Navigating Borderline Personality Disorder as a Gay Man

Borderline personality disorder, according to what I’ve read since my diagnosis, makes abandonment the worst possible thing. The condition is often rooted in trauma, abuse, or intense adversity of some kind at an early age. It is characterized by violent emotions, outsized reactions to stimuli that make it difficult to act and think rationally. It can make the sufferer desperate for approval, even from people they don’t really like. So when Ryan asked me to take a road trip to Houston with him, I agreed to go.

What did I think would happen? After years of life-saving DBT, or dialectical behavior therapy, this is now the most unpleasant part of my condition: the revisiting, the blaming. It says, “It was your fault.” Pop culture backs this line of thinking up (see: Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction). It frequently perpetuates the notion that people with BPD are narcissistic, manipulative monsters who seek out turbulence. I have the tools now to survive, even thrive with my condition, but what about my past? What if I was a monster?

It’s true that I often cast myself as the victim in my turbulent relationships. I did that with Ryan, I think, though I’m unwilling to absolve him entirely. We met near the tail end of undergrad. At some point in the course of our friendship, I moved into a spare room in his house to avoid having to spend a summer at my parents’ in the middle of nowhere. I knew he had feelings for me, feelings I was careful to skirt around, feigning ignorance when necessary. But I enjoyed it, in a way. I enjoyed being wanted. It was something I thought I needed.

Ryan liked to play the piano and read books in French and accuse me of leading him on, a claim I always denied. I would hate him when he did that; hate him like he was the worst person in the world. But then, when it came time to tell him I had no interest in a relationship, I found I couldn’t say it. I was terrified of having him hate me, terrified of anyone hating me. Someone hating me would be a more coherent view of me than any I held of myself, and I was worried that I would adopt it if I were ever presented with it.

We took a road trip to Houston. There, at a gay bar, Ryan tried to kiss me. I turned away, and his lips landed on my cheek. “Let me,” he whispered in my ear, booze on his breath. When I turned away again, he shoved me backward. “I’m done with this shit,” he said in a tough-guy voice that sounded contrived, like he’d imagined saying exactly this to me many times. He marched back to the car. I followed, hating him, but admonishing myself for not just kissing him. He opened the car door and slid inside. “You can come or not,” he said. I had no other way of getting around, and I didn’t know where I’d sleep if not our hotel.

He was driving too fast. I sat with my hands folded in my lap, my eyes closed. I realized I’d made a possibly fatal mistake, and all that was left was to hope we would survive. “I should just drive us off the fucking edge,” he told me as he approached the overpass, still using that voice. “I should just fucking do it.” It was an extreme situation, but many of my relationships had ended up at an extreme. BPD is big on polarities: people are either the worst or the best; life is either impossibly dull or a mechanical bull.

I might have known something was up with me earlier if I’d been taught how to date, if I had known what courtship could or should look like. It’s not that I wanted a rulebook or anything. After coming out, one thing I liked about being gay was that I could make things up as I went along. Where I’m from, people married young and had kids, and anything else was unconventional.

But it would have been nice to know a few things before diving in. How was I to know that I was sharing too much too soon? That I didn’t have to love someone just because they were nice to me? That telling someone I wasn’t interested in them romantically didn’t mean they would hate me, or that having someone hate me wasn’t the worst thing in the world anyway?

That just wasn’t how my brain worked. When things didn’t go well, I’d take it as confirmation that no one would ever want to be with me. When things went too well, I’d deliberately set up obstacles, attempts to unearth the sentiment I assumed anyone involved with me had — that deep down, they didn’t really like me. That they were only ever one bad episode, one fight, one trial away from abandoning me.

I spent years as a raw nerve. I came to understand, without being told, that I was missing an emotional skin, a protective layer shielding me from whatever might land on me. It wasn’t until that night, when Ryan threatened to drive us off an overpass, that I realized I had a problem I needed to look into. I thought I might die if I didn’t. I decided to ask for my parents’ help in seeing a therapist, who asked me a series of questions about my emotions and how I process them.

My diagnosis gave me a new perspective on myself, one that held more questions than answers. I learned that BPD isn’t very well understood, and that people who have it are more likely to die by suicide. I learned that BPD is often a sexist scapegoat diagnosis wielded against women for having emotions. I could see why. I couldn’t tell which parts of me were BPD and which parts were just the feminine traits I’d been taught to suppress: being sensitive, being vulnerable, wanting so much. Wanting itself, to me, anyway, defined my BPD and my sexuality.

But I was also exposed to DBT training, training that I’ve found so useful in navigating my emotions that I have to wonder why it isn’t mandatory for everyone. It teaches mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness skills, and emotional regulation techniques. I was taught how to get even footing with my feelings, how to identify leaps in logic I was making and the false conclusions that governed me. I learned that being fair to people sometimes hurt, but it was the right thing to do. I became a healthier person. But what about the person I’d been before?

Making peace with the past is something most queer people have to do. For those of us who lived with untreated mental illness, that endeavor becomes even more fraught. At times, it feels like years of my life have gone down the drain. I imagine what life might have been like if I had only known who I was, in every sense.

BPD holds many parallels to my gayness: the stigma that accompanies it in our culture, the challenge of navigating fraught relationships, and the seemingly endless quest for a sense of self. That’s in no way meant to compare being gay to a mental illness. I think it has more to do with how shame imperils self-understanding, how it sabotages development. I didn’t want anyone to hate me. I didn’t want to be a monster. I was willing to sacrifice my wellbeing to that end.

With time and treatment and forgiveness, I’ve been able to answer at least one question. No, I don’t think I was a monster. I think I just didn’t know who I was.

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