Note from the author: I want to make clear that this article was written with the full knowledge and approval of the subject, Caitlyn. Caitlyn is very involved in advocacy and education around Borderline Personality Disorder, and she has helped to make sure I am accurately reflecting her experience.
Caitlyn describes herself as an orchid based on an image used by Thomas Boyce, author, researcher and pediatrician, in his book The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why some children struggle and how all can succeed. Although Boyce’s research is with children, the metaphor can be illuminating for people of all ages. There are those who can thrive in a whole variety of conditions: they are more like a dandelion. Orchids, however, require certain conditions and some specialized care; they can’t just take root and flourish all on their own. Caitlyn has been criticized throughout her life for being too needy, too fragile, too difficult, just too much of everything. Caitlyn has spent a lot of her life apologizing, feeling embarrassed and inadequate for the “too” that is her reality. Recognizing herself as an orchid, and recognizing the specific beauty of an orchid, has been important for Caitlyn.
Caitlyn has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). This is a serious diagnosis, and Caitlyn is careful not to glamorize it. People with BPD can struggle to maintain relationships, can engage in self-harm and addictive, impulsive behaviors, and they are at risk at a much higher than normal rate of dying by suicide. At the heart of the presenting behaviors tends to be an unstable or shifting sense of self. Research suggests that people with BPD have noticeable differences in their brain’s structure and function which predispose them to heightened emotional states and a more intense engagement with the world around them. Events in a person’s life can then trigger that different brain formation into presenting as Borderline Personality Disorder.
As with many of the labels that we assign people, this one works best when it allows resources and help to be compassionately matched with need. It becomes problematic when it becomes a means of glossing over the unique person behind that label. People with BPD have some characteristics that are commonly shared. And they also have their own particular gifts, insights, experiences and offerings that never get fully gathered up, neatly packaged or entirely understood by one diagnosis.
The main treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). While the description of DBT sounds to me like healthy life skills that could benefit anyone, Caitlyn reminds me that for someone with BPD this therapy can be the difference between life and death.
As a runner Dialectical Behavior Therapy reminds me of what runners call ultrarealism. In running, we use ultrarealism to comprehensively identify the state of affairs that we are actually encountering in that moment—not what we wish were different, or what we worry might happen—and then basing our decisions and running actions on the circumstances actually before us. It is an intentional embrace of both acceptance and change.
In DBT, Caitlyn talks about learning the importance of the words “both/and.” Caitlyn is beautiful and beloved in the core of her being, and there are things that she needs to change. These things are both true. Caitlyn can feel pain in navigating the world because of the intensity of her emotions. She needs a toolkit of strategies to use in seeking to even out the emotional rollercoaster that is her life, to be able to breathe, pause before reacting and temper that pain with something other than self-destructive numbing behaviors. And at the same time, Caitlyn brings a fierce and insightful creativity to everything that she does because of her intense emotions. These are both true, too. The suffering is real and so is the offering.
I have learned more from Caitlyn in the past two years than from anyone else. Caitlyn has a relentless honesty about the brokenness of the world, the vulnerability of her own life, the fragility of human life in general, and the complexities of claiming faith, light and beauty in the midst of real and destructive darkness. Caitlyn is a wise and powerfully insightful spiritual leader.
This can get lost though. When Caitlyn speaks about having Borderline Personality Disorder, she never uses her last name. She would not want a google search to tell all the world that this is her lived reality. When I interviewed her for a video segment we were sharing with our church community and she spoke openly in the interview about BPD, she warned me ahead of time that there would be those who would say that airtime should never be given to “someone like that.” There is a stigma that people with BPD are erratic, manipulative, dangerous and not to be trusted. This stigma is so strong in the world of mental health that it inspires both fear and anger in even trying to engage with people who have been so diagnosed.
But even more than the stigma and fear that turns Caitlyn into an “other” who needs to be held at arm’s length, there is another common, and ultimately harmful, reaction to Caitlyn’s story. It is all too easy to think that what she shares is only important for those with a diagnosed mental illness. I have found the same thing when I have shared my own experience of suffering from an eating disorder. I begin to tell my story, and I can see in a visceral way the walls going up in a person’s gaze. They do not want to hear this story. They are unwilling to ascribe any authority to my tale of vulnerability. They can only hear what is being said in terms of a distant pity for someone that can be labelled and then carefully defined and separated into a category of “not like me.”
As I have noted every time I share my story, however, the truth is that it wasn’t just me who had an eating disorder. I was aided and abetted and encouraged in every wrong-headed and destructive thought I had about my body and the food I put into it. A thick blanket of cultural messaging wrapped me, as it wraps most of us, in affirming that my body was not good enough and that the act of eating should be shrouded in guilt and dissatisfaction. There is no such thing as this merely being my story.
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So, too, the truths that Caitlyn continues to so bravely wrest from her lived experience with BPD have something of critical importance to say about, and to, all of us. This isn’t just her story either.
Caitlyn is an orchid. She needs soil conditions of care and compassion in order to be able to flourish. She has to name and claim that as part of her survival toolkit.
And while I want to honor and acknowledge the very life-threatening reality that BPD can be, I see Caitlyn’s assertion of her orchid nature as something we all need to name and claim. Collectively, we need to abandon some of the very destructive narratives that we are taught: that we should learn to be strong and independent and self-made; that we need to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps when we find ourselves in trouble; that the most admirable among us are those who can fight through adversity to rise to the top. The plotlines we have loved best are of the conquering hero, the determined adventurer and most especially those whose meteoric ascent from rags to riches epitomize and validate for us the American Dream. Attached to these narratives are baked-in injustices that we fail to address because it is too easy to overlook how much the particular soil conditions of race, economic advantage, gender, an “able body” and nationality play into the advantages that certain people end up attaining. It is too easy to ascribe a metric of personal resilience to the powerful among us, as well as to blame those who aren’t able to flourish, and overlook the truth that in fact we are all orchids. And we all have a part to play in working toward climates that allow each and every one of us to flourish.
Closely related to this is another core truth into which Caitlyn is intentionally dialed. Caitlyn knows about emptiness. In a very short and powerful YouTube video, Seth Stewart speaks from his experience of BPD to name the constant emptiness that thunders away at his insides. This is one of the traits most commonly associated with BPD—an emptiness which overtakes a person’s sense of self. Stewart uses the word ‘longing.’ He knows that aching pull for more, he knows that all-too-common attempt to fill that ache with all kinds of things that never actually fill us up: drugs, alcohol, sex, food, and relationships that self-destruct because they can never bear the weight of trying to satiate the gnawing void. That search for enough, for the thing that is going to finally fill us up, is at the heart of a lot of the most destructive of BPD symptoms.
But it’s also at the heart of what drives the engines of the beauty, health, food, and influencer industries. It is the fuel behind most addictive behaviors, including the plethora of addictions that are socially acceptable. The drive to feed our emptiness results in our prioritizing some disconnected idea of economic advancement over and above the health of the planet on which all of our lives actually depend. The multi-trillion dollar advertising industry thrives not on selling us what we really need, but in mining that basic human ache for a lucrative state of almost constant dissatisfaction which will result in our going to relentless and expensive lengths in order to have and be enough.
The truth is that whether you have BPD, another mental illness diagnosis, or whether you are by all external measures “neurotypical,” the emptiness inside of us is real. We are, biologically in fact, born hungry. Our lives biologically are set up in order to not be self-contained realities. We literally need to ingest the world around us in order to live. Our bodies are in constant interchange with the earth, air, water, and fellow creatures around us. Spiritually, many of the great faith traditions of the world have named a similar truth. We are created for relationship. There is no health or joy in living merely for ourselves. As Bob Dylan sings on his acclaimed Slow Train Coming album, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a rock star addict, an ambassador, a socialite or if you’re living out any number of versions of success and achievement, “you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” It is only in leaning into our embodied need for relationship, to share our lives with others and to care for the world in which we all receive our own life, that we have a hope of being well, let alone flourishing.
“I have learned to bear loneliness and to understand longing,” Seth Stewart says at the end of the YouTube video, which depicts him at the center of the camera’s lens, reaching out to join hands with others reaching out from off camera toward him. It is an image into which I could easily imagine Caitlyn stepping. At the heart of all of the insight and beauty she has to offer those of us who know her is this need to reach out, to connect, to hold something of the world’s pain out of the experience of her own pain. In the both/and of Caitlyn’s life, she learns to accept her need to reach out. And she continues the work of figuring out how to reach out in a way that doesn’t drown her in the tsunami of wounded, hurting hearts that cannot be avoided when we choose to embrace the totality of this human life.
Caitlyn, and others who suffer the ‘othering’ of mental illness stigma, can be helped in that work by our willingness to hear their voices and to understand our own responsibility in how we create a world where every orchid can flourish. Then we can all be helped in recognizing in her unique, particular and beautiful story something of our own fragile, interdependent, hungry and longing lives.
Martha Tatarnic currently leads a thriving urban church in St. Catharines--the Niagara region of Ontario. Her book The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating explores the relationships between food, body image, community and spirituality.
