My daughter was six when I found her first letter she written saying she wanted to kill herself. I thought she was just being a brat and just mad at me. She was such a happy child and very active. She always shined in school, always got A’s and B’s. Than high school started and things started to change. The depression, the anxiety, the self-injuring, and the drug use started to change my daughter. Doctor after doctor, therapists after therapist, in-patient, out patient; they could never give me an answer to “why is my daughter feeling like this?” “What am I doing wrong?”
The answers always seem to be, “have her take this or take that” gosh only knows what drugs I have forced my daughter to take.
Through it all she graduated high school and received a scholarship to college and is in her second year. The battle has not ended. We have good months and than really bad months. Sometimes we wonder if going away to college was the best thing, over all it is proving that it was the right decision for her. The school offers counseling and that is when she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
After searching the web and trying to find a place that I can open up to other parents and she how they handle living with a child with BPD, I became frustrated. Yes there are plenty of sites for people who have BPD, but what about us, the parents? And that is how this site was started.
As I am writing this post I am deciding if I should tell my daughter about this site. I do not hide anything from her. But I don’t know how she will feel about it. Just now my phone text alert goes off. It’s her. It’s 10:40pm on a Friday night. It can’t be good. I am right. Her text reads …
“I want to hurt myself but I can’t do that. I want to pull my hair out, but I can’t do that. My only relief from this life is my cigarette addiction, but that’s costing me money I don’t have. People are telling me I’m someone when I feel like I’m no one… no matter what I do, I’m back to this. It’s hard not to do things that could make my anxiety lessen which is why I think I’m starting to feel like I’m having a panic attack.”
Sound familiar to you? I know I am not alone in this journey and there are so many of us out there. I hope we can all reach out to each other and share our journey and learn from each other.