The Girl With Bracelets On Her Wrists

How do I start telling this story, my story? Because yes, I had everything, but a thing called borderline personality disorder made me lose everything bit by bit until I became the girl with bracelets on her wrist.

Can I show you I had everything but lost it without knowing how? How do I make you understand that what happened is not my fault, that it has been an all-or-nothing matter, of wanting to be loved and avoiding the emptiness I feel every day?

Maybe you don’t understand, like most people. It’s very hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t act, feel or think like most people do, but I’ll tell you a secret. Even if we don’t think or act like you, it doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings.

Now I ask you to listen to me and try to put yourself in my shoes. I want to tell you my story, even if I don’t know when it started or ended. I want you to know what it feels like when you have a mental problem and no one understands you, so much so that you feel lonely and rejected.

The only thing that sets you apart from me is a diagnosis. But that label just dehumanizes me and makes me believe you’re better than me.

The story of the girl with bracelets on her wrists

Like I said, I’m not exactly sure when it all started. Maybe when I moved to another city to study. Never before have I been alone in a new place. I had always lived in the same place with the same people. I worried about not fitting in because the thought of being alone terrified me.

That’s why I wanted to be a cool college girl from the start. This meant being thin and always perfect, I thought. I started vomiting when I thought I was eating too much. At one point I even skipped meals or tried not to eat in front of other people.

I also drank too much alcohol until I lost control because I thought that this way people would accept me better and I would be less shy.

And then I met him. The boy with the perfect smile. The man of my dreams. The reason for my entire existence was that he loved me the way I love him. I didn’t care that he had someone else. I didn’t care that he didn’t like me.

I loved him and I would have done anything to make him love me too. In my mind no one would ever love him the way I did.

I found out where he lived and started leaving love letters in his mailbox. Imagining myself that we were protagonists in a beautiful love story that I thought would come true.

I tried to convince the whole world that his girlfriend was the antagonist and that they should break up now. I was so obsessed that he became my world. However, that world did not exist, so the emptiness grew in me.

The bracelets that cover my shame

I even lost control of my own feelings. Everything seemed black or white. I either loved myself or hated myself. I only focused on extreme realities and never saw the gray area. I turned into a hurricane of feelings, loving or hating with extreme intensity. But inside that hurricane was the eye of the storm, the eye that showed the void within me.

The growing emptiness changed my view of reality in such a way that I no longer felt anything. Then I started cutting my wrists to try to feel something. And that’s when I became the girl with bracelets on her wrists, because those bracelets covered what I didn’t want to show.

But bracelets don’t cure everything. They only hide what I don’t want to show. They hide the part of me that I have no control over. The part that makes me laugh because everyone thinks I’m crazy. But I just want to fit in and feel good. That’s why I decided to ask for help.

It’s a long road, I know, but there is hope. This is thanks to the treatment I follow with my clinical psychologist and the medication my psychiatrist has prescribed. I’m starting to feel like my old me again. I am brave and asked for help.

This is why I tell my story. If you feel the same or know people like me, don’t laugh at them. They are people who feel lost and also hide their pain and shame under some bracelets.