Dear MDDBPDPTSD,

Wait! Please. You are not alone!

The horrific pain that you are feeling at this very moment is shared by so many of us here. You are not calling into the dark woods, where wolf and owl stare, unmoved by your cries. You are not lunching with friends that have no way of understanding the true and terrible torture that you are feeling now. Even through their sympathy, it is impossible that they have empathy. Empathy requires some understanding or way in which to compare your feelings from something familiar to ones they have experienced before. The symptoms of this disorder, so painful...so unique is the ride that you and I and many standing here with us, reading our words endure, that unless you are afflicted with BPD, there is no way to relate.

Luckily you do not stand in the dark woods, and are not now having lunch with well-meaning friends. You are, at this moment surrounded by an army of troops that feel and experience all that you do. An army of people that when asked, or hear and recognize the cry of distress that can only come from one that truly suffers, will stop whatever they are doing, and come to check on you and remind you that this terrible night will pass. You will be changed by morning. Maybe not wholly well, but this slicing pain will have passed.

It is the only blessing of BPD....that these stingingly-raw expressions of pain are temporary in the extreme state. You must do what you know to do. Curl yourself tightly into that fetal position that protects perfectly the BPD sufferer from the agony growing any larger, and wait. Hold tightly,close your eyes, rock if it helps, but wait. God may bless you with sleep to ride out the rest, but is that is not your fortune this evening then please to remember this,...Optimism and pessimism are opposite sides of the same coin. A glass cannot be half-empty, without, as well, being half-full. yin-yang does not exist without the partners, and a loving merciful God, as you described does not curse flinging pain wildly. Perhaps there will never be an explanation as to why we were thought to possess such strength that He trusted us to bear this weight. Men many times our strength would be knocked to their knees attempting to endure what God believes us to have the strength to handle.

And MDDBPDPTSD, as for your children, the love you have is pure and clear in your writing. Would you not bear any weight asked of you to save them? I heard you counting your blessings within you S.O.S.. You are an empathetic person. Do you imagine there being one parent in any hospital across earth that would not quickly and readily take the burden from your center and swallow it as their own, if it meant that their dear child would suffer no more, grow healthy, and survive.

When thought of in that way, for myself, BPD is a blessing that I will bear in hopes that one day my suffering is in God's eye, a payment that will spare a greater pain in the future.

Try to sleep now, we will watch over you,

-Fleeing Bellocq, Muse of the Mission District