On October twenty-second last year, in the midst of an already struggling cross country season that saw me fighting to stay afloat and remember what my place out on the course was after an injury that shook my previously solid grasp of who I was as an athlete, I walked into what was meant to be a typical therapy session with my gal Monique, something I'd done roughly every two weeks since the previous November. I (and most of y'all, because I am a chronic oversharer and I firmly believe that the topic of mental health needs to be addressed in the world of athletics again and again and again until it becomes completely comfortable for all parties involved) had known for some time that I had the Millenial Special, a combination of anxiety and depression that is becoming less taboo every day-I've joked with friends more than once that if you don't at least have depression, are you really that trendy? So, thinking this day would be like any other, I basically just rolled out of bed, threw on some joggers and a sweater, and went to the CAPS center in the student union.
We started out our one-hour appointment pretty normally, just chatting about the events that had transpired since last I saw her, and got to talking about how a race I’d just competed in didn’t go as I’d planned. We touched briefly on how closely I tie my personal value to my ability to compete at a high level, and got somehow to the topic of the indicators of mental health issues that a family member was exhibiting. There was a brief pause after I joked that I sometimes thought this person might have bipolar disorder, and she said, “Well...Have you ever considered that it might be borderline? How much do you know about that disorder?” After I told her I had a broad idea of what it was, she pulled out her copy of the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-5 and flipped to the page that contained the steps for diagnosing borderline. Before starting to read through them, she looked up at me and said, “Try to think about if these criteria apply to (the family member)...and think about whether or not they apply to you.” I felt like I couldn’t have quite heard her right. Me? Yeah, I’m a little bit wild sometimes, but people with borderline are certified Crazy B*tches, aren’t they? Then she started reading the criteria. “Impairments in self-functioning...impairments in interpersonal functioning...negative affectivity”. Haha. Crap. As she described what these phrases meant, I searched for a loophole and found nothing. “Disinhibition...impulsivity...antagonism.” I met the criteria at every step, and when she finished going through them, she looked at me and said, “It sounds like you meet the criteria for diagnosing borderline personality disorder. But that’s not a death sentence. Knowing that you have it, we can just attack the negative aspects of it and leave you with the positive side of this.”
I walked out completely unsure of what to think. Everything I’ve ever heard about borderline personality disorder has been entirely negative. Women with this disorder are crazy, they’re hysterical, they’re overly emotional, they don’t know how to keep themselves in check. She said that it wasn't a death sentence, but in that moment, it sure felt like one. One of the diagnostic criteria for this disorder is "pathological personality traits", and that was a phrase that I couldn't seem to shake. Pathological? Like my personality was a disease? I told my coach Sarah my diagnosis in a meeting an hour later, and she reminded me that people are not their diagnoses. I felt like I should have been relieved by the knowledge that there is a name for what was happening to me, that I wasn't just losing my mind randomly, but I wasn't. I wasn't relieved because borderline is still the type of disorder that has a very negative social stigma. Because before I found out I had it, I still considered people with the diagnosis to be crazy and unable to be reasoned with. Because even my therapist admitted that most people in her field strongly dislike working with borderline patients because they consider them to be largely unwilling to change and hard to reason with. Equipped with this diagnosis coupled with the attempt to come back from my spinal injury, my grasp of who I actually was seemed to be slipping, regardless of how hard I tried to dig my nails into it. Being diagnosed with a personality disorder comes with a whole slew of questions-How soon do I have to tell new romantic interests that they might be taking up with a crazy person? What made me this way? What does this mean for the way people perceive me? How much of my personality is actually me, and how much is some kind of disease?
Gradually, I've come to be more comfortable with this diagnosis. Talking to Monique about it, getting my grubby little mitts on as much related literature as I can, and working through processes to deal with the uncomfortable side effects of having a ~pathological personality~ has made my life significantly better. The more I was willing to actually discuss this with my therapist, the more I realized that borderline is not something that has to be innately bad. In one conversation we had, she described borderline personality disorder as being like a very sensitive car alarm-Sometimes, it can be very useful, because it warns you the second someone is trying to break into your car (or ruin your life, break your heart, steal your cat, and burn your house down), and sometimes it's just inconvenient because it goes off if someone brushes it (or looks at you with an unusual expression, causing you to decide that they hate you and want you to burn in hell for eternity). Basically, the task that we are working on together now is to keep the positive borderline traits, like emotional highs and sensitivity to the emotions of others, while weeding out the negative things like emotional reactivity that can lead to explosive bursts of temper in response to triggers
, or depressive slumps
in response to the actions or emotions of those around me. Of course, it's still perfectly fine to get angry and sad sometimes, but the key with borderline is to recognize when reactions to certain stimuli are too extreme and keep them in check. Learning to deal with emotional triggers in a healthy and productive way makes having BPD something that can be viewed in a more positive light, because though it truly is a pain in the rear when you find yourself sitting on the floor crying because you thought you had more chocolate almond milk and you do not, in fact, have more chocolate almond milk, it can also be a very beautiful disorder (lmaoooooo what a weird thing to say) in that the intensity of emotions that you feel is heightened, so you get to enjoy the positive emotions much more than you would otherwise. Yes, the lows can be very low, but the highs are amazing and I can't imagine myself being any other way.
I have battled with mental illness throughout my collegiate career, and I have been truly lucky to have to support of family, friends, coaches and trainers, but while I’ve had this, some athletes do not, and the quickness to judge and lack of empathy from strangers and individuals with only pieces of the story can be astounding. Things such as people cracking jokes about one’s need for an ESA is one example of this-You would never think to laugh at an epileptic for having a seizure dog, so what is so funny about the concept of someone with a diagnosed disorder having a support animal to help comfort them? We need to reshape the way people, especially in the athletics community, view mental illness. Just because you can’t see a person’s suffering doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When someone doesn’t run well because they have a stress fracture, people are understanding and often sympathetic, but when someone doesn’t run well because some aspect of their mental health is suffering, they are often written off as having “made some bad choices” or not put enough effort into their training. In the book What Made Mady Run, the author talks about how mental illness is sometimes like anemia-Because it’s not something that you can see on a scan or put a brace on, people tend to see it as a deficiency of character, rather than an ailment that someone is working hard to overcome.
The reality is, we all need to sit down and chat about mental health. We need to make it acceptable for anyone to say “I need help” and to say that they are struggling without judgments about their character being passed. People are people, and a lack of serotonin doesn’t make anyone mentally “weak” or incapable of being an incredible athlete and human being.
, or depressive slumps
in response to the actions or emotions of those around me. Of course, it's still perfectly fine to get angry and sad sometimes, but the key with borderline is to recognize when reactions to certain stimuli are too extreme and keep them in check. Learning to deal with emotional triggers in a healthy and productive way makes having BPD something that can be viewed in a more positive light, because though it truly is a pain in the rear when you find yourself sitting on the floor crying because you thought you had more chocolate almond milk and you do not, in fact, have more chocolate almond milk, it can also be a very beautiful disorder (lmaoooooo what a weird thing to say) in that the intensity of emotions that you feel is heightened, so you get to enjoy the positive emotions much more than you would otherwise. Yes, the lows can be very low, but the highs are amazing and I can't imagine myself being any other way.
I have battled with mental illness throughout my collegiate career, and I have been truly lucky to have to support of family, friends, coaches and trainers, but while I’ve had this, some athletes do not, and the quickness to judge and lack of empathy from strangers and individuals with only pieces of the story can be astounding. Things such as people cracking jokes about one’s need for an ESA is one example of this-You would never think to laugh at an epileptic for having a seizure dog, so what is so funny about the concept of someone with a diagnosed disorder having a support animal to help comfort them? We need to reshape the way people, especially in the athletics community, view mental illness. Just because you can’t see a person’s suffering doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When someone doesn’t run well because they have a stress fracture, people are understanding and often sympathetic, but when someone doesn’t run well because some aspect of their mental health is suffering, they are often written off as having “made some bad choices” or not put enough effort into their training. In the book What Made Mady Run, the author talks about how mental illness is sometimes like anemia-Because it’s not something that you can see on a scan or put a brace on, people tend to see it as a deficiency of character, rather than an ailment that someone is working hard to overcome.
The reality is, we all need to sit down and chat about mental health. We need to make it acceptable for anyone to say “I need help” and to say that they are struggling without judgments about their character being passed. People are people, and a lack of serotonin doesn’t make anyone mentally “weak” or incapable of being an incredible athlete and human being.
