I used to have a podcast. Someday, innumerable future grandchildren of Millennials are going to have that sentence said to them as they meander through technology museums, and those grandchildren are going to roll their eyes the way I am at myself right now. My podcast was niche and vulgar and hardly edited, but it filled a need in its community and helped me excise a lot of rage.
My best friend was my cohost. I moved in with her as a way to get out of my hometown and get some mental health treatment. I was in a very bad state right before I moved. I would wake up every day and promise my then-girlfriend, who lived on the opposite coast, that I would go to the emergency room, and then I would never go. Once I moved, my best friend and I would stay up late smoking weed and trying to make any sense about where life had taken us. The podcast was hatched on her bathroom floor between pulls.
Almost immediately people found our podcast. They were other people like us: exmormon women, often mentally ill, who had been taught not to feel any anger. It was not my first advocacy rodeo by any means, but it was a trip to connect with other people who were struggling with so many of the same painful experiences I was, right when I was experiencing them. So many of my own emotions and traumas were processed, and the resulting purpose eased my constant existential dread. My cohost experienced the same. Though she and I were close friends for a decade, the podcast was one of the coolest things we ever did.
And then the relationship ended. I have borderline personality disorder and she probably does too, and it was just all too much. She has a real gift for cutting people out of her life and not looking back, and I have no indication that she has ever looked back. This official borderline Worst Case Scenario for such an important relationship has obviously been a challenging hurdle for me. I feel really good about how I have handled it and where I am now.
I moved out of the house we shared almost a year ago. The podcast has been gone for a little longer than that, and I haven’t had an outlet since. I have spent most of the past year in relative isolation, except for a close friend and my therapist and acquaintances at work. I am ready to move past that now.
Despite the stereotypes about people with BPD, we know that we do get better. Even without treatment, symptoms tend to ease as we get older. We know that treatment can help. We know recovery is possible. Even in cases where that happens, though, it seems like there is a before and an after. The space between is hazy and terrifying. I want to write it down, what I am doing day after day, so that I can look backward and see the journey more clearly. This is recovery in progress, starting two and a half years after I was finally diagnosed in an intensive outpatient program, which was ten years after I started seeking treatment and 18 years after I first self-harmed. Someday this will also be memory, faded into whatever comes next. I want to record the process.
The Feelings that Ate Everything 