Brains, BPD, and Transition

how I get through days and my tips to share with everyone

Experiences I share around mental health are my own only and even people with the exact same things as me wouldn’t experience life the exact same way I do. I do think there are extremely valuable benefits to sharing lived experience but I also do not think anyone owes anyone else their experiences around these topics.

So what I would like to start off with is that I am someone who lives with borderline personality disorder. I believe I also have depression and anxiety on my file or in my file whatever the term is but the BPD (previously diagnosed as bipolar 2) is what I feel makes things most challenging for me and for those around me.

Even saying the word challenging here is a bit hard to say because it is difficult to think that a lot of the way I behave has such big consequences on others. And these behaviours do have those consequences. Acknowledging that is ok, hoping I can change this is ok, saying sorry is ok, feeling like crap is ok.

This is something I have taken on as part of my identity both by choice and by the force of my brain. My emotions feel very big all the time, my emotions change a lot and the people I love experience a lot of these swings. These intense moments I feel physically. I can feel when they come and I can feel when they lift. People around me can likely see the changes in my body as well. There are quite a few other things about BPD that occur often, things like dissociation and splitting and favourite people and such, but you can go research these wonderful things if you’d like!

They don’t make me a good or bad person, they are just a part of who I am and I work every day to manage all the big feelings that come from having such a difficult time regulating emotions. It is rather exhausting and ongoing and there are not many breaks from something like BPD. Because even though I just said what I said about these things not making me a bad person, that’s not always what my brain lets me think.

Other diagnoses may be out there for me who knows and right now there is now way to access them or for me to know if I would want to. It is hard accessing diagnostic care as an adult. It is expensive accessing this care as an adult. Whether this be for ADHD or autism spectrum disorder or any number of late in life care changes, there are many barriers to learning how we can manage these and then having people around us be able to do the work they need to do as well to support us. I think one overarching thing I may talk about is just how privileged one needs to be to be able to access immediate care to all mental health tools.

Governments, employers, insurance companies, everyone who stands to make dollars off of us, need to be part of the change to get access to therapy, medication, appointments etc. if meaningful change is to happen. Because right now there is just a bunch of pressure for people to break stigma and speak up without there being a system in place to support people once they do.

How does all of this come into my journey as a transfeminine person? Well, it’s all a part of who I am. I would not separate my mental health from me as a person and I would really like to be in a place where people do not have to be quiet about mental health aspects of their lives in order to receive good care or to be loved and respected in certain spaces. I hate hate, hate, hate the idea that someone would look at me and think “oh of course they have a mental illness, they are trans.” This is bullshit thinking and the kind of thing hate groups use. Mental illness is not scary, trans people are not scary, trans people who need mental health support are not scary. And when I think about it, all trans people should have free access to supportive mental health care because there is too much out there putting strain on every single aspect of day-to-day trans life.

My daily life as a transfeminine person gives me plenty of opportunities to test the mental health tools I have. The knowing I am who I am even when I’m walking to electrolysis sessions with a dysphoric beard. Shopping in the quote unquote women’s section at a store while people look at me. Being misgendered regularly at stores and restaurants even by people doing it out of kind service. All of these things take little bites out of my mental health every day in addition to things like going to work and being a parent and being a partner and the toll those things can take on depleting mental health in a day.

I try as best I can to not hide this element of my life from other people as much for myself as to be able to stop the stigma around needing to hide mental health elements. The medication one is on should not impact a job, the mental health day one needs should be available in every role in every company, the letters of our diagnosis should not lead to gasps and how do you manage that’s from people.

Something else that has been really important to me throughout my transition is that I have looked for people who needed support while they transitioned. Transition has not all been easy for me. There are so many things this world puts on you to deal with when you realize something beautiful about yourself that accessing gentle care is really important. It is hard to avoid all the messaging in the world you see about trans people not knowing who they are and all the fighting about hormones and access to it. It is hard to see gendered bathrooms everywhere and it not impact your mental health.

For me, I didn’t realize I was trans and feel immediate relief and love for myself. I had to learn to process internalized transphobia. I had to, and am still trying, to navigate how to present the way I do without feeling immense fear and social anxiety. To do this I needed to be able to find people who also struggled in their transition and were ok sharing those things. For all the joy there is in getting to be myself more openly and freely, there is also a lot of loneliness and fear.

So I am that person for others I guess. Things are not always easy for me. I don’t expect things will ever be what I would term easy. I am on medication to help me manage moods and to help me manage depression and I am ok with that for the rest of my life. I am also on hormones for that same period so we might as well keep tabs on all of these things at once.

And while we’re on the topic of medication, this is another point of access we need to be honest about. Accessibility, from the cost, to the access to caring medical professionals, to the stigma things like religion and families can put on mental health medication, makes accessing these life-saving drugs incredibly difficult to access.

I go to therapy. Often. I currently have access to two separate therapy sessions. These are individual sessions I go to bi-weekly or weekly if I’m particularly in trouble. Therapy can be very beneficial for some I have found, but finding the right fit is very difficult. You can go through many different relationships before finding the right one and for some people that’s not an option. Because more than anything else, therapy is not accessible. And something else you might be thinking about three separate levels of therapy is how in the world is that in any way affordable? It isn’t.

Therapy is expensive, therapists have long waitlists, many are only accessible during the day when many people are working. There are many therapists who are not trained to be safe people for trans, non-binary, or gender nonconforming people. Adding other intersectional elements into accessing therapists, it makes it even more difficult to find someone who is available and affordable.

I have also spent time in an inpatient treatment center accessing the same kind of care I would in therapy but at an elevated level. I have tools, lots of them.

So what are some of the things I do to try and keep myself safe and feeling ok?

Progressive muscle relaxation

This isn’t for everyone but there are some episodes available on Spotify or YouTube or in many different places where you can be walked through about a 15 minute exercise to tense and relax your muscles that helps calm your body and mind. I do this fairly frequently to be honest. It works maybe half the time?

Cold water

This is from the TIPP skills I have accumulated through the years. This is like temperature, intense exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, paced breathing. I put ice on my forehead or eyes. It can help shift a mood.

Mental health first aid kit

This goodie bag of tricks is filled with fidgets and chocolate and Lego and scents and lotions and every sensory item you can imagine. I go to this when self harm thoughts creep in. It also has lots of jelly beans in it.

Journaling things like core values

I am not a regular journaler. I just cannot do it consistently or else I feel like a failure because I can’t keep up a daily routine. But when possible, writing things out has been very helpful for me. Sharing things just with myself about my own values and validating things I want to do for myself. I have a whole page of gender affirming things I would like to do ranging from procedures to hairstyles. I also write out important reminders for myself.. Not things like get groceries on Saturday, but things like “people leaving you is not about you,” or “you can survive someone leaving you.”

Habit stacking

I got really good at this for a while and have lost some of my momentum and notice life getting harder without it. Habit stacking is putting a few things you want to do every day all in a row so that when you start one thing, you are able to get a few done. For instance, for me it would look like: in the morning I will make coffee, then take meds, then have a shower, then do my skin routine. So instead of doing all of these things individually, I look at them as one big group of habits to hold together.

Walking or movement

This is my most recent one and it is really handy when deep and dangerous intrusive thoughts are present. I go for as many walks as I need to escape intrusive thoughts and self harm thoughts and cry on them and listen to my playlists on them.

Promote an organization you like or mutual aid requests

This is like a community needs kind of thing that can just help you feel good. We don’t all have the means to support others financially but we can provide care for one another in ways we can. This has been one way that I can help shift some of the I’m a bad person narrative that take form in my brain from time to time.

By no means are all of these things, or even any of these things, going to work for you. Often they don’t even work for me, but I wanted to share a few things I have learned in my paid sessions that do help me kind of get from one minute to the next.

My point on mental health is there is no normal. There is no target. There is safety and I want us all to live in a space of safety and to be there we need access to care. Care in the form of medication, care in the form of housing, care in the form of first responders who understand how to react to mental illness.

What we can offer, or what I can offer, is sharing some of what I have learned along my way. I do not mind sharing about the care I have received and I hope others can learn a little bit from what I have experienced. It is my own little way of sharing some sort of community care or knowledge transfer. Experience is how I learn best and I hope people can share a little bit about what they have learned with people they love as well.