I've been trying to figure out how to open this blog post for about 25 minutes, when I want to write something positive and helpful but all I can really muster up the strength to say is, I'm struggling.

I'm struggling to just get out of bed in the morning. I don't want to shower, I don't want to go to work, I don't want to speak to anyone and I want to sleep all day. But I do all these things, I get up, I go to work in a psychiatric hospital and I do my best to help young people cope with their lives when I can't even cope with my own. I talk to people and laugh and joke with colleagues and tell them funny jokes about my life and pretend everything is fine, I smile and laugh and walk down the corridors singing and fist bumping my co workers with a "I'm good thanks you?!" when all I really want to do is curl up in a ball on the floor and sob.

Living with a mental illness is exhausting. Faking and living a second life is tiring, having to pretend to be fine is draining. But we do it, because it hurts too much to just say "actually you know what, I'm not doing so great right now". Admitting I'm struggling is a personal milestone I can't quite tackle and never have been able to, I've never wanted to appear weak, or leave myself open to judgement - "is she safe to work here like that?" "maybe she's lying to get attention" "she's so dramatic" "all she does is complain that girl".

For me, BPD means I swing from one erratic mood swing to the next within minutes, sometimes seconds. Today I've been singing my heart out in the car, barely able to sit still in my seat in the coffee shop talking and ranting at a million words per second, happy and laughing and now a mere few hours later I'm so sunken into a depression I couldn't even get out of bed to go get a drink, just sitting up to write this post is physically painful on my body and my mind feels numb. I'm panic stricken about what my mood will be like next, and how easy it will be to get up tomorrow and take myself off to work. It also means that earlier, when I received a phone call to say I wouldn't be seeing my psychiatrist, someone I've seen every 3 months for nearly 4 years, again, I completely broke down, sobbing on the phone to the duty manager and angrily telling her to fuck off when she couldn't help me and was only passing on the message as to why I hadn't received an appointment letter.

I struggle to contain and deal with emotions, particularly stress or change, this can make me angry and erratic, and lead to a complete mental breakdown. For example, last night a wave of sadness took over me, and I began sobbing on my friend out of nowhere. I was overcome with emotions of not being able to cope with this anymore, and just wanting an out. When they and my mum touched me to try and comfort me I began screaming in pain, I couldn't bare to be touched or spoken to. 20 minutes later when I finally calmed down I fell straight to sleep, exhausted at the deep depression my mood had swung me into.

Living with borderline personality disorder makes these experiences a daily occurrence, and can make me difficult to be around. I can find different tones of voices hard to swallow, instantly feeling a hostility between me and someone else, and find it difficult to voice my frustrations at situations I don't feel comfortable in, instead hyperventilating and getting myself close to a panic attack in my seat.

But it also means I can be the life and soul of the party, the one that gets everyone up to dance and the one that always wants to please people. The one that's always there to listen, to help you with whatever you're going through and lend an ear day or night. It means I can be empathetic and sympathetic and help you get through problem, because I know what it feels like to struggle.

Living and dealing with a mental illness is exhausting, painful and tiresome, but it is doable. Going to work everyday, seeing and talking to friends, going out for drinks and meals and spending time with loved ones is possible, no matter what your mind tells you. You are always loved and never alone.

Meg x 

"they're fine... perfect actually" says the nurse on shift to my colleague who requested my obs to be taken as I was feeling unwell, they're fine he says, yet I feel like the complete opposite. My heart is racing, my chest is tight, my palms are sweaty and I'm struggling to see straight or make a coherent sentence. This is what one of my BPD/anxiety episodes at work looks like, me sobbing on an office chair trying to compose myself and being sent home told to rest and get myself right, not to worry it'll all be okay. But will it? Will I return to my next shift faced with the same weighted dread on my shoulders or will I make it through laughing and joking?

Working full time with a mental illness is tiring, it's long days filled with toilet trips sobbing to yourself, it's sick days pretending to have the flu out of shame, being called into the office to be asked how you're doing, and lying saying you're fine. It's telling coworkers "yeah, I'm just tired!" as they ask why you're so quiet today, and saying you've been feeling unwell as they ask where you've been recently.

I've been working ever since I was 16 and flitted from job to job, suffering from countless panic attacks, BPD episodes and anxiety attacks in offices, outside the building and on the bus in. I've had empathetic managers and people who couldn't care less unless I was staying to finish my shift. But I've tried, god knows I've tried. I've left jobs for the sake of my health and I've gone elsewhere and yet again struggled.

Having a mental illness and trying to work full time is always going to be a struggle, but when you're unwell, having time off shouldn't be something to be ashamed of. Do we go into work when we break our bones? Do we take a day off for the flu or some other physical illness? Then why should our mental health be any different? We shouldn't be hiding from our diagnoses and not naming this as our sickness reasons, yet we do.

Advice I see and hear a lot but don't see in practice is "no job is worth your mental health" which is so unbelievably true, yet we don't follow it, because it's just not practical sometimes is it? We all have bills to pay and money we need and sometimes you physically can't accommodate a sick pay day or to be unemployed for the sake of our health. But we should, and jobs should be more accommodating to mental health.

Finding a job you love is so important, but it doesn't fix your mental illness, and I'm here to tell you that sometimes it's not the job. Don't get me wrong sometimes it is but a lot of the time, the problem is the illness, and that's not something you can help but something you learn to cope with and something you become stronger from. I love my job and I love going to work but that doesn't stop the tears from falling in the toilets and the panic attacks in the staff room. Your brain may tell you that you don't belong in your job or that you're a failure but you aren't one bit, you're struggling and it's perfectly okay to ask for help.

Always ask for help.

Meg x

So a lot of you will know that anxiety is something that has plagued my life for longer than I care to remember, ever since I was a kid I have been haunted my a sick feeling in my stomach, sweaty palms and an inability to speak, leading to panic attacks of me sat breathless, unable to speak or breathe properly in a fright on the floor.

One thing I've learnt in coping with anxiety, is finding out my triggers, what makes me anxious, what triggers a panic attack etc, and alongside this, learning my behaviours when I am feeling anxious, and helping me and other people notice when I might need taking aside and having a minute. Learning these behaviours has been hard, and accepting that this is how I have learnt to cope and trying to unlearn bad methods is also difficult, but has taught me a few things. So today I thought I'd share my learnt behaviours of anxiety and hope some of you might relate.

Ignore How I'm Feeling 

Projecting 

Paranoia 

Unable To sit Still

Stop Speaking 

Anxiety is something that has wrecked my life for a while (and a while I mean my whole life lol) and is something I've spent a lot of my time and life trying to deal with and find ways of coping with it. I like to think that at 21 I have some rough idea of my triggers, of what to do when I start to feel anxious and how to deal with my anxiety, but really I'm just in the muddle of it as anyone else, but I have learnt some coping methods and want to share them with you guys too. (I'm practicing them as I write this as I've currently just ran out of the gym feeling overwhelmed and anxious, oops)

Finding Your Triggers 

I've mentioned this in my previous post How To Help Someone With Anxiety/Panic Attacks  that finding your triggers is one of the more important tips with anxiety, it's always helpful to know what is causing your anxiety and what is triggering you to feel anxious in situations. For me, I don't like overly crowded places when I'm feeling anxious already, sometimes I'm fine and sometimes I get very overwhelmed, it's also hard for me to cope with new places and new people, I turn quite shy and quiet until I've settled in somewhere and tend to feel very anxious until I've soothed.

Listen To Your Body

I recently wrote a post focusing on body image and my childhood eating disorder, (which you can catch up on here) and often I find my mind wandering to those days, but recently I've been reading Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, which feautres a chapter on her struggles with disordered eating and I found myself sobbing, remembering my own struggles and how often they pop into my head. 

I developed anorexia when I was 11/12 years old, barely into secondary school and found myself at my lowest ebb, starving myself and self-harming to deal with the thoughts I was dealing with. I would count my calories that I'd consumed throughout the day and figure out how much time I'd need to spend on the exercise bike we had at home to work them off and finally be thin enough to be beautiful. But you see that would never happen, because I would never be thin enough, be pretty enough, be worthy enough in my eyes. 

" I started going to mental health services when my mum saw my self-harm scars one morning before school and they diagnosed me with anorexia nervosa,  a serious mental illness and eating disorder where someone who is a healthy weight or underweight  thinks they are much fatter than they are and stops eating or reduces food intake to lose weight. Anorexia can affect anyone of any age or gender, and often have a very distorted view of their appearance, seeing themselves as much bigger than they really are and have a deep fear of gaining weight. You don't necessarily have to be skin and bones and the usual picture of someone with anorexia to be struggling, this can be an internal battle with food in your mind that gets your diagnosis. "

So my last post on the '15 'embarrassing' symptoms of BPD' went down extremely well as my most popular post to date, and thought I'd do a spin on that continuing with BPD awareness month and have a look at 13 positive traits of people with BPD. There are always going to be stigmas and misconceptions around any mental illness, BPD especially, so I like to remind myself of these positive aspects when I'm feeling particularly down about it.

1. Empathy

This is one that made the bad list, but I wanted to also mention it here. We may be so empathetic that it physcially hurts us, but that also means we understand people's pain, we truly feel it for you meaning when we say we understand, we mean it. We understand people's sorrows no matter how small and feel their pain with them.

2. Loving

Because we have such intense emotions and feelings, when we love someone, we love them HARD, this does have have it's negative connotations of obsessive and clingy, but we when we love you, we mean it. We would do anything for our loved ones and really would go to the end of the earth for someone if they needed it from us.

3. Extreme highs

With extreme emotions comes extreme mood swings, these can be difficult to deal with but it also means when we are on a high we are elated, we feel everything rushing through our veins and truly do feel the happiest possible. We try and do everything we can in this time, and think we can do more than we are able but god loves a trier!

4. Creative

With a lot of mental illness comes creativity, hence why art therapies are so popular and important. Idle minds are not good for BPD and so a lot of us tend to be very arty and creative, a lot of people I know with BPD are fantastic at creative outlets like sewing, knitting etc. Personally my creative outlet is my bullet journal, I use it when I'm sad or happy to forget about how I feel and just enjoy doodling and creating something that's truly mine.

5. Compassionate 

Because a lot of us have felt a lot of pain in our lives, we want nothing but to help others and are very compassionate. A lot of us take on careers where we can help others, I myself am in support work for people with mental health issues, and know many people with BPD who do similar care careers.

6. Easily Excited

With BPD comes our extreme emotions and so we can find ourselves in an almost child-like state when it comes to excitement, being filled with happiness and joy is such an experience for us that we feel it a lot stronger than other people, and we are infectiously excited about things, even it's for someone else.

7. Relate easily

We feel a lot of emotions in ourselves, and therefore we can relate to nearly every emotion and every situation because chances are, we've felt it. We feel so much that we can relate to any problem and able to put ourselves in other people's shoes and see the problems.

8. Passionate

When we decide to take on something, we can easily become obsessed, and this transpires into great passion about a new hobby or task to complete. I recently have had an obsession with my bullet journal and doodling in it and filling it in with nice pages, and I am passionate about it looking it's best and looking after it. We are also passionate about other people's ventures, we believe and see the best in the people we love and are passionate about what they and we do

9. Loyal

When we love someone, we love them hard. We are very loyal both in relationships with romantic partners and friends, we would never want to hurt anyone and can again become almost obsessed with people, meaning we are very loyal friends and would never leave your side.

10. Aware

With BPD tends to come a lot of self-awareness, both of people/things around us and of ourselves. We can sense when an atmosphere is off or if someone is feeling something odd in a group. We can know instantly when something or someone is wrong or not feeling right, it's almost like a tangible feeling inside. We also can be very aware and very logical thinking, and able to think through situations to find a conclusion by taking in every aspect around us.

11. Spontaneous

12. Relatable

Because we have been hurt so much in the past and experienced so much pain, we can relate to nearly every situation for someone else, and also can put ourselves in their shoes easily and are very good at reassurance. People can easily relate to us as we make ourselves that way.

13. Resilient

Another reason we have experienced so much pain, we are resilient and know better times can come. BPD causes a lot of major mood swings meaning we go up and down very quickly and very often, so we know it gets better and have often endured extreme pain and suffering too.

I hope you guys enjoyed this more positive post on BPD, if you have any other positives to add please leave me a comment below!

Meg x

Many people without BPD feel identity loss and issues, but a core symptom of BPD is a lack of an identity and ensuing identity crises. A good sense of identity is knowing who you are and where you belong in the world, knowing your place so to speak. A stable identity is understanding you can change and you still remain the same person deep down, and is made up of your beliefs, opinions, personality and who you are as a person.

So someone with BPD may struggle to have a stable sense of self, they may struggle to understand who they are and this often leads to clinging to our labels to understand ourselves, putting ourselves into little boxes to understand who we are.

As a kid I always wanted to be a writer. I wanted to own a big country farm house, have a stable family life and tend to animals on my farm, I wanted the perfect life and the perfect career and basically become the next Jacqueline Wilson. This then changed a lot, and landed on tattooist. I read everything about tattoos, I watched shows about tattoos, I researched and drew tattoos, everything I was was surrounded in this sense of self of who I wanted to be. This cycle kept going on for a while, nurse, mental health nurse, therapist, and onto smaller things like being a girlfriend, a good friend, a good daughter.


We put ourselves in boxes labelled to help us feel, help stable ourselves out on even ground. As a kid with an eating disorder I put myself in the box labelled 'anorexic', everything I did was surrounded by my eating disorder, I read about them, I read books about people with anorexia, everything I did was to lose weight and be the thinnest, that was who I was. Then I recovered, and I had a period of recovery where I felt very lost, I was no longer the thinnest, I wasn't the illest, I was fine. Until I picked back up a blade to feel myself again, I had to feel something and feel like someone again, so I went back into my mentally ill ways. Then I was put into the box 'depressed'.

Currently, I've put myself in many boxes, picking out the personality from each box and deciding what costume to wear that day. Am I girlfriend Meg? The happy, upbeat and in love version of myself? Or am I best friend Meg, am I the funny, witty , sarcastic Meg who tries to make people laugh and fit in? Or am I depressed Meg? The Meg that can't get out of bed today, and mopes around waiting for someone to fix me?

Getting my diagnosis of BPD helped me find a sense of self, helped me to understand I'm not crazy, i'm not losing my mind, I have a condition and the symptoms that come along with it. I am Meg with BPD, I am Meg who people don't see, the one who experiences melt downs, depressed days, but I'm also Meg who is a daughter, sister, auntie, girlfriend and friend, the witty, sarcastic Meg that I let people see.



Finding my identity has been hard, and will continue to be hard for a long time I imagine, I have times where I feel like I have a stable sense of self, and then I'm on my own and I think, who am I? Who would I be without my condition? Who would I be if I didn't take medication? There are so many versions of myself that already exist and yet I struggle to understand what would it be like if there were even more. Still now when I'm not around my friends or my boyfriend I sit and become sad and think who am I without the people around me?

You see, with BPD, we are trying so hard to find ourselves, to understand what kind of person we are and want to be, that we become the people around us. We take on their personalities, their humour and their jokes, even their lingo and make it ours to feel as though we know who we are, when in fact we are clutching at other people's identities trying to mould it into our own.

But this can also be a good thing, it mean we can be a chameleon of sorts, we can mould and change ourselves into the people around us to fit in, we always have conversations starters ready, and we know how to make other people feel comfortable by becoming them. It also means we have many opinions and beliefs and so many personalities and different personas to take on, we are filled with opportunities to take because of how different and flexible we can be, we can fit and mould into anything we want.

It's hard, and it doesn't make a lot of sense but there are good parts to this illness, and this is what I want to focus on too as part of this blog, because god is it hard. A lot of people who also have BPD have told me they read this blog and so I just want to tell you all, you're not alone!  I hope this little ramble made sense and was at least an interesting read, as I'm having a bit of a down moment and thought I'd take to my blog to get it all out.

As usual, like, comment and share and let me know your thoughts below!

Meg x

useful links:

1/ BPD and Identity Issues

I talk about my experience with BPD a lot on here, and I follow a lot of fellow BPD sufferers on twitter, who talk about the symptoms very openly on their social medias which spurred me to write this post on 'embarrassing' symptoms that aren't talked about. There are the main 9 symptoms that are well known on BPD, but alongside those come a lot of other things that can be hard to talk about or open up about, so I thought I'd share some for you guys. It's also still Borderline Personality Disorder Awareness Month so thought I'd share a few more BPD posts with you guys to support it. (Here is my first post for awareness month!)

1. Feelings With Sex and Rejection

2. Random Disassociation 

Another embarrassing trait is disassociation, especially when it happens randomly. You could be sat amongst friends, sat in a meeting, with family etc and then suddenly feel yourself disappear and become numb and feel as though you aren't real. Disassociation can be scary at first and especially when it comes and goes in random bouts, but it will always end.

3.Paranoia With Friendships

4. Flaking On Plans

This is one for all mental illnesses, but often you can make plans with someone when on a high or a good day and then when it comes around you may have come onto a low and suddenly not be able to make the plans and having to cancel last minute to recuperate and spend time alone, which is perfectly acceptable but you can feel intense guilt for cancelling as much as you can't help it.

5. Impulsiveness

Impulse control is something that doesn't come easily to people with BPD, when we're on a high or a low we can use our impulses to try and cover our emotions and make questionable decisions, such as promiscuity as mentioned before, drug or alcohol abuse or gambling. Personally mine was a little less dangerous, shopping. I would shop online whenever I felt sad and spent all my money on makeup and clothes I didn't need and feel more sad when they arrived and It didn't make me happy.  

6. Obsessive Behaviours

7. Centre Of Attention

8. Over sharing 

Over-sharing is another 'trying to fit in' symptom of BPD, we try so hard to make conversation and fit in and be 'normal' that we tend to accidentally over-share and get a bout of word vomit. Then once you've started over sharing and realised you've done it, you do it more to cover it up and get stuck in a vicious cycle. This can also happen in the form of over-texting someone, we get so wound up that someone is ignoring us and hates us and is fed up of us we try and take it back what we've said by keeping on texting. It's pretty annoying for us too.

9. Rejection

10. Explosive Anger

11. Numbness/ Lack of empathy

12. Overly Empathetic

13. Not Taking Care Of Yourself

14. No Identity

15. Overly Sensitive 

Then

And Now 

And now, 9 years later, I am fully recovered for many years and consider myself to have a very healthy relationship with food, I even gained a relationship gut and had to join slimming world to get myself back to a healthy weight. Even though I am recovered, the thoughts will always stay with you, still now when I try and lose a few pounds I have to fight the thoughts that I am worthless if I'm not skinny, and that I have a good figure and am happy with how I look.

I think it's pretty rare these days with social media for people, both men and women, to say they are 100% comfortable with their body, there are so many ways to see images of people with amazing bodies, most of the time they are photoshopped and not even real, or the person knows just how to use angles and lighting to make them look slimmer and more toned than they are. So I won't lie and say I love my body because a lot of the time, I still hate how I look.

I find it just as hard as the next person to see the difference in someone who has the money and time to have these 'perfect' bodies on instagram/magazines and having an average sized body and liking what you see in the mirror. I don't have a distorted view of my body as I used to, sure I look in the mirror and I've had times where I've been upset by my weight, but I would never starve myself anymore. Now, I cut out the junk food and hit the gym, a healthy way of dealing with your weight.

What I'm getting to, is no one is perfect, not even these people you see plastered on the runway, on the cover of magazines and on instagram, these people aren't your average joe, they have professionals to help them look and take photos as well as they do. It's normal to feel as though you could look better, but rather than wallowing in it, hit the gym, try eating healthier meals and snacking less, do what you need to do to feel good about yourself. OR, eat what you want and don't hit the gym, all that matters is that you are happy and confident in yourself no matter how you look.

We only have one body and one skin, so it's about time we learned to love them right?

Meg x

Useful links:

1. What is Anorexia?
2. Body Image and Eating Disorders 

Symptoms of depression

What Is BPD?

BPD Thoughts VS 'Normal' Thoughts

BPD Triggers 

Often, you come across people who are ignorant to mental health, and mental illnesses, and I always say that I'm happy, genuinely happy, that some people have never experienced such problems and so can't understand them. Sadly, not a lot of people have that luxury of blissful ignorance.

Many people with physical illnesses and chronic illnesses tend to get a mental illness on top of their problems as a side effect, and some people with mental illnesses also experience physical illness symptoms as side effects This is something that people don't see from the outside, mental illness is invisible and it's important we remember we need to be there for those who aren't as upfront about their illnesses as some.

IBS and Stomach Illnesses

Health Anxiety

Depression And Other Illnesses 

Lack of libido

One of the hardest parts of having BPD is maintaining and establishing relationships, be that with friends, colleagues, family or romantic partners. This is something I've always found difficult, so thought I'd share my experiences and advice I can share.

On the outside, I guess it must seem as though I'm pretty good at relationships and friendships and coping with this aspect, but close up I've had a few difficulties and find my own paranoia and anxiety can threaten my relationships with people and I have to reign myself in a lot. From age 16 to 20 I had a boyfriend, and now a year later I'm with someone else and am incredibly happy, I have a group of amazing friends and I get on with the majority of my family. But that doesn't mean that I can find maintaining these relationships incredibly difficult.

I want to focus on romantic relationships when I speak of relationships for this blog post, as I feel it's the one I struggle with the most. My first long term boyfriend I had as I was first diagnosed and started to cope with it and cope with life so this made my relationship incredibly rocky for a while and ultimately became the end of us.

' Favourite Person'

People with BPD often become very overly attached to certain people, and rely on them for a lot, they can also become their 'FP' or 'favourite person' (there are a lot of interesting articles on this to google, one being this '5 Things to Know about being the favourite person of someone with BPD'),but what this essentially means is this someone (and there can be multiple) becomes someone you constantly rely on for reassurance, advice and guidance as well as approval for things you do and say. This isn't someone that you necessarily choose to be your favourite person, it just sort of happens as your attachment grows.

It doesn't mean you are attracted to that person necessarily either, it can be anyone you know that you suddenly rely on for a lot in life. There is very little that your FP can do wrong, you think the world of them and will always stand up for them, but when they are close to someone else this can spark intense jealousy and pain for the other person, even if it is unintentional and harmless in retrospect. Being someone's FP may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn't mean you have to do everything for someone, and you will very rarely know when you are someone's FP, nor will that person always know, it can be something that just happens and stays unnoticed. If you do know, then it's important to imput boundaries into the relationship, and understand what is acceptable on both sides and what to expect of the other person to avoid unhealthy reliance.

I've had multiple FP's over the years, my ex boyfriend was my first big one. I would rely on him for everything, the minute I felt anxious or started to have a panic attack I'd need him to come running for me, if he couldn't this would start a row and I'd shout and scream and tell him he didn't understand me. In retrospect this was a very unhealthy relationship on my part, I expected and needed too much that couldn't be asked for or given, don't get me wrong neither of us were perfect but this was a massive part of the end of us. I couldn't do anything without him for a long time, I needed his constant reassurance and approval for everything I did, and when I ultimately didn't get it this would cause me intense pain and cause intense rows that sparked my BPD anger and nastier side and it would be awful.

When we split I learnt to do things on my own again, and started to become a bit of a commitment phobe, I was terrified of ever relying on anyone like that again, terrified of the rows we used to have and going through that pain again. I saw people and dated, but I found an excuse to run away every time. The littlest of things when I went on a date or met up with someone I would use as my excuse to be single and free and not need anyone. I was convinced I could do it alone, I could cope alone and I'd never need anyone again.

Communication

Rationalizing and Wise Mind