It's difficult for people to understand Borderline Personality Disorder and place it on the disability spectrum for a couple of reasons. The main one is that so many of its symptoms are behaviors that have the *illusion* of choice behind them.

Think of it this way. Imagine a man just sitting somewhere peacefully and then suddenly he lets out a blood-curdling howl. You'd be really uncomfortable, because he seems to be doing this for no reason.

Then you look down and notice that there is a bear trap in the grass by his foot, and he just accidentally put his foot in it. You no longer judge him or find his behavior inappropriate; you're now 100% in sympathy (whether you can help or not is another matter).

If a man starts howling and you can't see the reason, you assume he's either "crazy" in some unspecified way, so you're nervous and uncomfortable, or you assume he's choosing to act that way to get attention or bother people, and you're angry at him and expect him to stop.

BPD involves a fair amount of getting caught in bear traps that others can't see. There is no socially acceptable way to release/express that intensity of pain; there are only ways to reduce doing any harm that will linger after the pain passes.

The other thing that makes it very difficult for outsiders to understand the extent to which BPD is a disability is that it varies spectacularly, not just from person to person, but from phase to phase of a person's life. Amounts of ambient stress affect symptoms dramatically.

If you know someone with BPD who used to be an absolute wreck, a toxic vortex that destroyed everything they touched, and now they seem to have a 9 to 5 job and a family and a picket fence, you may be tempted to think they're "cured" and no longer disabled.

I can assure you that this person probably still, from time to time, steps in that mental bear trap. They've just gotten WAY better at not doing splash damage to those around them when it happens (the "havoc" that most people associate with BPD).

Sometimes symptoms go into remission for a very long time, because that person has learned so many great coping methods and/or has gotten to a secure place in life where they feel confident in at least one or two people's love/support. But life doesn't stay static.

Anytime something in life changes drastically, symptoms flare up again; you're suddenly playing on a new difficulty level. You have to learn new tricks. Sometimes there's no trick that works except "remove yourself from situations where your symptoms will cause lasting harm."

People with BPD get seen as "quitters" because the abled paradigm is, any job/responsibility you have is yours until you're fired or retire, and choosing to set it aside for no clear external reason (having to move, death in the family, etc.) is lazy at best, immoral at worst.

Most of the things I've pulled away from in my life, I've done so because I calculated that my symptoms were becoming so severe that my absence would cause less harm/inconvenience to others than my presence. To me, that *is* responsible.

But neurotypical people won't ever understand this, because they see symptoms of BPD as decisions. They believe, in the depths of their hearts, that you feel the same way they do, and they don't like the stress either, but they have to stick with it. Why shouldn't you?

If you tell them, "If I continue down this path, I will eventually start to dissociate, become paranoid, and be unable to tell what's real and what isn't" then they back away horrified that you've been "lying" to them all this time pretending to be "sane."

Because we believe it's one or the other. We have these two boxes in our head labeled "sane" and "crazy" and we aren't comfortable until we know which box a person is in. The "crazy" people are to avoid and marginalize, the "sane" people are to befriend and employ.

I've watched people my whole life try to figure out which box I'm in, and there are only a couple who understand that I'm neither. I'm not sure either thing exists.

I am not employable in the traditional sense, so I feel confident calling myself disabled. At the same time, my kids are more well-adjusted than those of some neurotypical parents, and I've held a volunteer job long enough to be supervised by like 4 different people at it.

I cannot survive on my own, so to me that reads "disabled." But does anyone really function without a support system? Aren't all people interdependent to an extent? Can you fix your own car and grow all your own food and cut your own hair? Where is the line?

I don't actually know the answers to all these questions - all I know is that neurotypical folks understand even less than I do, and it makes it hard to explain things like why I've surgically removed almost everything extraneous from my life in the past 2-3 years.

Why I can't tell people what I'll be doing in 2021 or 2022. Things are changing too fast. All I can do on a day to day basis is aim for the moving target of symptom control. I don't know when or if the world will hold still again.

"Must be nice to have the luxury of adjusting your life constantly to be low-stress for you," neurotypical folks would say. To which I would reply, "Must be nice to be able to survive stress."

Do you know how much more I would do?

I think abled people assume that anyone who isn't working as hard as they are just doesn't want to be. That isn't so. Some of us are lazy, sure. And that's fine. But some of us would kill to be able to carry massive stress loads and produce, produce, produce! And can't.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. I've just had a lot of reason lately to navel-gaze about my condition, and I know that talking about it on here sometimes helps fellow sufferers and/or people who just want to understand.

If you have BPD, know that it CAN be disabling, absolutely, and that this isn't your choice/fault. But also understand that you're not always going to be as disabled as you are at this exact moment, and that over the long run it averages better the older you get.

But no matter how good you feel, no matter how long you've managed to "keep it together," just expect that when a rug gets pulled out from under you, symptoms you thought you'd licked might come crashing back, and it's not the end of the world.

It doesn't mean you were wrong about being "sane" and are actually "crazy." You've always been the same person. It's those boxes that don't fit. You are who you are, and you're doing the best you can, and people who expect anything else are wrong for you. Hang in there.