My Parents Gave me a Personality Disorder.

For those of you who may know me, you know my story. For those of you who don’t, my names Tracy and I am sick. I have two mental illnesses. One that I was born with, Bipolar Disorder. The other is BPD, Border Line Personality Disorder. Mental health professionals have been saying for years they want to change the name of the disorder. Because BPD is not in fact a change in personalities. It’s a disorder of emotions. I feel each and every emotion to an amplified extent. How they say there’s no gray area, it’s all just black and white for us border liners. When we are happy we feel like we are being shot across the sun flying into a parade of fireworks, drifting off into the Red Sea in the Mediterranean. When we are depressed our chest feels hollows, the emptiness physically hurts us (we can feel the pain in our chest) we feel intense suicidal ideation and believe we are a burden to our loved ones and they’d be better off without us. BPD is a back and forth of depressive, angry/irritable and happiness/feelings of euphoria episodes. Its getting stuck in the episodes and knowing you are stuck. Being intelligent but knowing your mind can’t think rationally until the episode ends. It’s mood dysregulation and snapping on the people around you just from the slightest trigger. It’s having a hard time with interpersonal relationships. It’s having a sex addiction, alcohol addiction, suffering from other mental illnesses as well, having symptoms of every mental illness put into one disorder And having eating disorders. It’s having erratic behavior. And unintentionally pushing people away by overreacting. The worst part for me is my fear of abandonment. I’m scared all the people that love me will one day leave me. Incase you were wondering I was not born with BPD. I had the genetic inclination to develop a personality disorder. But my environmental factors brought it out. It’s a learned behavior. It’s a coping mechanism I learned from my trauma. Here’s how my parents gave me BPD.

I suffered a lot as a child. I grew up in a rich, white town. A plethora of all white, Jewish girls with Paris Hilton bodies. I am white and I am Jewish. But let me break down my body type for you. I have thick legs that rub together, very wide hips and a large butt. I have large breasts a small waist and I’m petite only 5’3. Sounds like an ideal 2020 body type. But in the early 2000s everybody wanted to look like Jennifer Anniston and Nicole Ritchie. I just didn’t fit in. I was severely bullied growing up for my body. I was considered fat even when I wasn’t because of how thick my legs always were. It would have been one thing being severely tormented in school and going home to a loving family, but it wasn’t the case. On the outside my life seemed perfect. I lived in a house considerably large enough to be a miniature mansion, a 5 bedroom, 5 bath colonial, with a tennis court and a pool. I wore juicy couture track suits and had designer hand bags. I always carried around with me a Chanel lipgloss and my pink LG phone. My dad was a dentist. My mom a school teacher. A Lexus LS 460 in the driveway with an Audi Q6. Perfect, right? But no, it wasn’t. My parents weren’t accepting of me. At 12 I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was taken off adderall and put on ambilify. I automatically gained weight when I went on the mood stabilizers. Not only did I have to live with the fact that I was now mentally ill at only 13 years old. I now weighed 150 lbs, which honestly for my body type was not heavy. I had perfect curves and a flat stomach. It was my parents who made me feel fat and like I wasn’t beautiful. My mom had called me many things. She came from an abusive family. I remember distinctly she once called me fat as a horse. And my dad has said many things to me. I remember when I got my first high end retail job at Bloomingdales. During the interview process he said “Don’t you think your weight will affect them giving you the job?” I’d come home from school and have a snack and my dad would say I was going to die of a heart attack because I was so fat and so unhealthy and shouldn’t be eating garbage. My brother was the perfect angel child. My dad worshipped him. He was my dads dream. Played tennis, the sport my dad tried to infringe in us. Listened to my dads favorite music. Was studious and only got A’s. Didn’t party, didn’t drink. Didn’t do anything wrong. I was depressed, I liked writing poetry and songs. To my dad my writings weren’t good and I’d never be the Beatles. I was in completion dance but I was wasting my time dance isn’t a sport only tennis was. I didn’t get the best grades because I always hated school. Why I am now an entrepreneur and am self employed. I liked partying with friends. I hated my dads music. I wasn’t validated. I was never good enough. When I did something wrong I was hit. I remember I spoke back to my sixth grade teacher and she called my home phone. My dad got home and heard the message and stormed into my room. Loudly yelled in my face pointing his finger angrily at me. He started choking me until I couldn’t breathe. And my mom stood there the whole time and watched my as dad choke me. As young as 4 years old my dad gave me a bloody nose. I was refusing to go to bed and my dad screamed at me and rushed to grab me and force me to go to bed. He grabbed me so hard my nose started gushing blood. So yes, the abuse started as a toddler. I give props to my brothers. My oldest brother fought with my mom constantly. He heard my dad hit me on the phone at one point. I called him because I was forced in a long car ride with my dad home and he was being verbally abusive. I called my brother crying and said I can’t flipping do this anymore. My dad thought I said the F word and he slapped me. My brother went completely frantic and lost his shit. He called my mom screaming at her. And he did that quite often. He was my safe space. He doesn’t have such a close relationship with my mom anymore. And she says it upsets her. I can’t say the same because he is there for me 100% of the time. And I think I’m finally beginning to realize he may have started to distance himself from my Mom when she got remarried to my Dad and had me. Me and my brother were so close, I’m sure it was traumatizing for him to see what I was being put through. From the ages of 13 and 14 I was bullied at school, verbally and physically abused at home. I came forward at 13 with the time I was molested on a trip to Israel and my mom told me it was a lie. Even my own traumatic past wasn’t validated. My parents kept hurting me. And I kept acting out. They forced me into weight watchers because I was fat and wasn’t beautiful enough for them. Everyday I was told I wasn’t good enough. It got so bad that I was running away from home. At 15 I switched schools in Long Island to a therapeutic day school. However I was still at home, my home life was still toxic. At 16 I ran away for the last time because after that my CSE sent me upstate four hours away from my home. I’ll never forget the feeling of my parents packing my things and driving me to this school in the middle of the ghetto in Troy. I’ll never forget how it felt being bullied by people from the Bronx, Kingston, Schenectady, Brooklyn and every ghetto in NY. How I didn’t fit in being rich and white and everybody deeply hurt me. I’d call my mom hysterically crying that I couldn’t do it anymore. And she’d hang up on me. I’ll never forget going almost a year before I could go back home for the first time for a home visit. I remember not being allowed to see my parents for six months and I only got to spend three hours with them on a day visit and how traumatizing it was for my mom to kiss me goodbye and drive off in her car and I’d cry watching her car drive away. My parents abused me, then abandoned me. They never took responsibility for my issues. And always blamed me. “Why was I a problem child?” “Why couldn’t I be more like my brother?” “Why couldn’t I just behave?” All I needed was validation, unconditional love and for my parents to protect me. To be my safe space from the bullying I endured in school. But no, they let me down. My parents gave me my personality disorder.