After living in my feelings for many years.....

After living in my feelings for so many years it has been really, really, hard but I have experienced both positives and negatives because of being like this. So my take on life is that if I embrace the positive aspects and be thankful that there are some very positive things I can get out of this whole troubling mental disorder they have a name for, and if I can somehow reach for the help I need and begin to work on the negative things and turn them into positives, then I can have myself a win, win! All sounds good, not easy but doable,or at least I have to try my best. Let me elaborate more. When I mention positives and negatives I will begin to share what I see as the positive aspects that have come out of having BPD . It has developed a search inside me for answers and that search has developed a great self awareness. I have dug deep within for truth and clarity and also learnt to hear what my feelings are speaking to me, not just have them swimming around leading me this way or that! This has and is taking a long time, It's not an overnight experience. The art of 'self' is quite a life long journey. When I have seen counsellors and professionals they have always remarked almost in awe at my self awareness, I guess that's why they call me high functioning BPD. I don't think I always was, only when I began trying to help myself. Also through seeking answers I have developed a lot of knowledge about how humans think and act and how intricate our souls are. It has become an interest and a study that has inspired me to learn more and more not just about myself but psychology in general and spirituality as well. I don't think that I would have taken this path had I not had to and yes I did have to or I would not have survived I believe. I really had to become my own counsellor so to speak since I never could find anyone who fully understood me. There was the odd person here and there but never anyone who really called what I was experiencing something tangible like when my psych first said " I believe you have BPD " when I was 46 years old. That's a long time to not know what is wrong with you and feel yourself become progressively worse over time. Wow! it hit me like a ton of bricks for a week, I went from crying to relief then crying again. I became depressed and then was able to cope again or at least stumble along some more like always. Before that I never had any answers to my specific condition but I knew there was something definitely going on and so did everyone that knew me. It was quite embarrassing and humiliating and still is to be honest. So before diagnoses I was desperately seeking some answers f because of pain, suffering, and bad circumstances repeating in my life and how I dealt with them. I felt pushed toward self help and understanding and in the long run I found great benefit out of it. It still didn't solve everything but I took the edge off at least.
Another positive I see that has come out of having BPD is that through suffering a lot and having to find the answers for myself meant that I often went without understanding or a great deal of validation or comfort from others. That in itself is definitely NOT a positive but it did bring out some positives in the long run. Well, firstly I became very angry and hurt because it always felt to me like more of what caused my condition in the first place was being done to me again. This reinforced my pain and hurt. But then I began to turn the situation around and meet a lot of my own needs. Not because I am a super powered positive thinker, but just in order to survive. I had to stop sinking into despair. Through self awareness and self validation, self understanding etc. I sought my own comfort that I felt others weren't giving me and never really had. This didn't fix the pain of being let down again by others, inside there is still some bitterness I must admit. I felt pain that no one around me seemed to want or be able to do what I saw as obvious, like caring, and what I feel I so often do for others. I so often want someone to listen, understand, offer comfort, validation. But I have had to come to the conclusion that I believe that the average person is ill equipt to do what I may see as obvious. Either most of us don't have the capacity to give because we aren't having our emotional needs met firstly ourselves or it could also be that The BPD personality is so often so highly explosive and demanding emotionally that often people protect themselves or just switch off. This to those of us who suffer with BPD is just more rejection and abandonment, repeating the whole cycle of hurt again. Because having BPD symptoms and behaviours are normal to us and we only know this world we have experienced we can often wonder why others don't seem to know or understand our level of emotional pain. We ask ourselves "don't they feel it too? then why do I react differently to most, why am I so highly strung? why do I get so angry and upset and even want to die?why can't they just understand and heal my pain?" Any wonder so many of us self medicate, we have to get pain relief or comfort from somewhere and since we don't know where and we so often can feel so very alone and have a history of feeling not nurtured etc until we can learn to understand ourselves a lot more and have more positive strategies in place such as diagnoses, a level self understanding & understanding for others and their world as well to somehow take the focus off us this can seem our only option. To me it's very hard to realise that not everyone thinks like me, feels pain the way I do. That isn't to say others don't feel pain and pain is only something that BPD'S feel. I can only speak for myself and for my level of pain or my pain threshold. The way I see it is that if I don't seek and reach out for the help available then on the story goes, one more hurt added to the list, one more reason to feel intense pain, one more disappointment and even one more reason to give up on life and not want to 'do' life anymore!