TRIGGER WARNING: Content deals with abuse (including sexual) and nightmares.

I guess my story starts pretty early on. My cousin molested me when I was 6. We lived with him at my grandparents after a really bad car accident that left me mom disabled. He did it every day after we moved in. Mom, when she finally was able to function again, knew something had happened to me so she put me in therapy. It didn’t work I didn’t talk. I just sat and played with the toys or was silent as a mouse. She thought my dad had hurt me I found out years later but no not my dad. It was the boy she trusted to babysit me. My own cousin. To this day I have not confronted him and I never will. He never raped me; just made me watch porn and copied it on me. He would ask if he could put “it” inside of me but I always said no. It was scary to me and I didn’t understand. He would always have me shower before people got home but never let my hair get wet so that no one knew. I still think about it when I see him at family functions. No one in my family but my mom and other cousin know what he did to me.

Next I’m 12. I can’t sleep and I’m seeing monsters. Not like monster’s INC. monsters but terrifyingly gruesome dead people. A little girl named molly who was dripping in blood calling out to me from any dark spaces. So naturally I couldn’t sleep. I would sit up all night either in my mom’s room staring at her, in the hallway staring into my room or on my bed. My bed was a futon so what I did was took the mattress off and barricaded my closet with it and I would just sit on the bars and stare out of my room into the hallway where molly stood waiting for my light to go off. If I fell asleep, because eventually I did, my mom would turn off my light and I would wake up screaming with bruises all over me; a couple of times they were shaped like hands. Now I know it was my own fear of molly that made me put my hands on myself in my sleep but I always thought she was out to get me. The councilors started calling home when they saw the bruises because they thought I was being abused. They never believed my Molly story and of course no one realized I was doing it to myself. I started cutting then too. I don’t know what gave me the idea to do it but I began to be so numb that I just started to carve away into my skin thinking that Molly wanted me to be like her; a dark bleeding shell.

(I went through plenty of abuse throughout my years but I don’t think that’s relevant to my story right now; I’m going to skip past it and just talk about my mental illness issues.)

The doctor told my mom I was just depressed. No one validated the voices I heard or the monsters I saw. No one cared about my bruises. Just that my weight loss and cutting and inability to function to the outside world meant I was depressed and needed medicated. So prozac enters my world. I’m on Prozac until High School where finally I start hallucinating and collapse in the school hallway. You see I had been anorexic and was losing weight quickly but hiding it with my clothes so no one knew. My dose had gotten too high for my weight since the doctor didn’t weigh me and I was taken to the ER for six hours.

My diagnosis of being depressed was kept until College when I was finally told I have Bi Polar. My meds all changed but I didn’t. Something more was wrong with me I was up and down and cutting and screaming and crying for no reason. I couldn’t function in classes, I couldn’t hold attention, I couldn’t keep friendships or relationships. I kept getting raped because I was too fearful to say no. Yet I also slept around. My brain was full of contradictions that I couldn’t control and I just let it all happen to me.

I’m 21 now and have been told I have Borderline Personality Disorder. I fit 8/9 criteria for having this disorder and it explains all of my contradictions.

The criteria is—>

1) frantic effort to avoid real or imagined abandonment. CHECK
2) a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by extreme idealization and devaluation. CHECK
3) Impulsivity in at least two self damaging behaviors (not self harm)
4) recurrent suicidal behaviors, gestures or threats. CHECK
5) identity disturbance. CHECK
6) mood instability. CHECK
7) chronic feelings of emptiness. CHECK
8) inappropriate and intense anger that is beyond control. CHECK
9) stress-related paranoid ideation or severe disassociation. CHECK

I still cut. I still have nightmares but it’s easing as I get help. Get help everyone no matter what people say. It could save your life, it saved mine.

I’m finally on the path to recovery and am using my diagnosis to recognize bad behaviors and things that I need to change along with help from my therapist and DBT. Follow my recovery on twitter: @Border_Crazy