An insight into a week in the life of a young woman with emotionally unstable personality disorder (EUPD/borderline personality disorder), to give you an idea of how exhausting it is to be in a constant state of emotional flux, having zero control over your brain or heart, being unable to regulate your feelings or react appropriately to stimuli, permanently inhabiting the fraught, nervy space between flight or fight mode with no release through either.

GOOD TEARS

My brother came round to visit me and he made me cry with laughter recounting his messy weekend in Bristol

My care-coordinator said that she likes seeing me

An old friend who I thought I’d lost forever reached out to me

Made the most perfect jacket potato of my life

Won a court case

Tap water – access to it, taste of it, reliance on it, existence of it

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TEARS

I miss Obama so fucking much

A random man described me as “a lovely bit of crumpet”; I got a craving for crumpets; the off licence doesn’t sell crumpets; walked 2 miles in a hailstorm to source a packet of crumpets; ate 4 in a row; threw them all up

Don’t like the look of the word “crumpet” in this font

Couldn’t see the cityscape from top of Muswell Hill, too cloudy

Can’t remember living in Muswell Hill, too young

Want to live in Muswell Hill, too poor

Tesco ran out of pierogi

Was scrubbing the bathroom and got pure bleach in my eye

Everybody seems to think that Fleabag is smart and funny and it’s neither

New psychologist thinks that I may have ADHD

Finished another Moleskine notebook (‘The Campbell’)

Started a new Moleskine notebook (‘The As Yet Undecided What You Shall Be Called’)

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BAD TEARS

The meat cleaver incident that kicked off right next to me

The worst, most fucked-up nightmare I’ve ever had

The Guinness Six Nations rugby advert about the 3 brothers and their late mum’s Wales purse that goes everywhere with them

Can never read all of the books that I want to read

Missed a work deadline and let everyone down

Finding an old application for disability benefit written by my dad in 2005 in which he says my brother and I are the only things keeping him alive and that without us he’d have taken his own life; also the revelation that he was on the same anti-depressants that I’ve been on for years

My skin is disgusting, I want to rip it all off – ugly face :(

I don’t know where Libby Squire is

The story written on the page isn’t as good as the one in my head

Janis Joplin can’t come to my birthday party

Wrote the date as 10/03/18 on a legal document

Too afraid to go outside; can’t leave the flat in case somebody looks at me

24 Hours in Police Custody (series 8 episode 2)

Realising I wept over a potato

I asked my dad to visit me in a dream and he didn’t

Can’t afford to live

Can’t afford to die.