To live well is the greatest revenge.

I may have no emotional skin and come undone at the smallest interpersonal upset, but I’d make a great bullfighter or firefighter – anything that gets my adrenaline going and focuses me on a physical target. The motorcycle is all of that and more. When I’m on the bike, it feels like a door opens in my chest and the world rushes in, pure, fresh, and sparkling with clarity. It forces me to approach fear with total awareness and to pull reason mind into the moment of intense reactions.

Well, it’s not like I don’t like people; I just find them disturbing and can’t manage their effects on me, positive or negative.

For those of us with BPD, entering into a shared experience means passing through the ring of fire that leaves us feeling even more burned – and in this case branded with a label no one would ever choose to wear.

Poisoned by what’s inside us and vulnerable to anything outside us.

But what if you simply don’t have a solid self to return to – if the way you are is seen as basically broken? And what if you can’t conceive of “normal” or “healthy” because pain and loneliness are all you remember?

An inner ease spreads inside me. Such is the power of acceptance and understanding from other people, the power of validation.

I don’t know what I have,” the woman says flatly, tugging her sleeves down. “I don’t care what it’s called. I just want to stop feeling this way.

I’ve grown up with an ethic, call it a part, that insists I hide my pain at all costs. As I talk, I feel this pain leaking out – not just the core symptom of BPD, but all the years of being blamed or ignored for my condition, and all the years I’ve blamed others for how I am. It’s the pain of being told I was too needy even as could never get the help I needed.

We do not deserve to be trapped in hell. It isnt our fault.