations of blood flow in certain areas of the brain when exposed to memories of abandonment.”

These feelings of abandonment—real or imagined—can even cause disassociation on a deep and personal level. “Patients may lose the sensation of existing, of feeling real.”

In essence, loneliness is so unbearable for those with BPD that many affected individuals are unable to ever conquer feeling comfortable alone, and ultimately, with themselves.

For many people, being alone offers the chance to reflect on the day’s events, meditate, or simply to enjoy moments of quiet without interruption. However, for the borderline individual, being alone often feels like sitting in an empty room with a telescope aimed directly at their center.

It’s often during quiet moments that people are able to carve out their identity and make decisions about who they are. But for someone with BPD, unresolved loneliness can turn solitude into a held breath—one that doesn’t release until people who love them are in the room again.

This tragic relationship between “what used to keep me safe” and “who I am inside and wish I could show people” often led me to consider the feelings of everyone over myself until I was the smallest person in the room—even when it was just me in the room.

And it’s this shaky sense of identity that led to the slippery slope of thoughts like: “Do I even wanna be here? Please tell me you love me. I can’t do this without you. Oh my gosh, please, don’t go. I don’t want to be alone. You know what? If everyone I love doesn’t love me 500%, maybe I should just die.” This isn’t healthy for anyone—obviously—but when there’s a hole at the center, you cannot build a person.

I had hopes, dreams, and a personality—people I loved, and people who loved me—but we couldn’t build a life around a person who wasn’t internally allowing herself to exist.

Even when I was feeling stable and not experiencing any significant periods of crisis in my life—since finding my Momma, safety, and being able to transition and forge myself—I felt blocked by my fear of losing everyone I loved. It caused me to hold my breath, and threaten to kill myself whenever anything disruptive happened.

Because of that fear, I never felt like I could succeed or be myself, because what if I do something by accident that causes me to lose everything? The reason behind this stems from how “the borderline adult never reaches that point of confidence [required for standing on their identity confidently.”

It’s like a seed of imposter syndrome planted firmly inside the borderline individual’s center while growing up inside the environment that molded them into the BPD shape: chronic fear of violence and abandonment.

No matter how successful I became in journalism or in my work, no matter how much my Momma told me she was proud of me, or reminded me—“I love you unconditionally and am proud of you no matter what you do”—I still felt misplaced, like I didn’t deserve any of the good things happening to me. My center couldn’t hold on its own, because when I was young I had been brainwashed and traumatized into believing I was nothing unless I was surviving.

It’s also due to this unstable inner center that a borderline individual’s life can swing from bliss to crisis so quickly. While someone with Bipolar Disorder may cycle through dozens of intense moods in a matter of days, someone with BPD can experience just as many emotions—or more—in a single day.

For me, as long as my writing was going well—and as long as I perceived everything to be going perfectly between me and my Mom, my wife, my brother, my sister, my brother-in-law, and everyone else I deeply care about and love—I could generally function without too much disruption in my life.

But the moment I thought my brother was mad at me, or my wife was disappointed in me, or that my Momma might not have thought about me since yesterday, my brain would fucking collapse. I’d be reduced to nothing but a flesh shell on the outside, while internally I ran around and screamed, trying to collect every possible memory to counter whatever intrusive thoughts were attacking me.

I could have been in a conversation with you.

I could have been driving in traffic.

I could have been brushing my teeth.

But now I’m reduced to nothing but rocks, rubble, and panic attacks, because “oh no, I can’t tell if the people I love are leaving me.” Even though I know this is all made up in my head, and that they love me. I’m still spiraling, and my nervous system is still attacking me.

This was my standard reaction to an intrusive thought: imagined abandonment.

Self-mutilation, threats of suicide that felt completely real to me, and rolling on the floor and throwing up against my will is what would happen whenever something triggered the fear that someone I loved was leaving me.

And when you’re twisting around on the floor, you can’t do anything. No one can talk to you, no one can reason with you. And when you’re the one who did something wrong, it can look a lot like manipulative behavior when really, it’s more like: “Oh no, I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the tools or words to deal with this situation—the real parts, and the fake parts in my head. Please help me. I feel terrible and don’t want to lose you. I love you.”

There may not be a cure for BPD, but the prognosis is actually very bright. Once you know you’re on a roller coaster being held hostage by intrusive thoughts, the roller coaster starts to disappear.

Once I realized there were things happening inside my head that felt real—but weren’t real at all—I started “hanging up sticky notes” inside my mind. Sticky notes with affirming statements, like: “This light flashes when you’re scared, but ask yourself why you’re scared. Is it because you think someone is leaving you? You have to trust your loved ones. They said they’re not going anywhere.”

Or: “Hey girl, you grew up with a chronic fear of being abandoned, and people exploited that fear, but you are not in that situation anymore. Or around those people. Your Momma and brother and everyone in your family loves you unconditionally.”

After 6 weeks of living with a mind cluttered by metaphorical sticky notes, targeted therapy addressing the way my BPD responds to me, and constant reminders like, “Hey, your mind is unreliable when it comes to negative feelings, do not trust them at all,” I’ve started noticing a massive difference in my skin.

I can still feel the intensity of the positive and wondrous things in my life—the deep love my Mom and everyone else has for me—and I’m incredibly grateful for the closeness and intimacy my BPD allows me to have with positive and happy things. But now I know that I need to pick up each and every negative feeling, examine it, and ask whether it’s real, before I unpack it.

It’s through this extra time I’ve spent sitting with my emotions, and exploring myself, that I’ve started to find stability and understanding. I’ve also noticed that the time I spend interrogating negative feelings has been steadily shrinking, while my default state of safety and unconditional love continues to grow.

With the psychological hole that once drained my psyche’s bucket now filled, I can now feel every drop of unconditional love surrounding me, and none of the delusions of abandonment that used to chase me inside my mind.

I’m not a therapist or a psychologist, but I am a beautiful and insane girl with both an affliction for words as well as all 9 criteria of Borderline Personality Disorder. I just blew my life up. I hurt one of my favorite people—a family member I love more than I’ll ever have the words to properly articulate—and it is that tragedy that led to my professional diagnosis. It’s how I learned I was on fire—burning—while riding a roller coaster I had no idea I was even on.

Absolutely nothing has changed in the situation I caused, or with the person I love and accidentally hurt. But now, I can breathe. I can feel clearly, without twisting on the floor and throwing up. With the attention I’ve dedicated to healing and managing my BPD, I can finally tell that everything is wonderful, and there’s nothing I need to worry about. I can just live my life with those I love—without the paranoia and fear taking over me.