It's currently 00:28 on a friday night. Nothing has happened, no one has upset me, no bad things have happened, and yet I'm wide awake on the settee alone sobbing into my phone as I scroll through twitter and open up blogger and try and find the words to explain how I'm feeling. But I can't. 

Because as soon as I try and open up to people or write down my feelings, they're stuck, lodged in my throat, trapped and unable to be set free. The words are there in my head a minute ago, I was explaining to myself what was going on and now I'm up and trying to tell someone, they're scrambled up like a jigsaw that I can't fix. No matter how hard I want to fix it, to unscramble the anagrams in my head, to join up the dots and the squiggly lines, that's all they are, shapes and colours where the words should be. 

And I cry more, fat sobs streaming down my face, all I want to do is scream and throw my laptop across the room in frustration, because I had the words, they were there in my head I can picture it, but it's muted, the silence deafening. 

All I remember, is wanting to feel normal. And I know there's no normal, not really, but I want to feel something that isn't, this.  This sadness, this long aching feeling inside my heart, this fuzzy painful stabbing in my brain. I just want it all to stop, to tell the driver "no thanks I've had enough" and get out. But I can't, because this is my brain, my life, my normal. And I hate it, I despise the normality that is the sobbing, the scrambled words and feelings, the silence of explanations I long to have.

Many people compare mental illness to that of screaming into a crowded room and nobody's listening, but to me, it's like telling everyone "oh btw I'm about to scream but you won't hear me" and them saying "ok cool" then screaming intermittently for 22 years, whilst on fire, naked. You see? 

The truth is, I'm tired. I'm exhausted by being held captive by my illness, held ransom for happiness by a disorder that says "happiness? 5 minutes only today". I'm tired of a diagnosis that means I'm constantly fighting a battle inside of my head of whether or not I'm worthy of staying alive. Of constantly weighing up the pros and cons of life or death. Because that is my normal. Have an argument with my partner? Kill yourself. Feel sad about something that is totally irrelevant to my everyday life and will pass in a few hours for a normal person? Kill yourself. Feel any emotion at all out of the blue that I wasn't expecting to deal with? Kill yourself. 

By now you'd think it would be expected, that I'd know it was coming. But I don't, ever. It's like someone walking down the street with a sign above their head saying "I'm a murderer", who says to you "I'm going to kill you" and then when they stab you, being shocked and surprised they did it anyway. That's what it's like living with BPD. You know full well you will be rocked by mood swings and feel emotions you don't want to feel at any given time, and that you may or may not react in a dramatic way about a minor occurrence, and yet when it happens, you're shocked and appalled that your brain could play you this way again like it did yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. 

People wonder and ask me what having BPD means to me, and how it affects me, well this is it. It's essentially a lot of "you should kill yourself" mixed with a lot of crying, many questions and a lot more stupid metaphors about life and how you feel. And that is my reality, my normality and my nightmare. Welcome to my brain.

Meg