Removing the created parts of me

Lately, I’ve been going through reassessment, and it’s brought up a lot for me.

For a long time, I was told I had BPD, and I accepted that because I thought the professionals knew best. I tried to make sense of myself through that diagnosis. I tried to carry it, understand it, and live with what came with it.

But now there are real questions being asked about whether that diagnosis was ever right in the first place.

What if I didn’t have BPD at all?

What if I was reacting to trauma?

What if the way I responded to certain situations was never about “who I am” as a person, but about what I was living through at the time?

That difference matters.

Because being traumatised, controlled, pushed to your limit, and constantly living in survival mode can change how you react. It can make you emotional, reactive, anxious, defensive, overwhelmed.

But that does not automatically mean your personality is disordered.

Sometimes it means you were in situations that were damaging you.

One of the biggest things for me in all of this has been having support from my GP. To have someone actually listen, look at the bigger picture, and support

removing a diagnosis that may never have truly fitted me has meant a lot.

Because this never felt like it was about my character.

It never felt like it was about the core of who I am.

It felt like a label that was attached during circumstances that were messy, painful, and heavily influenced by other people including an ex who used things to control me.

That is a hard thing to admit, because once a diagnosis is on your record, it can shape the way people see you. It can affect how seriously you’re taken. It can make you question yourself. And when that diagnosis may have been influenced by abuse, control, or the way someone else painted you, that leaves a lot to unpack.

I’m not saying I haven’t struggled, because I have.

I’m saying those struggles may have come from trauma, not from some fixed problem in who I am.

That feels important.

This whole process has made me realise how easy it is for survival responses to be mistaken for personality traits. How easy it is for pain to be turned into a label.

And how hard it is to separate yourself from something once it has been written down as fact.

But I’m trying.

I’m trying to see myself more clearly.

Not as a diagnosis.

Not as the version of me shaped by survival.

Just as me.

And maybe that’s the point of all this.

Maybe this is not about losing a label.

Maybe it’s about finally understanding that it was never meant to define me in the first place.