Loser Boy

Loser Pulp Diaries #6

Around five years ago, I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which hurt my feelings.

It felt like she was calling me “terminally dramatic,” like every big emotion I’ve ever had was an overreaction and I was this clumsy dog just crashing into antiques and glassware my whole life. Acknowledging that I could have a personality disorder was beyond embarrassing. It was—in my mind—a new low.

I was angry at myself more than anything. Maybe just because anything regarding emotional regulation felt like a “discipline” issue, like a source of shame that I hadn’t truly grown up with everyone else. I was in my late 20’s and still spent hours of every day boiling quietly in my room while the world seemingly rotated without me.

This particular diagnosis happened over one of our weekly Zoom calls; I would spend my Wednesday lunch breaks in my driver’s seat with my phone propped up on the steering wheel, and my therapist would sit—poised and thoughtful on my screen.

As the appointments went underway, my left hand was tucked under my leg while my right hand always found its way to the dent of exposed leather where I picked at my center console every time my therapist scolded at me to stay on topic. I rarely washed that car. Enough smudges gathered on the surfaces that they started to look like brush strokes.

Every time I zoned out, I would rest my eyes on a crack in the windshield from my first winter, when I poured hot water on it to melt the frost away. When my coworker called me a dumbass for doing that, I said I hadn’t learned that in California. “No shit,” he said.

My rear bumper was hanging off because—my last night in California—I spent the evening with a good friend of my sister, unbeknownst to my sister. After we had sex in my passenger seat, I tried to impress her by peeling off and accidentally backed into a concrete pillar. She told me that sort of thing “happens all the time,” and I remember hoping she was talking about the bumper.

The intensive nature of CPTSD therapy in my old Kia Forte eventually melted my most sour memories onto the dust-covered dashboard, and I would zone out on every drive, replaying old stories in my head, hoping that one day I would get a diagnosis that was curable and not a core part of my identity. The diagnosis, it turns out, was inescapable.

I sat in that driver’s seat one July, and my therapist interjected with her regular steady and silk-toned voice:

“Are you familiar with BPD?”

“Goddamnit.” I replied. I pinched the bridge of my nose

“Mhmm. Yeah,” she nodded her head thoughtfully.

“You sure?”

“Oh yes, yeah.”

I raised my shoulders and pitched my voice up an octave:

“Curable?”

“No.”

“Can I have my own family still, you think?”

She pursed her lips like she was forgiving me for something.

She told me that those with BPD are usually the children of people with Bipolar Disorder, and they have difficult-to-regulate emotions, a disoriented self-image, and a complicated history with relationships. I blushed.

She elaborated that BPD didn’t mean I was beyond therapy, naming some famous celebrities who had it. Amy Winehouse, Pete Davidson, even a colleague of hers who built a career out of helping veteran’s mental health had the disorder himself, or so she said. I did feel that she could have left out Amy Winehouse, considering.

I think for all the frustration and isolation that comes with it, BPD has made me a particularly graceful loser. Maybe it’s just hard to feel like you’re falling if your feet are planted steadily on rock bottom.