What I Learned About My Patterns This Week With BPD
This week I’ve been paying closer attention to my patterns—how my brain and body react to things—and wow, it’s been eye-opening.
I’ve always known that my feelings run deep, but what I’m realizing is that with BPD, it’s like they run deeper than deep. When I feel something, I don’t just “feel it”—I fall into it. Yesterday I had a pretty big let down, and instead of just being disappointed, my mind went straight to worst-case scenario. I cried like it was the end of the world. For me, disappointment doesn’t feel small. It feels like rejection, abandonment, loss, and grief all wrapped into one.
Another moment hit me just as hard. I got angry over something and my first instinct wasn’t to pause or breathe—it was to act. Immediately. I texted my friend asking if I should make a drastic move, because that’s where my head went: extremes. I don’t tend to sit in the middle. Everything feels like “all or nothing.”
That’s the thing I’m really seeing more clearly this week:
I take every emotion to the extreme.
I struggle to hold space for feelings without reacting.
I want immediate relief, even if it means blowing something up.
And it’s not just with emotions—it shows up in my hobbies too. When I find something I love, I throw myself into it with the same intensity. Right now, that “something” is writing, and more specifically, poetry. I can feel myself becoming obsessed—in the best and hardest ways. I don’t just dabble. I dive in headfirst. It’s like I want to wring out every word, every feeling, every metaphor until I’ve bled it dry on the page.
It’s not easy to face these extremes, but naming them helps. It helps me pause and notice: Oh, I’m going into my all-or-nothing place again. It doesn’t stop the tidal wave of feelings, but it gives me a little bit of perspective. And maybe that’s where growth starts—not in silencing the extremes, but in learning to recognize when I’m swinging there.
Because my reality is: I feel feelings extra hard. And while that can hurt, it also means I care deeply, love deeply, create deeply, and experience life with intensity. My work now is figuring out how to ride those waves without letting them wreck me.
Poem of the Day
I don’t feel in halves.
I don’t feel in whispers.
I feel in avalanches—
in thunder,
in glass shattering.
All or nothing.
Never the middle.
BPD is a tidal wave.
It wrecks me.
It lifts me.
It makes my intensity
both curse and cathedral.
