Here’s something nobody tells you about having BPD: it’s not that your emotions are wrong.
They’re actually incredibly accurate. It’s that they’re enormous. Too big for the moment, too fast for the situation, too loud for any room they’re in. You feel everything at the correct intensity for the most extreme version of what’s happening, even when what’s happening is a Tuesday. Even when what’s happening is a situation where a neurotypical person would feel a mild concern and then think about dinner.
I feel the full-volume version. Every time.
There is a second part of this that makes it weirder: the logic runs in parallel. I can see the spiral starting. I can watch it begin the way you watch storm clouds forming on a horizon — I know what’s coming, I understand exactly what’s happening, I can narrate it in real time with complete accuracy and zero ability to change the outcome. My brain issues a formal report on what’s happening and then continues doing it anyway. You, watching from outside: “just calm down.” Me, inside: “I know. I can see the thing you’re describing. My brain has heard your suggestion and filed it in the trash.”
The brain said no. Fuck you. We spiral now.
When the Alarm Bells Are Right
Here is something I want to be honest about, because it took me a long time to be honest about it even to myself.
My BPD emotions fire for real reasons.
The thing about big, fast feelings is that everyone around you gets to decide they’re the problem. If you feel something strongly, the feeling is the issue. If you react, the reaction is the issue. If you name what you saw or what happened, you’re being dramatic. The actual thing that caused the feelings? That tends to get lost in the noise of you having them.
I watched something happen recently that I had been watching happen for a while. I saw it clearly. My alarm bells were not misfiring — they were responding to real information. I tried to make sense of it. I tried to find a shape for what I was seeing, something I could hold in my hands and look at. And still, I became the villain anyway.
I’m not going to detail what happened, because some things are not mine to put in public, and because the specifics aren’t actually the point. The point is this: I loved someone as the person I knew them as. And then the version I knew was gone. And the person is technically still there, still breathing, still existing in the world — and that doesn’t help.
That’s a specific flavor of grief that doesn’t have a great name. Ambiguous loss, the therapists call it. The grief you feel when you can’t grieve properly because there’s no funeral, because no one is dead, because everyone around you is saying “but they’re fine, they’re right there,” and you’re standing there holding the absence of the version you loved and there’s nowhere to put it.
The shock hit first. Not sadness, not anger — just a string of whats. Where is my brother, because this is not him. The emotion followed later, sharp and specific, the way grief always arrives late and then won’t leave.
The Document That Had to Exist
I made a document.
Not for them. They didn’t read it. That wasn’t why I made it. I made it because I needed the thing to have existed. I needed to take what was swirling in my head at maximum volume and give it a form — put it somewhere outside of my body, let it have a shape it didn’t have when it was just living in my chest being loud.
I’ve been sitting with why I did that. Why I put it together at all, when I knew nobody was going to read it, when it wasn’t going to change anything. And I think I finally understand it: it’s the same reason I make anything.
When something is too big and too fast and too loud, when it won’t fit in the normal human container for feelings, you find another container. You make one. You externalize the thing that’s eating you from the inside and you give it a form, and now it’s a thing in the world instead of only a thing in your chest.
Making things is how I manage what doesn’t manage otherwise. The laser cutter, the stickers, the weird dark whimsical objects that come out of this shop — all of it is the same impulse as the document. Give the thing a shape. Let it exist outside of you. Make it into something you can look at.
Which brings me to stickers.
A Confession, and Then a Feeling
I probably shouldn’t admit this part.
When I see that someone has bought my stickers — not a small order, a real one, the kind where someone clearly chose deliberately — my first reaction is a very specific flavor of what. A mild, confused, bewildered someone actually paid that for something I made in my studio with my laser cutter and my weird brain and my extremely strong feelings about everything.
I still haven’t fully made peace with the gap between “thing I made because the noise in my head needed somewhere to go” and “thing someone wanted badly enough to purchase.” That gap surprises me every time.
And then the second feeling hits, which is the one that matters.
I imagine them opening the package. I imagine the moment they pick up the sticker and read it — whatever it says, whatever dark or spicy or too-honest thing I put on it. And I imagine they breathe out a little. That they feel, for just a second, less alone in whatever the thing is. The big feeling. The loud one. The feeling that’s too much for the room and they’ve been carrying it quietly because nobody around them seems to get it.
The sticker says: I know. Me too. You’re not the only one.
That’s why the stickers exist. Not the margins, not the business logic. That moment. That specific imagined exhale from a stranger I will never meet who picked up the thing I made and felt, briefly, less alone in it.
The emotions are correct. They’re just too big for most rooms. That doesn’t make them wrong — it makes them what they are: yours, real, responding to actual things in the world, and in need of an outlet that isn’t just screaming into the void.
(Though sometimes also that.)
If you’ve ever watched yourself spiral in real time and been completely unable to stop it, and then made something in the aftermath because the thing needed to exist somewhere outside of your body — hi. The shop is here. The stickers are here. You’re not alone in the having-too-many-feelings thing. You’re just in good company.
And if you want more of The Coven — more posts from someone who is very integrated and still makes documents about things when the noise gets too loud — there’s more here.