Mikayla
British Columbia
Borderline Personality Disorder, OCD, Anxiety
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.
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.
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.