It’s my turn to give back. I’ve been fortunate to have received the intensive treatment I needed. I’ve recovered from anorexia, major depressive disorder and borderline personality disorder (BPD).

On March 5, 2020, I sat in the Jazz Auditorium at Lincoln Center in New York City with five-hundred entrepreneurial-minded women as we gathered for Tori Burch’s Embrace Ambition Summit. Incredible speaker after incredible speaker graced the stage including Gloria Steinem and Diane Von Furstenberg. A premonition of things to come hovered amid the eaves. We were told not to shake hands as we introduced ourselves to each other. Tori said she almost cancelled the event, but was gratified she made the decision to carry on.

Before Work.

I was diagnosed with anorexia, major depression and BPD in quick succession in my late twenties, during the second half of the 1980’s. The BPD diagnosis followed my second suicide attempt and several years of slicing up my arms with straight-edged razor blades. When the psychiatrists in long white coats high above Lexington Avenue revealed this latest diagnosis (good things come in threes, no?) to my parents, they were told the prognosis was poor and not to hope for much.

My mother mourned her dreams for me, her hopes that had stretched out like a brightly lit road paved with potential. My future washed away as the storm of BPD rushed in, letters driving down from the sky.

When you’re suicidal, it doesn’t matter if the view from your window is the amorphous blog of yellow cabs bottlenecked on Lexington Avenue or the green rolling hills of Westchester County. I was transferred to a long-term unit at a private psychiatric hospital just north of New York City that specialized in treating BPD with a then new treatment, DBT or dialectical behavior therapy.

I felt safe on that unit. I felt as though I’d come home. To people who understood me, who didn’t ask why, who said ‘Of course you do. We do it too.” Cutting, suicide attempts, starving. I didn’t puke, but many of the other women did. We hung out in the common room after dinner, heads nestled in each other’s laps, sharing the intimate details of our lives, of our childhoods. Sexual, physical, emotional abuse, Addicted parents, Absent parents. We were all in this together.

I was on that unit for ten months, until my insurance balked at paying for additional time. I became hysterical when the staff told me I had to leave. I went to live in a 24/7 supervised residence, attending a newly opened BPD day program, overseen by the same hospital.

After eighteen months at the day program, I was discharged and continued with my therapist there in her private practice. I saw C. for twelve or thirteen years, but I can’t recall much of what we discussed. I know I vehemently argued I’d been sexually abused by my father, because of the BPD diagnosis and because most of my friends on the long-term unit spoke about their experiences in detail. I believed in solidarity.

“I have BPD and an eating disorder. I was addicted to cocaine. I cut myself and I’ve tried to kill myself. Twice. I had flashbacks and I have an exaggerated startle response.” I repeated this diatribe almost every session. C. believed Dr. B., my psychiatrist on the long-term unit implanted false memories of sexual abuse in my psyche, though not maliciously. I longed for a reason for my BPD and being vulnerable and suggestable, absorbed his insinuations greedily. He’d introduced me to the exquisite poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I defended him, if not to her, then to myself.

At some point when I was seeing C., earlier in the therapy rather than later, I hit a telephone pole head-on with my car. I reported this to her after the fact and she informed me she considered this to be a suicide attempt. She admitted me to the hospital. By this time, a psychiatric admission was commonplace. This inpatient stay was number eleven or twelve. I didn’t mind. The hospital was a place I felt safe from my constant self-destructive urges. Urges fueled by a pervasive self-loathing buried only God-knows-where inside me.

I’d become fascinated by the process of therapy. How did the therapist know what to say and when to say it? How did she know when to shut up? C. encouraged me to return to graduate school to obtain my master’s degree in social work. She was a licensed clinical social worker and I think she liked the idea of me traipsing after her. Grad school kicked up my perfectionistic tendencies. I graduated with a 4.0, but my BMI was heading downhill. I starved myself to deal with the stress of needing to get all A’s. Or A+’s. In 2000, I officially became a social worker.

In 2002, my mom died from pancreatic cancer. We had only three months with her from her diagnosis to her death. She was my rock and at the same time my harshest enemy. The sicker I was, the more attention I elicited from her. Without her, I floundered.

C. became a mother substitute, a stately, suburban woman, who always wore skirts and stockings, regardless of how high the thermometer hit. Still, she wasn’t my mom, a brilliant woman, a programmer who had worked on the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). Twenty-five years later, after she divorced my father, she founded a successful custom software development firm.

2005. Enough. I quit therapy and stopped all my meds. And sank into a suicidal depression. I made a U-turn and headed for Dr. Lev’s office, whose name was pressed into my hand by a group therapist. I dropped into and out of group. The appointment with Dr. Lev was supposed to be for a one-time medication consultation. I stayed for eleven years.

Dr. Lev specialized in TFP or transference-focused psychotherapy. The premise being the relationship I developed with her held up a mirror for all the other relationships in my life. I was then to apply the insights I gained from working with Dr. Lev to the other relationships in my life.

Fully trusting Dr. Lev took years. Trying to figure out if she was going to abandon or reject me, laugh at what I was saying or tell me I had no right to feel a certain way was a process. My father got drunk every night coming home on the bar car of the Long Island Railroad. I was the first-born and the only girl. He demanded perfectionism and eschewed feelings.

Once I grew to trust her, I revealed parts of myself I’d been frightened to glimpse.

A verse reverberated in my head when my depressions became severe and my thoughts turned psychotic. The voice was male, angry and loud. The voice was always the same. He chanted in a deep timbre and his recital took on a mesmerizing rhythm.

“You are the charmed one

You are evil incarnate

You will vanquish evil

You are invincible.”

Dr. Lev was quick to reassure me. “You’re not crossing that line. You are very much in touch with reality.” I heard the calm tone in her voice, more than the words and I settled down.

My father died in April of 2013. I thought I’d embrace a sense of relief. I thought the ordeal would be over. Instead rage and resentment reared back and roared.

“I may be able to forgive him for drinking until I was in high school. “He was supposed to teach me how to be with boys, with men. So I could date and get married. And enjoy sex. Instead, he just drank. It was so fucked up. I’ve never had a boyfriend unless you count Josh when I was thirty, who disappeared when I wouldn’t do oral sex on him. I’ll never get married. I can’t forgive him for that.”

I overdosed. My fourth suicide attempt. I was in a medical hospital for two days while my vital signs stabilized and in the psychiatric hospital for a week. In the years following the suicide attempt, Dr. Lev and I spent many sessions talking about my father, dissecting my angry feelings towards him, sorting out how they’d affected me. Anger was a new emotion and each time I acknowledged aloud, I expected to be admonished by someone or something unknown.

At the end of 2015, I told Dr. Lev I wanted to spend the next year terminating our treatment and she agreed it was time. She and I had been working together for ten years, so to spend one year terminating our therapeutic relationship was appropriate. I couldn’t believe I was the one who initiated ending therapy. I once thought I would never be able to survive without having someone to talk to each week.

When I say I’ve recovered from BPD, my declaration is often met with skepticism. BPD is partly defined in the DSM-5 as a “a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects…” Pervasive is the key word, which means the illness affects all aspects of a person’s life and is thought to be at best, manageable, unable to be stricken from one’s being. Often the self-harm and chronic suicidality behaviors of BPD remit over time, but many people find it difficult to function socially and sustain full-time employment.

Researcher Dr. Mary Zanarini conducted a 10-year longitudinal study on BPD inpatients. She found that the 10-year course of BPD was characterized by high rates of remission, low rates of relapse, and severe and persistent impairment in social functioning. Additionally, the 10-year outcome of patients with BPD in the CLPS (Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study)demonstrated a distinctive, clinically useful, and diagnostically validating course characterized by remissions more enduring and by functional impairment more severe than many other major psychiatric disorders.

At Work.

I not only survived without therapy, I thrived. March 5, 2020 was also the day my website — and my business went live. For those of us who struggle with eating disorders, depression or borderline personality disorder, I offer hope. BWellBStrong fights the stigma surrounding mental illness by relating my story of recovery and inspiring the power of enduring and functional recovery in people diagnosed with these psychiatric conditions.

I embraced entrepreneurism. My brother, who took over my mother’s software firm when she passed away, sent me a card which read, “I’m so impressed with your move into entrepreneurship. I’m rooting for you.”

I’d started writing about mental health and recovery in 2007 and began my blog titled “From Both Sides of the Couch,” on the website of Psychology Today at the end of 2011. I’ve amassed almost 900,000 hits. Writing is one way for me to openly and honestly tell my story of recovery and let others who suffer from mental illness know they are not alone in their journey. Comments and e-mails from readers telling me I offer them hope is the reason I continue to post almost every weekend.

Writing is magic. Creating something where nothing used to be. A word, a sentence, a paragraph. Each essay is written at a different point in time and tells a unique story. I’m in the flow, lost in time. This is work?

Writing is a way I can legitimately let my craziness loose. Having been diagnosed with not one, but three serious mental illnesses, I write about sanity, insanity and the grey area covering the spectrum running from one end to the other. Writing is running a marathon forwards and backwards, backwards and forwards.

I continue to write, amassing rejections, but building a thick skin from a thin one. I received some key acceptances, such as publishing two essays on NAMI’s (National Alliance on Mental Illness) blog. NAMI “is the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.” I published an essay on the site, The Mighty, “a digital health community created to empower and connect people facing health challenges and disabilities.” When Megan Markle revealed she had been suicidal, I published an essay on Thrive Global, “Changing the Conversation Around Suicide.”

I send out query after query to the glossies, hoping to break in to more mainstream media. Checking my ‘sent’ folder, I see the editor opened the e-mail. I don’t hear from her. I wonder what I’m doing wrong. Refusing to give up, I’m armed with an arsenal of relevant topics and a long list of publications. Mental health is on the minds of the American people right now.

Writing keeps me sane.

Prior to the pandemic, I spoke about BPD at local libraries. The audience consisted primarily of parents — usually the mother — aching for hope for her adult child, asking how to shepherd her into treatment. As much as I want to provide Mom with a guarantee, I’m not able to give her the answer she wants to hear. “Your daughter has to want to enter therapy.” Or, “When his life isn’t working for him any longer.” Mom’s face falls. Tears follow. She feels her child’s pain. Her child who has scars crisscrossing her forearms, or the child who has overdosed and Thank God lived. This time.

I don’t hide my scars anymore. I used to wear long-sleeved shirts and swelter in the summer months. Fine white lines, some more noticeable than others. I cut designs into my upper arms, words into my forearms. “COW.” “PIG.” Cutting and anorexia make lovely bedfellows as blood drips from my arms, staining the white sheets.

In the spring of 2021, I received this e-mail:

Congratulations Andrea!

NAMI received over 300 submissions for NAMICon 2021. A program committee of subject matter experts reviewed submissions to determine which proposals to accept or decline. We are pleased to announce that your proposal, Harmony In BPD Recovery: How Both DBT & TFP Led To Full Recovery From BPD, was accepted.

My presentation was pre-recorded and posted for viewing during the two-day conference at the end of July. Regardless of how much I rehearsed and prepared, I was anxious and stumbled. The IT guy who was in the virtual booth with me said “good job,” when I finished. I didn’t know whether he meant it or whether he just didn’t want to go through the trouble of recording the entire presentation again.

I was recruited via my LinkedIn profile to speak at the Annual Positive Psychiatry and Mental Health Congress in person in New York City, also in July. My presentation, interspersed with additional research-based slides. was on the same topic as the NAMICon presentation, but geared towards clinicians. The audience was relatively small which I realized was fortunate. If I had stood at the podium and looked out onto a vast sea of bobbing heads, I would have been flooded with anxiety.

I was in group therapy at the hospital during one inpatient stay. The therapist who led the group knew me from numerous prior admissions. I opened my mouth to speak and he shut it with a comment I will never forget. “Andrea, you’re a professional patient.” His words hurt, like my father’s did. I swore I’d prove him wrong, even if he never knew it.

It’s one experience to stand in front of an audience and tell my story extemporaneously, but to “perform” in a more formal environment with slides was different. Balancing looking at my slides and making eye contact with the audience, trying not to read off my slides and not to read to off my notes (too much), and trying to remain conscious of not using fillers such as “umm,” was hard work, but I loved it and I want to do it again.

After I returned to my seat, members of the audience and other clinicians made it a point to come up to me and let me know they enjoyed my presentation. High praise from my colleagues. More of a high than watching the numbers on the scale decrease could ever be — and sustainable.

Becoming a keynote speaker is a goal and a dream. Relating my story of recovery from severe mental illness, fighting stigma, raising awareness and with any luck, providing inspiration and hope.

I comb through the mental health conferences for 2022, jockeying which ones may be feasible for me to reach out to the organizers, take time off my day job and afford the travel costs. One day the organizers will be the ones reaching out to me, paying me and covering my travel costs.

There will come a time when BWellBStrong will be the only work I have the privilege of focusing on each day. There will come a day when a passion and a career come together and I will hesitate to call what I do work.

Thank you Edward Kennedy. “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.”