My name is Mikayla.
I deal with O.C.D., B.P.D., which is Borderline Personality Disorder, and occasionally bouts of social anxiety.

I’ve been dealing with it for about eight years. I think what brought on my mental health problems would probably be genetic and environmental.

I guess in terms of coping strategies, I would use stuff like anything from that I’d learned in terms of mindfulness, pleasure activities like drawing, but also bigger things like exercise and eating properly. And building those goals like going to work more and just taking it one step at a time. A lot of it is just focusing on yourself, focusing on how to get through the situations. I take the skills that I have been taught and I work it into my life. And with that it’s like when you kind of get little snippets throughout your days or months or weeks or years, you bring that, those little ideas in, and you just work with them. It’s a work in progress. I mean there’s no magical wand that is just going to cure you.

B.P.D. is a personality disorder so a lot of it is action based. So it’s a very, very, self-destructive illness. It’s very personal; it’s very all about you kind of thing. It’s the way you act out, the way you think and it’s personal with everything. Everyone’s different, but my own experience with B.P.D. is that I have challenges with self-harm and that was my biggest addiction. It’s masking your emotions or it’s a release. I mean it can be. I use to do it anywhere, any reason from being bored, to being angry, to being sad, or even happy. And sometimes I did it to feel emotion and sometimes I did it to suppress emotion. Sometimes I just did it because I was punishing myself for punishing someone else and I took it out of my body and then sometimes it was just plainly the release.

The thing with B.P.D is it is a very dramatic illness, and I mean there definitely were a lot of traumatic events based on the drama that went on in my environment. A lot of it I’ve learned, you know, that I have hurt people with my illness but it’s learning that it is not me that hurt them, but it is my illness that hurt them. It’s coming to that understanding that you know you’re not doing it to hurt people, it’s your illness, it’s inside you and sometimes it controls your brain, it controls your operating system. I give a big shout out to my family because I know they went through a lot and it made us stronger, it did, and it gave us a lot of really good moments too. And you know, it goes with any family who has a child who is very sick.

If we band together and we help each other, we’re going to spread that knowledge of what helps each other and what works and what doesn’t work and how we can fight back to get us, to get our voice heard. You know, you’re all worth it. We’re all worth it. We’re all pieces of a puzzle that connect the world.

I believe I can live positively. As much as it’s a negative atmosphere, it’s definitely is, I wouldn’t have had so many awesome attributes about myself. Some days I’m like I wish I never had to go through what I went through; I wish I’m not going through what I’m going through now. But when I am in a positive frame of mind, I wouldn’t take back those years. I wouldn’t change them because it’s taught me so much and it’s given me so much insight and so much wisdom and so much empathy and it’s really just kind of brought me to where I’m supposed to be in life and what I’m supposed to do. It showed me the path of what I’m supposed to do in life. I mean it can be a real pain, a pain in the bum, but it’s really, there are moments where, I mean even laughter even just having a bout of laughter and you cherish it so much more than most people. You don’t take things for granted. You don’t take those happy moments for granted. And so yeah I think I can live positively. You know maybe not all the time, as this is a lifelong process. But if I live in the moment and if I live through the skills and helping myself then yeah there are going to be a lot more moments that are really worth living for.