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
without a care in the world-we danced in the rain enjoying the last vestiges of childhood feeling the wet ground against our feet stomping and laughing and enjoying the miracle of this moment as it rained in paradise
I call to the waning moon for inspiration, for motivation Some days it’s hard to keep going, to keep trying I call to the waning moon to turn into Mama Killa and bring me comfort and growth
stuck between two divas-I was never meant to stand out my older sister shouted cries of continued injustice my younger sister just cried over any little thing my parents tried their best to give us individual attention but sometimes I got left behind between the shuffle of my sisters’ hysterics and while I hold no ill will towards my sisters or my parents I wonder what my life would have been life if I had been the first or last born
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
It’s been 2 years since my BPD diagnosis and some things have changed, some things have remained the same. I still have the same two jobs and still adhere to my strict routine of consistency and routine with exercise, writing, and therapy. I’m still on the same meds for my anxiety and depression. All of that has helped with my continued progress and growth. And I still continue to suffer from major depressive episodes but it’s not as bad as it used to be and here’s a blog I wrote about it recently:
What has changed overall has been me. I remember last year writing about how I was living an authentic life and while that was mostly true, there was still something I had to take care of to make this true, my divorce and telling my youngest son about it. I went back to therapy to navigate these big feelings in actually starting the process and following through and telling my youngest son about it. I’m glad to report, I filed for divorce a couple of months ago and told my son who took it better than I expected. After this, I felt like this major burden of guilt and grief has been lifted off from me. It was hard, really hard to have lied about this part of my life for the past four years to my son and to other family members. Three of those years, I felt like I was leading a double life as I had to be careful not to let one part of my life bleed into the other. It was awful and reflecting back on this, I think this was a major trigger for my mental health breakdown in the summer of 2021. Feeling guilt and shame with the immensity of emotions that comes with BPD is horrible and something I would never wish on my worst enemy.
me and my youngest son on his birthday
Another major thing that happened in year 2 is that I took two trips to my homeland, Peru. The first one was in September of 2022 and the second one was in March of this year. Both times I went, it was amazing and the first trip helped me reconnect with my roots and find a sense of identity I had been searching for all of this time. I hadn’t been back since I was 9 so it had been 32 years since I had been home. It was strange, glorious, amazing and overwhelming at the same time. It felt like I finally found a piece within me that had been missing all of this time.
Finally home after 32 years -September of 2022
The second trip was even better because I took my oldest son who hadn’t been on a plane since he was an infant and we got to visit my dad’s hometown of Oxapampa. I think I’m still processing that trip because it was so special and meaningful to take my son to Peru and show him his and my roots. I’m honestly still processing both trips and I’ll write about both of them later. What I can say is that both trips helped in my healing and recovery process from my BPD symptoms. Before, I was still floundering when it came to trying to establish a stable identity. That changed radically after I came back from my first trip.
me and my oldest son in Oxapampa, Peru in April of this year-the beer in Oxapampa is the BEST EVER-anything else is MID
From February to July, I’ve continued to maintain the healthy coping skills I’ve acquired in therapy and have made even more progress. I started group DBT therapy in April and that’s also helped me tremendously. Listening to members in that group talk about their issues has made me gain a lot of perspective. I’ve also had a few obstacles along the way of course. In May, I upped my dosage on one of my meds that ended up with me having a major depressive episode, here’s a blog post about that:
A year later, I can honestly say that I’ve been successful in managing my emotions in a much better and healthier way. My growth has been phenomenal in many areas of my life due to my hard work. I’ve had incredible support from my therapists, medical providers, friends, followers, and family who’ve helped facilitate my growth by encouraging me and giving me the space I needed to be who I needed to be at different parts of this process. Sometimes that was a complete emotional mess, sometimes that was an angry and salty poet, sometimes that was a cringy mom or a moody coworker. Restarting this blog and creating content for it has been instrumental in my healing process and has been a great outlet for the inspiration and creativity I’ve had during this time. Another beneficial thing I’ve done is simplified my life by letting go of anything that doesn’t serve me. I keep my life simple with work, kids, friends, family, and writing and this is the right combination for me to maintain my emotional stability. I’ve learned to prioritize my mental health above everything else because the consequences for me and everyone are too great for me not to do so. I understand now that the “old me” before her diagnosis was trying to have “everything” and well, that extended my emotional bandwidth to the point it was detrimental to my mental health to the point that I constantly lived in a flux of emotional dysregulation. I don’t blame anybody or even myself; I did not have the knowledge or awareness at the time to do any better.
I’m not completely where I want to be because I have two areas that I still have problems with: -sticking to my boundaries especially when I feel pressure from others to bend to their will and desires -my cognitive distortions which include black and white thinking and thinking in absolutes I’ve lived with these cognitive distortions since I can remember, and it’s been really hard to break these unhealthy thinking patterns but I’m working on it.
There is a lot more to say about this journey, but I’ll save that for later throughout this year. To conclude, here are a few thoughts: To have an immense amount of progress and growth this year; I had to learn to be brutally honest with myself about things I had been lying to myself about for too long. I had a tendency to blame others when I felt terrible about my life. This year, I changed that pattern and I had to learn to hold a mirror to myself and take accountability for any harm I’ve done to myself and others and that was extremely difficult to do. It also meant facing some of my biggest fears and insecurities and that was fucking hard. Sometimes it was so much work, I wanted to give up but I didn’t. And now I’m here, at a place where I’m truly happy and content with myself and my life. And to not have major depressive episodes every other week where I’m stuck in this rut of misery feels like a type of freedom I can’t describe. To manage hard emotions like anger and sadness without it affecting my whole week or my whole day is something I always felt was impossible until now. And while I am thankful for everyone that’s been helpful in my journey, I feel the most gratitude to myself and my determination and resilience. I had always known myself but just this year I’ve finally started to understand myself and finally felt a sense of freedom to be who I really am without a need to filter out the crazy or hard parts that make me the complicated and resilient human that I am. A year later, I no longer allow life to happen to me and feel powerless and have an immense need for validation from others. Now I’m a person who lives a life with intention and purpose for my own betterment.
Video taken 5/15/22, 5/22/22, 7/3/22- To get a place of emotional stability and permanence has been worth all of the tears, notebooks and journals full of self reflection, poems, essays, etc, miles walked or run, and countless hours of therapy. Let’s see where I am in another year! Excited about my future! My new concept map 😍🥰
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’d rather be berated and hated than ignored and treated with indifference call me a lunatic, call me a bitch call me the worst mistake of your life JUST CALL ME ANYTHING! Then I’ll know I won because I’ve imprinted on your memory
nothing ever happens to my exes after they leave- they don’t blink, they don’t flinch, they don’t need therapy and I’m so incredibly jealous of that! They’re carefree and without any feelings- Absconding without blame or any responsibility While I’m left in a spiral of shame and regret and many times losing my sanity How many more mental breakdowns will I have before accepting= love is always a dangerous game for me- no matter how casual and detached I try to be my nature will always be to give, give, give Until I lose parts of my identity Maybe this is how I keep attracting narcissists?
My default setting must be sad because when a wave of happiness comes all I can feel is anxiety a stabbing in my gut that makes me nauseous maybe I’m still getting used to this new feeling of joy and excitement in my life Maybe I don’t know how to deal with finally being healthy and happy maybe I’m just used to my constant state of misery
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 used to have a tunnel vision of love thought it could only be felt with someone but I was wrong love is in the trees love is in the ocean love is in the earth and love is in myself my higher power taught me this and it’s a lesson I’ll forever cherish
Life on the BPD 