Borderline Personality Disorder: When Everything Is Too Much and Nothing Is Enough

Sometimes I shut down.

Everything is dark, everything is quiet and I can’t move — I can’t physically move. I won’t answer your texts, I won’t pick up the phone. I am nothing and no one. I don’t know how anyone gets out of bed, let alone does anything. Moving my body is too much. I am weighed down by this heavy darkness. Everything is too much.

Sometimes I’m great.

I write down my goals and enhance my office vision board and I go for it and I get it. I take care of myself… I am successful. I help others. I express myself with tact and love. I’m a good listener. I am content (for a minute).

Sometimes I’m too much.

I’m spamming you with texts and messages. I jump from topic to topic as quickly as my opinion is splitting. I can’t sleep, I can’t stop, I can’t slow down. I could grasp my wildest dreams and still be starving. Nothing is enough. Nothing.

In any mode, anytime, underneath it all…

I am filled with this thing — The Thing — the chronic emptiness, the endless longing for more.

I think everyone carries The Thing in the center of our chests, but I swear those of us with borderline personality disorder (BPD) carry a void ten times heavier than any neurotypical I’ve ever met because our Empties make no sense. The feeling of loss a neurotypical would feel experiencing the death of a loved one is how one of us feels if an online dating match slowly stops texting us back.

I can temporarily fill the deep darkness in the center of my chest with a quick relationship, a religious experience or a really, really good donut.

But I find those willing to spend the night and stay into the morning can never be enough for me and in turn, I am far too much for them. My love language is Smothering and unless I’m being Smothered back, no relationship will ever satisfy me.

My church life and family at least hold me together and enhance the rational part of my mind that can tell my BPD mind that it’s not actually exploding or on fire (or if I breathe my skin will fall off). But I still (usually) feel like I’m exploding, on fire and about to lose my skin.

And donuts are unfortunately impermanent fixtures in our lives.

If I had a few days in a row of each mode, maybe it would be manageable. But it truth, I swing moment to moment, overwhelm to longing, shutting down to just waiting for someone to reach out to me so I can hold. Onto. Their. Words.

With my BPD, on any given day, at any given hour, everything is too much. And nothing is enough.