In the beginning, it was just me and you – and it was hard making sense of being a mom the heavy weight of caring for another human felt like it was going to crush me at times and I tried my best with my lack of knowledge with my lack of judgment so your lullabies were the goo goo dolls and sugar ray and your bedtime stories were stephen king and cosmo the pediatrician did tell me to read to you- at 17, I thought he meant anything at 17, I was far from June Cleaver and I felt so inept at times and while other moms read parenting books on how to become mommy dearest I focused on school books to graduate from high school so we’d have a fighting chance so while you never had a typical mom you still lucked out with a mom who’ll always fill you up with love and strength a mom who’ll always have your back
As far as what my future holds for me, I’ve been doing a lot of long term goal planning and manifestations the past few years and that’s been working for me. Here’s a recent blog post I wrote about it:
The past 2 years was me trying to find out who I was and what I wanted out of life. I had this very vague idea, almost like a sketch but now I have a clear picture of what that is exactly. Getting out of survival mode was crucial for this development and I’m excited about the future. One thing I can tell you is that there will definitely be more storytelling. In fact, for the month of September, I’m telling my story chronologically with some of the moments in my life that most impacted me. This came about organically as I was planning blog content for that month and I said, “fuck it, let’s do this” and “let’s see what happens”. I think that so much of my healing happened because of my storytelling. It was important for me to retell my story because that’s how I took ownership of it. It helped turn me from a victim to heroine in my story and this has been monumental to my healing process. Of course, sometimes that looks crazy and messy but it only proves what a resilient and powerful Queen I am to still be standing despite the chaos and trauma I’ve been through. Here’s a poem I wrote in April about it:
Sharing my story
I’ve taken off my mask and stop repressing my true self- And while it’s terrifying at time, I show the world my authenticity and vulnerability I share the parts of my story that are terrible, happy, sad, lovely, crazy, beautiful, and tragic so others don’t feel alone and find solidarity in my chaotic and bicultural story of love, rage, defeat, hate, and resilience And bring to light my rich and vivid experience of the duality of being a rooted and rootless, Peruvian and American, a hateful and kind woman living her life fearlessly and shamelessly
I restarted this blog a couple of summers ago as a way to cope with my mental breakdown and at the time I had only 17 followers and now I have more than 300 followers who have been incredibly supportive and encouraging throughout this self discovery journey. Thank you to all of you who have given me this safe space on the internet to share my story through blogging and poetry. This has been incredibly instrumental in helping me in my recovery from BPD . It’s given me a sense of love through community that I didn’t know could exist and I’m incredibly grateful and humbled by it. Anyways,if you’ve made it to the end of this blog post, you’re the best. I’m not sure what year 3 after my BPD diagnosis but I hope I continue to evolve and live a life with purpose for the betterment of myself and my kids.
It’s Bichota Season and like Karol G says, “La Vida es Mia”-it’s me and my meds against the world
bad bitches go to therapy-me about to go see my therapist in July of this year
The big question is “Do I still have BPD?” well I had another assessment done in late spring and I still wear the scarlet letters of mental illness, BPD. I was infuriated because I have worked my ass off in therapy, doing all of the healthy things, abstaining from sex and relationships, and reading everything I can to get better and I still have the diagnosis. My therapist did say my symptoms were a lot milder than when I first came in. She also said that it could take several years before I can say I’m “recovered”. She has also recently discharged me from therapy because I’m doing so well and at this point I might be using therapy as a crutch. Ouch. It sounds harsh but honestly, she’s right. Going back to therapy this time around, I went back to get better at regulating my emotions. It sounds strange because while I have done a lot of work and adhere to a strict routine, I still have trouble at times when life gets chaotic or there are big changes. I know too well the consequences of what happens if I don’t get help. So whether that’s medication changes, a refresher on DBT skills. reading books about mental health or even taking time off; I will do whatever it takes to get back to a normal baseline for me so I can continue to heal and thrive.
a few of the mental health book I’ve read to help me understand my diagnosis and trauma
Another big thing that happened in this second year was that I was able to identify my values and live in alignment with them. Honesty, integrity, community, family, compassion and grace are just a few I identify with this year. Before my diagnosis, I was trying to survive and find solace in these pockets of temporary adrenaline rushes and happiness. I not only caused chaos but also invited it into my life over and over again. It was a realization I had shortly after things ended with me and C last summer. I think that was when I decided I needed to understand what true solitude meant without the distraction of anything resembling lust or romance. It was one of the hardest challenges I had to face. And I won’t lie, the loneliness was crushing at times and it drove me insane on some nights but I relied on my writing and my friends to get me through the worst of it and somehow made it to the other side. And on the other side, was my empowered and higher self. Am I all the way healed? No freaking way. But like I was telling one of my new friends when I was explaining my BPD diagnosis, “I was like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind but now I’m much better. I’m way healthier and much better at managing my emotions”.
my favorite self lives in alignment with her values
Around September,I started to logically understand how out of control my behavior was at times. The strange thing about it is it doesn’t feel like me when I’m acting that way. I’m a person who has always tried to have control over all aspects of my life. For example, when I was first diagnosed, I was naive enough to think that I could somehow “fast-track my healing” . I quickly learned that’s not how healing or therapy works. It didn’t matter how quickly I read my DBT workbook or did the exercises from there, how many poems I wrote about grief in one day, or how many healthy coping mechanisms I picked up along the way; healing and changing my behavior was going to take time and patience. I couldn’t speed up the process if I truly wanted to get better.
that DBT workbook I’ve started 5 times and I still can’t get past chapter 8-lol
I needed to learn to sit with my grief, anger, mania, self-hatred, and any other uncomfortable and painful emotions and learn a healthy way to process and cope with them instead of chasing it away with booze, sex, or binge shopping. It’s been hard to do, and I’ve stumbled along the way and have made many mistakes. One thing I’ve learned this year is that changing unhealthy patterns in my behavior had to be the most arduous and difficult work I’ve ever done. For example, maybe one day I’m feeling fat and ugly, the old me would have gone binge shopping on Amazon for a pretty dress or reached out to one of the casual Joes in my life for validation; the new and healthy version of me had to ask myself the whys of why I’m feeling fat and ugly and what triggered this reaction in me, do I need to write about it, what can I do to make myself feel better that doesn’t involved shopping or the validation from others? It’s way harder to face my insecurities head on than chase them away with a quick and temporary adrenaline rush or serotonin fix. Throughout all this it helped to have an incredible support system who gave me what I needed emotionally to process, grow and move forward in my journey. Part of that support system was my therapist who was kind, compassionate, knowledgeable, and patient with me. I was really tough to deal with at times and I wanted to break up with her at times cause she pushed me a lot when it came to my driving phobia. I remember having a panic attack in front of her because of a driving exposure but she calmed me down enough so I could do it. I got paranoid after thinking she would leave me but she didn’t. She stuck by me through the end of our therapy sessions in January of this year. The few times I’d missed a session, she would call me to check in and talk to me for at least 10 minutes to make sure I was okay. She was also respectful of me and my experiences. I’ve had therapists in the past who talked down to me and were condescending and she wasn’t one of them. People talk about finding “the one” at the “right time”; well in my case, I found the “right therapist” at the “right time” in my life. Here is a poem I wrote about her:
The Healer
From September to January, there was so much progress in my healing and mental health journey thanks to having the adequate resources and tools because of my therapist. I did beat a driving phobia (but that’s a story I’ll tell in depth later on) and I was free from suicidal ideation until May of this year. What was strange to me during these months was how I was learning to really live and enjoy my life. I remember that before my diagnosis, I’d get annoyed sometimes at having to spend time with my kids. During the months of September to December, something switched in me to have this new appreciation for motherhood and spending time with my children. My relationship with my three sons got better and I grew closer to them. I feel like I’m finally the mom my children deserve. Here is a poem I wrote about them:
My Three Kings
My first king, I met at 17 when the nurse placed an alien like being in my arms She was like “feed him” and I was like “how do I do that?” What should I do with him? Eventually I figured it out
My second king, I met at 24 as a birthday present, just like me he had to make a dramatic entrance but it was love at first sight No one could take him from my arms I knew what to do
My third king, I met at 30 He was a dream delivered After a dream lost the previous year He was planned, he was awaited, he was loved He was welcome by everyone with him, I felt a completion of love
1/24/2022
As I’ve also mentioned, my therapy sessions ended in January and after that I was on my own with my maintenance plan making sure I didn’t do anything to sabotage the progress I had made.
Video taken 1/5/22 and 1/16/22-during this time, I really started to thrive-it felt like years of progress within a span of 6 months
Video taken 6/15/2021 before my BPD Diagnosis-I was burnt out and miserable AF
6/30/2022
It’s been a year since I received my life changing diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and so much in my life has changed because of it. I started therapy sometime around late June and I had to do a 3-hour mental health assessment in two separate sessions where my therapists asked me questions about past trauma and past patterns of behavior. It was a really, rough week emotionally for me because of that and other personal stuff going on in my life. I sat down across from my therapist as she explained how Borderline Personality Disorder diagnosis ended up on my concept map.
My first concept map-made on 6/30/2021, altered by me in Mid July
My reaction was one of numbness and shock. And then I made the mistake of going to the internet and looking it up and well BPD gets a bad rap for good reason. After reading all the bad things about BPD, I thought “I knew I had issues and was kind of messed up, but I didn’t expect to be this fucked up, this broken”. It doesn’t help that a couple of things that stand out on the internet about BPD are “BPD is the most painful mental disorder “Or “BPD people are manipulative” or “Some people with BPD are incapable of love”. It didn’t help that at the time I was diagnosed, I was also having a mental breakdown and my relationship at the time was on the rocks. When I told my friends and family about my diagnosis, most of them were supportive and encouraging but some were in denial and didn’t fully accept it. I was told “I couldn’t have BPD because I’m not so awful” or that “it’s not a big deal”. A couple of weeks after my diagnosis, I was broken up with. While I don’t want to go into the details about the events that led up to the demise of that relationship; I will say that the last day I saw my ex, there were a couple of things he said to me that really impacted me and made me really look at my life. I won’t say what they were, but it was useful for the next part of my journey. The breakup validated my worst fears about myself, “I’m unlovable”, I’m hard to love”, “I’m always going to be too emotionally unstable to be in a relationship” “I don’t deserve love” “I always fuck up everything good in my life” “I’m too fucked up and broken to be loved” etc., etc. Y’all have read the poetry and stories about how I don’t handle breakups well-ever. So, I’m lying-in bed crying and thinking all these things and don’t want to get up. I was on vacation when this happened so I could’ve stayed in bed all day and it would have been fine. However, something told me to keep going and getting up. The rest of the month of July is a blur to me at this point. I did document through video and journaling what I did so I know what I did, however there are parts of that month I don’t remember living.
Video taken 7/16/21, 7/19/21, 7/24/21-the start of this journey was difficult and rough-I was in and out of suicidal ideation mode for 2 weeks straight
I know I kept up with my therapy appointments and worked every day and wrote. Something I had to do for therapy was keep a daily diary card monitoring my emotions and any situations that brought out strong emotions in me. The main emotions I felt the months of July, August, and September were anger, sadness, and despair so filling out my diary card was a task but also necessary for me to get better at coping with life.
my first diary card-first two weeks of July
Something my current therapist said in group therapy was how grief makes one take a stock of life and how you’re living it. After the breakup, while yes, I felt this immense grief over that situation, I also felt grief and anger over other traumatic events in my life I hadn’t healed from. It was like I had this closet full of unprocessed trauma that was about to burst open at any time and in July, the door busted wide open and out came well, almost everything I kept inside of me well hidden. Shame, guilt, anger, fury, despair, sadness over past trauma were feelings I became well acquainted with for those first three months. I felt stuck at times in this emotional fog but somehow kept going. I continually asked myself what the purpose of all my hard work was and at first it was so that I don’t ever “split” on my kids like I had on other people in my past. I also had to learn a new language with my BPD diagnosis. I know that sounds weird but with all the new vocabulary words thrown at me, it’s what it felt like. In June and July, I learned real quick what dissociation, masking, and splitting was because that’s basically what I did those months. I also learned the term hypersexuality which I’ve addressed in some of my posts and poetry in this blog. Reflecting on everything that I’ve learned I can understand how my behavior can seem scary and unsafe to some people. I’ve finally had a deep understanding of how much of my erratic and impulsive behavior has greatly impacted my life.
I nurture my soil with love and everything that makes me smile Excitement stirs inside of me thinking of all my untapped potential and the poems and stories that are yet to be written The soil I step in is solid and I am grounded and calm Is this what’s called God’s love?
Halfway through 41, I am truly alone no potential love candidates and sometimes the loneliness threatens to kill my soul- But I know better than to suffer through another deception so I process all of my feelings through poetry Hoping it’s enough to keep the romantic in me from making another mistake
Let’s go to war with ourselves and speak our truth and heal unprocessed trauma within and face our fear and insecurities we’ll walk out with confidence and feel empowered We’ll leave with versions of ourselves ready to reach our full potential and ready to love
At 5 am, I woke up and wrote a 4 page poem about how I wasn’t enough and proceeded to crash my car and my therapist asked if I wanted to die- And I was like “nah, I just couldn’t reign my impulsivity in” at least this time I got control of the car and didn’t fuck anyone else up
I used to water my roots with the supposed love of others their compliments, their energy made me whole but eventually they’d tired of being my water, my earth my everything and leave And I was left once again incomplete- until one day I learned to water my roots with my tears, my strength, my self-love And now my growth and potential are infinite
I keep my screams and cries inside for the sake of my pride I’ll pretend I’m happy and fine even as waves of infinite grief wash over me and I’m drenched in humiliation and shame for allowing myself to become the pawn in a game played by another guy who’s only looking for a temporary distraction
I give my pain and sorrow to God and it lessens the heaviness in my soul and I’ve never felt lighter and I laugh more and feel content and gratitude and I no longer want to die Instead I’m excited to live I’m excited about my wrinkles and every birthday because I’m finally enjoying the gift of life God has bestowed on me
Life on the BPD 