Please note this blog contains discussion of self-harm.

If you’re part of an online community surrounding mental health, be this Twitter, a Facebook group or Instagram, you’re likely to have stumbled across a few posts that celebrate the length of time people have been in recovery. Be this being self-harm free, sobriety or days in treatment.

Don’t get me wrong, I genuinely love seeing these posts. I love seeing people celebrate their successes and feel proud of their achievements. It also fills me with a sense of hope, that people can and do overcome the darkest of times and go on to recovery.

But for me, this has never felt like something I could do. I mark one, and only one, milestone relating to my mental health, and that is the very first day I admitted I needed help. For me, this marked a significant shift in my life, one where I stopped running from my issues and began embracing a need to dedicate myself to recoverin – although even then things got significantly worse before they got even slightly better.

I have no idea when I officially stopped being anorexic, I never woke to an epiphany that I couldn’t continue with a life of obsession and restriction. I never committed to changing my life on one cold winter morning, swearing to treat my body better. My reality is that recovery has, and continues to be, a long and messy ride.

Having BPD means I never truly go into a remission phase. I don’t relapse for long periods, more hours or days at most. I could go months without self-harming, and then suddenly feel no other way to cope and the smallest things can cause me to relapse for days on end, a phrase I currently find myself trapped in.

Marking recovery milestones doesn’t work for me because this pattern of instability, so typical of BPD sufferers, would lead me to constantly feeling like a failure. Each time I would count a further day free from self-harm or restriction I would have this knowledge that it wouldn’t last. That in reality, I should be counting down to the next outburst, the next cut, the next skipped meal.

So instead, I mark the day my outlook changed. The day I decided to stop hiding, stop fearing, stop lying. The day I embraced the need to ask for help and accept it when it is given. To admit to my struggles, and reflect on their beginnings. To learn new ways of managing my emotions and interacting with others. Because no matter how many slip-ups I have, no one can take that change away from me.

Lorna

x