'I'm The Girlfriend From Hell'

An inside look at the roller-coaster ride of living and loving with borderline personality disorder 

- Andrea Karr

IT WAS SATURDAY NIGHT, DATE NIGHT: I WAS 21, and I couldn’t wait to spend time with my new boyfriend, Steve. But when I arrived at his parents’ house, he was still in the basement working on his computer and barely looked up at me when I walked in. “Just a sec,” he said. As I stood there, I began to feel insignificant and stupid for getting so excited when he clearly didn’t feel the same way about me. The panic was overwhelming. I got back into my car and drove laps around the neighbourhood, crying, until he’d sent enough texts apologizing and begging me to come back.

A few days later, I was filled with self-loathing because I couldn’t figure out why I’d reacted so strongly. We’d only been dating for a few months, and I felt like I’d already morphed into the girlfriend from hell. And that wasn’t the last time it would happen. For the next seven years of our relationship, I found myself enacting similar scenarios over and over again. I was on an unending emotional roller-coaster — cheerful and laughing, then raging with anger or mired in sadness. Any time I thought he had let me down in some way or that he didn’t love me enough, I would throw things (a plastic pail at his car, a glass vase of roses in the kitchen), scream, cry and say horrible things. I would push him away with all my force, but what I really wanted was for him to love me and prove that he would never leave.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was exhibiting classic signs of borderline personality disorder (BPD), the diagnosis I later received from a pair of psychiatrists in 2017, about a year after my relationship with Steve ended. It’s a mental health disorder characterized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the presence of at least five out of nine specific symptoms, including: