A Year Ago, I Started Writing The Borderline Between Us

A year ago, I started the journey of writing The Borderline Between Us.

At the time, I did not call it a journey. I did not even call it a book. It was just an idea, something I thought would be funny, cathartic, and honestly necessary. I wanted to write about all the different men I had dated. The stories, the red flags, the heartbreak, and the patterns I kept repeating. I wanted to put it all somewhere outside of my body and outside of my mind because carrying it alone was starting to feel unbearable.

I thought I was writing about them, but I was not. Not really.

What started as an idea to write about dating stories slowly turned into something bigger. Somewhere between the journal-entry style reflections and the late-night writing sessions, it transformed into a dramatized, inspired-by-my-life fictional story about a girl reclaiming her life. She begins to explore stories and trauma from her past while trying to figure out who she is and why she loves the way she does. She is in therapy, of course, because healing does not happen in isolation. It happens in the mess. It happens in the hard conversations. It happens when you finally stop running from your own truth.

What I did not know when I started writing this book was that I would also find myself through the creative process. So many of the stories in The Borderline Between Us are either directly about my life or heavily inspired by it. That meant I was healing in real time while writing them. I was unpacking memories on the page and then processing them in therapy. I was creating a fictional world, but the emotions underneath it were real. The truth was real.

Writing this book did not just become a creative outlet. It became part of my healing.

The girl I was a year ago is not the girl I am today, and I am so damn proud of that. I have grown. I have changed. I have begun to truly heal. Not the kind of healing that is neat or linear, but the kind that feels like shedding old skin. The kind that forces you to look at yourself in ways you have avoided for years. The kind that makes you confront your patterns, your triggers, and the parts of you that were only trying to survive.

I think writing has a way of forcing you to face the truth. It is impossible to write your life down, even through fiction, without noticing the patterns. It is impossible to relive certain moments on paper without realizing how much they shaped you. But it is also powerful. Because once you write it, it stops owning you in the same way. Once you give your pain language, it becomes something you can understand. Something you can hold. Something you can heal.

There is an excerpt from my book that perfectly sums up how I feel right now. It is one of those lines that came from somewhere deep inside me, and when I wrote it, I did not even realize it would become my truth.

"I don't crave the chaos like I used to. That version of me, the one who lived on the edge of emotional emergencies, who thought love had to look like suffering, she was doing the best she could with what she knew. I don't hate her for it. I just don't want to live there anymore. This version of me is learning how to stay. And that might be the bravest thing ive ever done"

That is what this past year has been. Learning how to stay. Learning how to stop running from myself. Learning how to stop confusing chaos with love. Learning how to recognize my emotions and everything that comes with BPD. Learning how to forgive the version of me that did not know any better, while also choosing not to live there anymore.

A year ago, I started writing a book thinking it would just be stories about dating. I did not know it would become a story about healing. I did not know it would change me. But it did, and I am so thankful I started.

Because the girl who began The Borderline Between Us was still learning how to survive. The girl writing it now is learning how to live.

-D