Borderline Ontology
The (inconsistently applied) Borderline Personality Disorder label does the funny trick of moving me from one type of personhood to another, from sane to insane. The border crossing was anticlimatic, appearing as an offhand remark from a psychiatrist barely 6 months into 18, the youngest age one can be diagnosed, noted in my medical chart as "cluster B symptoms" (symptoms not included). Since then, and maybe inspired by this original impression, the words are now strewn across medical records, so that when my latest dentist office, walk-in clinic, school, or police station asks for my disabilities I'm never sure what I'm entitled to say.
My recent access to my own medical records made me realize that 'BPD' is prevalent in describing me, enough to make me feel entitled to possess BPD (as it possesses me). What should I do with the freedom of craziness? Now when I say I'm suffering, a reasonable listener cannot conclude that I am suffering, only that I want you to think I am. What I say only exists when mediated through your attention. Without attention, apparently, we flail, we say truth and non-truth indiscriminantly, and wouldn't you want to join me in that fantasy, if you could, if you were just a bit braver and crazier?
Since doctor-common-sense dictates that BPDers don't respond well to hospital (mis)treatment, we're often re-entering society in an ambiguous state. The statistics are dire, the psychiatrist seems skeptical of our success in any real world, but I've never been discharged with disability income or infrastructure to survive as insane. The only option is to go back to the day-to-day affairs of earning a wage and housekeeping and pretending to be sane.
If you haven't met me, I might seem pretty scary. So far, what you know about me is that I lack a sense of self; I'm prone to lying; I'll indulge in attention-seeking feats sometimes ending in (inevitable) death. It might be frightening to know that the insane are unnoticed in your midst. You think you're commiserating with a classmate about an unfair assignment - little do you know, this classmate had no legal autonomy a few months ago!
When I pass as sane am I sane? Am I not the same person, reliable to an employer, erratic and evasive to a psychiatrist at 3am in the ER? I might seem like a tearful hyperventilating patient now, doctor, but my friends think I'm fun and normal. Maybe my sane-passing is actually a momentary lapse of sanity. I might seem fun and normal, buddy, but I'm formally insane.
It's a paradoxical title. BPD is designed as an insult, evoking a manipulative character whose tragic backstory is explanation but not justification for the harm they (she) will inevitably effect by reason of their (her) existance. Of course I would be skeptical of BPD as an accurate category of people. Of course I would want to escape it, like a criminal erasing fingerprint logs.
But any self-identification with BPD is also taboo. Internet advice warns me against forming any community with the other insane, who will inevitably leave me astray further down a path of self destruction. It is not my place to self determine, even if adopting a label given to me. Only doctors can tell me I'm a lying bitch, and I should damn well be ashamed of it. I should renounce this lifestyle - even though my tragic backstory dooms me to it - and go through the twelve steps, apologetic for my inevitable sins living as lying bitch disordered.
Biased or not, I think BPD is fake. I believe feeling deeply is a practice and so are all the other criteria. I think we're a loosely assorted bunch of people with PTSD, C-PTSD, autism, some other labels maybe not yet invented. BPD is measured by the degree of inconvenience caused to others. It makes claims on our interiority that it has no right to make. It makes claims on our future. Yet I also maintain my freedom to adopt BPD, if I wanted, like reclaiming a slur.
