It’s hard to differentiate what is delusional, due to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and what is genuine self.

When i look back on my own journey, things formed intertextually. My true self, with its own inner core of emotions, and its understanding and perception of the external world, is there.

But so too are symptoms of BPD. There is intensity, instability, fears and self image distortion. And that makes me afraid. What if? What if all the devotion, love, loyalty, empathy, passion and dreams don’t belong to me? What if they belong to the BPD?

The way i’ve come to look at it is like a spectrum from the left to the right, like perhaps if you put free-will on the left and fate/destiny on the right and realised that some things can be a combination of both.

That’s the way i make sense of my personal story too. i imagine it as a spectrum. On the left is the self that was built and constructed from my mental condition (BPD) and on the right is the self that i consider to be my core inner-self. Not everything i am or everything i have done is one thing or the other thing. Often they sit somewhere in-between the two extremes.

This helped me tremendously when i was trying to make sense of something very important to me.

For me, the love, devotion and loyalty i have for my Master is an extremely important part of my identity as a slaveboy. i’d say it’s the most important part. So when i discovered i had BPD and i was trying to understand what effect it was having on my life, it became important for me to understand where my love, devotion and loyalty came from. Was it a genuine part of my core self? Or was it symptoms of my BPD (efforts to avoid abandonment, extremes of idealisation, identity disturbance)?

i had a period last year, before i was collared by my Master, where i thought i had already been abandoned by Him. i had no collar, i saw no hope of getting a collar and i couldn’t visualise what was about to happen. At that stage our relationship was platonic, i was calling Him “Mentor” and He was giving no indication that the relationship might change.

i suffered depression (secretly) through that time, but throughout that i held on to my desire to make Him happy. i didn’t see the future, but i never lost sight of the fact that He was special.

i think that love, devotion and loyalty came from a genuinely core part of myself, but i do see how it was amplified and enhanced by BPD.

Is that a bad thing?

i love my Master, that’s not because of my mental condition. But BPD spices that love up for us, like a little secret seasoning added to a meal. The meal isn’t made up of the seasoning, and it never will be.