Last summer, I spent over a month on the psychiatric ward. I was acutely suicidal, I had planned everything for the moment I was going to kill myself. The month I spent in the hospital gave me a lot of answers to my situation, and the most important one of them all was a name for everything that was wrong with me.

Borderline personality disorder.

I met with the ward doctor a few times during my hospital stay. He asked me a lot of questions, some of them more invasive than others. He wanted to get a surface-level understanding of how well I filled the criteria for the BPD diagnosis. He listed the criteria, described the symptoms and asked me if I related to any of them.

One of them was a bit different than the others. He prefaced the question by saying, "Now, the following criteria is really vague, and I can't really give you a solid description of what it actually means, but it's something that almost everyone with BPD seems to understand and relate to the moment I bring it up. As a psychiatrist, I don't know what it means, but maybe you do."

What followed that was a very simple description.

"Chronic feelings of 'emptiness', meaninglessness and hollowness, as if though your core is missing a major part of itself."

And I knew exactly what it meant.

"It looks like you understand what 'emptiness' means here", he said in a question-like manner, and I nodded.

"It's strange because this is a symptom the medical community has been struggling to understand, to describe as an outsider, but it seems to be a common nominator among people with borderline personality disorder. You know what it means, and while I do not, I will take your word for it."

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For years, I've had this nagging feeling deep within myself, a feeling of a part of me missing, a feeling of meaninglessness and purposelessness, a feeling of an abyss eating my soul alive. Sometimes it grows so intense that I almost end up losing myself in it, and that usually results in depersonalization. It's almost like someone has scooped a part of my insides out with an ice cream scooper. Now I have a name for it, I know where it comes from and what it means.

Based on my reading on borderline personality disorder, the feeling of emptiness can be traced back to the lack of sense of self, a solid identity, a personality outside of the disordered behaviors and thought patterns. It all comes down to the fact that you just don't know who you are, what kind of a person you are, what you want from your life. For people with healthy identities, it is impossible to relate to that feeling, and that truly is a blessing.

BPD emptiness is pure agony, and I am so happy you do not know what it feels like.

Because that emptiness sometimes leads me to do things to myself that I shouldn't be doing – usually to the very extreme, too.

When you feel like you're only a shell of a human being and the very core of what makes you an individual person is missing, you gravitate toward something that will make you feel at least something. That is not the same phenomenon as with depression and the apathy it brings, though. BPD emptiness is so numbing, so overwhelming, that sometimes it leads to desperate tries to ground yourself, in yourself.

And because the human brain cannot ignore physical pain, that is what you typically end up doing.

Many times, I've ended up cutting myself for the sole purpose of avoiding the emptiness that is consuming my entire being. Because if I feel pain, that means that there has to be at least something going on inside this flesh prison, right?

I feel like sometimes I really do try to dig out the emptiness inside myself. As though it was something tangible, something I could rip out of my fat tissue and throw away. You really do end up doing and thinking outlandish things when you feel like you don't even really exist as your own person. Because who are you? Who is the "I" you're talking about when you're referring to yourself?

For some reason, I always end up thinking the answer has to be found from my bleeding veins.

Waiting to feel something,

ichigonya

My Soul Is An Infinite Pit Of Emptiness

Second Nature

For Your Pain, I Am Punishing Myself