I wrote about Underground and Alternative Rock professionally for 10
years and never much considered that a time might come when I would
rethink my identity in the context of a career.

There was a certain amount of denial there- denial that I would age,
denial that I would go through any more big struggles with my
diagnosis. Granted, I had absolutely no idea I had BPD until last
year.

About 5 years ago,though, I decided I wanted to get clean and see if
I could make recovery work for me better than it had in my 20's. From
1989 until 1997, I went to NA and was an active member. But I hit a
wall with the Steps the last 2 or 3 years I'd gone to meetings and
despite an ongoing search to break through, it felt like there was
only so much that being clean and working the Steps could really get
me.

Besides Punk Rock, NA had been the only thing I'd ever really
committed to or believed in, so runnig into a dead end with it was
pretty devastating. I had really believed that "whatever was wrong
with me", all my answers lay in NA. I struggled a long time before I
left. So returning took a while to decide on.

In the meantime, although I had started getting published while in
recovery, it was not until I left that I allowed myself to really
show people the non-journalism writing I had been doing. But during
my time away from meetings and the fellowship, I began to really
branch out and do performance and indie publishing along with
continuing to write about music. I was finally able to let people
read my personal writing about growing up in Punk culture in a small
college town in the 1980's and amazingly, it turned out a lot of
those stories had a universal quality and really effected people.

But when I got clean again, I wanted to finally understand what it
was that has always held me back in so many areas- even in writing. I
would only allow my work to get so popular before I'd withdraw and
stop performing or publishing.

Looking back, I can plainly see now that tug of war that is
splitting. So many aspects of my personal and professional life have
been driven one way and then the other by that chasmic ambivalence
that is, in many ways, the hallmark of Borderline.

Although in the last 5 years, I have changed and grown tremendously,
especially after joining a DBT skills group 2 years ago, I am still
mystified by my quest for identity. This, too, is a calling card of
Borderline. Although chaos of my past now makes sense to me, I hate
the idea of having this disorder continue to throw my life off course.

In small moments, I can reach for a kind of peace and have clarity.
My notions of mental illness have had to change. My notions of what I
am capable of, too. I can't have a foggy notion of a future anymore
like I did in my teens and 20's. I am working to build a more
concrete future now through school and other endeavors. So far,
writing is not much a part of that future.

But it's been a real blow to come to terms with the serious nature of
this disorder. Arranging things to best navigate around the ways that
BPD can harm the people I love and can harm me, I am doing things now
that most of my contemporaries did 20 years ago.

There's a scene in Chalize Theron's "Monster" where she applies for a
job at an attorney's office and the man interviewing her gets her to
admit that the reason she has no experience or resume is that she has
been hooking and taking drugs since she was a teenager. He basically
tells her that the time to decide she wanted a legitimate life has
long since passed and that she can't just expect anybody to let her
into that world now just because she changed her mind.

That was a very hard scene to watch. Although my disease never took
me to those extremes, while my peers were getting their degrees and
starting careers and families, I was hanging out with Rock stars and
being a hipster and a journalist. Basically, I was hanging out and
enjoying the culture that had been a huge part of my identity since
my teens.

Wanting to relocate to a calmer, more stable, less glitzy, less
public world, I still feel that splitting making every decision a
crisis.

I have a tremendus gift and I'd love to honor it by using it to help
others. But I have no idea what that means in practical terms. And no
idea where to start searching.

Here's something I never see anyone confront about Borderline. Having
it and being prone to the ways that it perpetually destabilizes
identity- that doesn't exclude us from the same longing for meaning
felt by anyone else. It's just that on top of the ordinary trials and
tribulations, we also have an internalized scrambler mowing down any
progress towards meaning we might create in our lives.

I don't think this is impossible to overcome. But it certainly is a
drag. Like building on sand.