Screwedup,
Did not know that some jobs will discriminate based on BPD. That is terrible... they should not be allowed to do that. It would be tempting to do the same thing as you are doing, to ask the psychiatrist not to use that label. Do you mind if I ask, is this in the United States? I thought it was illegal here for companies to ask for your medical records. Given that the BPD diagnosis is itself unreliable and really invalid as a medical disorder (i.e. different therapists often diagnose the same patient differently), it doesn't even make sense to restrict someone from work based on such diagnosis.

I'm not advocating this, but it may be possible for you to use another, less stigmatized diagnosis (like "depression") to get another form of useful treatment, and then retain the ability to do teaching sooner, if what you fear is right. I will admit I did this in my later years of therapy. I stopped being diagnosed as borderline (which I actually was not, in terms of the 9 symptoms, by that point) and instead asked my therapist to use another diagnostic term which she did.... "dysthymic disorder".... whatever that means It was funny because I was feeling well most of the time but I was officially labeled with this disorder that means you are really depressed.

IDoNotExist,
Your theoretical point make sense - if one is doing well one is doing well. However, this has not been my experience. Today, I am very rarely extremely angry and rageful in the way I used to be. Really, I am only angry when there is a realistic reason to be - when someone does something really bad to really p--- me, which any normal person would be angry at. So I have become much more "normal", and I know from my therapy that my tendency to easily get enraged in past years was related to my father, who physically abused me for many years with beatings. I was so angry about this that it often came out inappropriately toward other people. But once I worked it through and felt more loved and supported by other people, my psychological functioning gradually became pretty normal. So, there was never anything biologically wrong with my brain, as I experienced it - my excessive aggression was related to my experience in the environment and to the internalized object relations that I carried with me based on that experience.

I have also read extensively about object relations theory, particularly Kernberg, Kohut, Masterson, Adler, etc, and their theories of BPD make much more sense to me than the modern reductionist-biological view. But perhaps you are still right that it doesn't matter what one believes, or what the cause of one's problem is, as long as one gets to a better place in the end.