What the heck is Borderline anyway?!

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is often characterized in the media in incredibly negative ways. Laurie and Sara go through each symptom of the disorder and discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly about their experiences with each symptom. In future episodes they’ll go into more details and stories about each diagnostic criteria. 

This episode featured Laurie Edmundson who previously was a co-host of this project. You can find her at https://www.laurieedmundson.com and on IG @laurieanned where you will find ways to access The Super Feelers Club and other projects she works on.

Transcript

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Sara Amundson: 0:19

Hi, guys, my name is Sarah Amundson, and I am a woman living with a variety of mental health disorders. I am so excited to be here hosting the bold, beautiful borderline podcast with my good friend Laurie. Because we're really going there on some topics that are often under discussed and highly stigmatized. So let me just tell you a bit about who I am. I said, my name is Sarah. I'm a social worker and a woman that experiences major depression, anxiety, an eating disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive compulsive personality disorder. And those things have made me feel a lot of shame in my life, but I don't want to feel shame anymore. And I don't want anyone who experiences the world the way that I experience it to feel shame either. So I think we're all here together to learn and grow and ultimately work towards reducing the stigma that exists for a life that looks like ours. I have my friend, Laurie with me, who's going to introduce herself and we are going to get into what this podcast is all about.

Laurie Edmundson: 1:44

Thank you so much, Sara. So my name is Laurie Edmundson, our last names are hilariously similar. And I live about an hour away from Vancouver, British Columbia. I've been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder for the last eight or so years. And as Sarah mentioned, it is arguably the most stigmatized mental health issue that there is. So I live with that, and anxiety, depression, disordered eating and lots of other things that I'm sure somebody would love to diagnose me with. I started being really open about my diagnosis with borderline about a year into my diagnosis, and haven't ever looked back. So Sara, and I met on Instagram, because that's what millennials do now. And we decided that we would do this podcast together and just have really open conversations about the disorder that we live with and what our lives look like, with borderline personality disorder.

Unknown: 2:40

And we can't wait to do it with all of you guys. And this podcast is going to be a variety of interviews with other people with lived experience and teaching about the disorder and really just getting down on what life does and doesn't look like and it doesn't have to look like the movies in the books. We are so normal, right? Yes, totally normal, depending on who you ask, of course. Yeah.

Sara Amundson: 3:13

We're normal ish by really what is normal?

Laurie Edmundson: 3:15

Yeah, nobody's normal. That's what I always say.

Unknown: 3:18

So we're so excited to be here and be doing this. And yeah, Laurie, what's your hope for this podcast? Like? What's your goal for this? I think for me, it's honestly just talking about a disorder that nobody talks about. Because when I was diagnosed, obviously, the first thing I did was I went online and started Googling things. And everything that I found was like, you're going to die, you're never going to have a relationship, you're going to be unemployed for the rest of your life. And that was really hard to read, because I didn't identify with any of those things. And despite having the disorder and living in a way that was really emotionally disregulated. I just felt like there was no representation of people like me. So nowadays, there's a couple of representations. Ironically, no women, which is super interesting, because it's diagnosed so much more than women. But like Pete Davidson, Brandon Marshall, they're both celebrities that talk about borderline. But that was not the case when I was growing up with it. And so I just really want us to be a place where people can come and say, Look, I've been diagnosed, and I just want to hear from somebody that's been through it and that survived and is living a life that I would hope to live one day. Yeah, absolutely. That's my my goal as well. And Laurie has been open about her experience with borderline for so much longer than I have. I have really not openly talked about my experience. hardly at all, I kind of allude to it here and there in my life and partly because I have a pretty significant fear of people not wanting to work with me as a professional because of My mental illness but I think Laura and I both agree that we don't want to be afraid to work with people who don't want us that ultimately we want to be around people that see us support us and believe that we deserve to take up all the space that we take up. So I am going to let me lean into the discomfort and or you're going to have to hold me accountable to that. Because, yeah, our experiences are so similar. But that's so different in that I've been hiding for a really long time, and I don't want to hide anymore. All always happy to help people not want to hide anymore. And I think it's really interesting because both of us work in mental health. And we're both still so worried about the stigma and how it affects our careers. And I think that in most situations, when you work in mental health, like you can say, look, I really need a mental health day today. But because of the stigma about borderline, we're still terrified of it. And I have to say that I just decided probably five years ago that if somebody didn't want to work with me, because I had a mental health issue, then I didn't want to work with them either. But I haven't actually found any situations where people have used it against me, at least to my knowledge. And so if that helps, I know Sarah and I have had this conversation a lot. Because when she told me that she doesn't actually talk about borderline openly about herself having it I was shocked, because she does so much advocacy. And she you know, is always talking about mental health. And I think it's just really important that we start talking about it. And if you don't like it, then you don't have to listen. It's fine by us. Yes. Okay, guys, well, that's the podcast. We don't know what this will look like how long it will go on. But we just know that we feel honored and blessed to be here and have people that want to learn with us and grow with us and expand with us. Hi, sweet friends. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the bold, beautiful borderline Podcast, where he and I are so happy to be able to share this space with you and just roll and create an awareness and understanding of people will experience borderline and other mental health conditions. So thank you so much for your time and energy and just being with us. If you liked this podcast episode, we would love if you would subscribe, review rate and tell your friends and family about podcasts. This is how we find more people to interview and connect with and just stay alive with. We also have information in the show notes about our Patreon page, we would absolutely love your support there. Your support through our Patreon page as well allows us to show up and do this work. And we have all of the information for local and national crisis lines built into the show notes. Should you ever experience a mental health crisis please do not hesitate to reach out for support. We love you all so much and we can't wait to see you at the next episode.