What happened when I went to get help for my BPD

Disclaimer: this happened while I was between the ages of 18 to 29. After that, I got married and now have my husband helping me and backing me up with health care. I have since been to some DBT and other forms of care. It took me a solid decade to even get a guess from the healthcare about what I might be dealing with.)

I tried to get help. Many times.

The first time wasn’t by my own choice: my boyfriend at the time called the clinic and told them I need help, he couldn’t handle it alone anymore. It was a time when I consistently kept telling him I don’t want to live, that I am in pain. A time when I lashed out and pulled out knives to threaten myself with them, a cry of help to end it. 

It didn’t end. Nor did I get help either. I was semi-forced into visiting the psychiatric clinic, not the ward but the one where the less messed-up cases go at their leisure. There were two people at the first appointment I think, I can’t quite remember. And a clock on the wall that I do remember. People staring down at me in silence and a clock, that infuriating clock… Tick-tock… tick tock… I Didn’t want to be there.

I moved into another city, I still wanted to die. There was no point in any of it. My puppy was dead. I was already partially dead. Just let me go, please.

No.

We found a house and moved in. There were nature and trees, I must admit it helped me a little. I could breathe again. I got my study. I got a place where I felt safe for a while. Well, safe from the outside world, not so much from myself. But I was told in here it is ok to be whoever I am, feel whatever I happen to feel. That I don’t have to act. To be someone else anymore. It felt nice and I started to try again. That ended in tears as well, it wasn’t ok for me to be who I am.

I spoke with the job-center people, the social workers, the nurses and doctors, the people from the workshop that was teaching me to learn to live again. And I talked to the psychiatric nurse.

You’d think things get better, my story has a happy ending. My friend, you should know by now that’s not me. Not my story.

Things were fine. For a while. I adjusted to my new life, tried again. Went to places, not letting my fear control me. That’s all great but inside, the shadows still stirred. So I tried to communicate this to the nurse. They wouldn’t hear of it. For the first time in my life I was brave enough to use my own voice and tell someone: I need help, something isn’t right. That’s it. I would be helped surely, these people know what I’ve been like for the past years they know how much in pain I am, they are professionals and will take care of me.

No.

Despite my social worker and my coach-tutor-mentor being there by my side, backing me up… I would not get to see a psychiatrist. Apparently, the nurse didn’t have any grounds to make it happen. And you have to have something to show you need it!

Years of self-harm, years of not wanting to live and often wanting to die, the inability to be happy, the inability to eat or drink or give two shits about it, being tired all the time and my blood test results being fine for god knows how many times in a row, me being aggressive and even having psychosis as a part of my past and mildly these days.

They know this. And it was not enough.

When am I ever going to be enough of anything? In what state do I have to be to get the help I need? To get some sort of a whisper of a word to get closure with what is wrong with me?

I still don’t want to live occasionally. And I lost most of the faith that I built up over the few years I lived in that village to ever get help. I don’t have the strength to fight to try to make people who should be professionals believe me. To believe in my pain. To really listen to me. It is hard to talk as is. It only got harder. But I tried.

So now, my dear posters and high up people who keep telling us we need to get help.

I. Really. Tried.

I am not even one of them who has it worse than me. How many people must die because some medical person or whoever refused to believe them when they did the best they could to tell the world they are not ok? How many people contemplate the impossibility of anyone listening to them, when even the professionals don’t seem to want to help them? How many just give up because of the insane amounts of paper filling and slapping us around like we are some sort of cattle just waiting to get slaughtered in the great well-oiled machine of this glorious country of ours?

I now walk again with a mask on my face. Only when I’m home may I take it off. Because here is the only one who would truly ever listen to me, to hear my pain and to try help and understand me.

And that’s me.