Surviving the day behind thick glass only lasts until sleep takes over. When The Armours Are Dropped… explores the raw reality of dissociation, night terrors, and the memories that wait in the dark—featured in Edge of Humanity Magazine.
Tag Archives: poetry
I Did Not Choose To Be This Way…
I did not ask for the shield; I built it because the alternative was falling apart. Every wall, every cold response, every habit of echoing others was put in place to keep a child safe in a world that was not. Given a quiet, safe start, I would have grown wide open to the daylight just like anyone else—the distance I carry isn’t who I chose to be, but how I survived what happened to me.
An Armour-plated Heart…
Forged in the shadow of early turmoil, emotional detachment becomes both a shield and a survival strategy. This poem traces the arc of a life constructed behind an armour-protected fortress—where human relationships are viewed with distant, calculated precision, and sentimentality holds no power.
The Difference Between Us…
I look at my son today and see a child who lives without fear, knowing only safety and warmth. But looking at his freedom means looking back at the child I was—the girl who had to hide behind glass just to survive. This poem is about that contrast, the vow I made to protect him, and the quiet hope that one day the walls inside my own mind might finally drop.
The Blueprint Of My Mind…
They call them disorders, the mind calls it engineering. When survival requires absolute control, you don’t build a sanctuary, you draft the blueprint and weaponise a fortress.
Too Much…
A piece on trauma, neurodivergence, and self-preservation. To anyone who finds raw honesty uncomfortable: I don’t write to play it safe. This poem is a manifesto for anyone who has ever been told they are “too much.” It is better to be too much than too little.
The Armours…
An early piece from when I first began writing. It maps out the long, hard road from the past to now. Looking back at it, every word still holds true. It may not be my best work but it is still mine.
When You Just Want Peace…
*Author’s Note: This piece explores heavy themes of suicidal ideation. Reader discretion is advised.
I’m not saying life is easy for everyone, but when your own brain is chaos and constant demands, how do you get some peace? You can’t turn it off or escape it. It never stops. This poem is probably how a lot of others with BPD feel at times.
It Is Not An Excuse…
Living with a fractured mind is a constant battle. But lashing out in pain is one thing—hiding behind a diagnosis to cover deliberate deceit is another entirely. Dissociation detaches the mind, it doesn’t erase your morals.
A call for boundaries, truth, and genuine accountability.
The Dark Counterweight…
Born from childhood survival, driven by BPD intensity, and structured by OCD logic. This is the truth of the dark counterweight sitting underneath.
A Book With Loose Pages…
The brain builds its own prisons long before we ever understand what we are locked inside of. This is how a child learned to bargain with terror, how disorders built their walls, and what happens when the pages refuse to stay bound.
A Cruel World…
A raw look at the architecture of survival—where emotional shields, OCD, and BPD built an iron wall, and how a hard won numbness became a safer ground than the alternative.
Because You Never Spoke…
Society has a rigid script for child abuse, expecting it to fit a predictable box. But sometimes it’s the person least expected, so nobody asks and nobody questions.
Later in life, when you try to tell a psychologist you were abused as a child, they immediately hand you leaflets on sexual abuse. Rather than exhausting yourself trying to correct them and explain that it wasn’t that at all, you just keep quiet. The way you have all your life. Until now.
Judgement Day…
An exploration of the daily friction where BPD and OCD collide and the heavy cost of performing normalcy to everyone else.
So You Think I’m Weird…
To the outside world, my daily habits and strict routines might look strange or extreme. But what looks like “weirdness” from the outside is a carefully built framework of survival.
From the way I step on the street to the exact order of food on my plate, every movement of my day is commanded by an internal dictator. This is a journey through the fear, hyper-focus, compulsions, and internal machinery of an OCD-rewired head.
Misfit…
A young child builds the foundation for one disorder and at eleven is ambushed by another. With no one to help or advise, she gets lost and becomes a misfit.
I Asked My Mother…
A raw, brutal subversion, tracing the sharp edges of splitting, impulse, and survival through the unvarnished reality of BPD and OCD.
The Good, The Bad, And The Lost…
A defense mechanism is a brilliant, ruthless thing. It stops the bad from destroying you, but it doesn’t know how to keep out only the dark—it takes the light, too. This is about emotional amnesia, the architecture of survival, and what happens when the armour protects you so well that nothing gets through anymore.
Resurrection…
As a child I was given whatever I wanted. Everyone looked at all the gifts and called me spoiled. They didn’t understand that I was being bought off, that all the things I was given were in place of safety and love. That I would have traded every single thing I was ever given just to have a normal childhood like they had.
Once Upon A Time…
Not all fairytales lead to a happily ever after. Some are just illusions spun by a desperate mind, trying to manufacture a happier childhood to drown out the nightmare one.
The Imprint Of Addiction…
Survival isn’t a clean break, it leaves echoes in the architecture of the mind. This poem is an unvarnished look at the long shadow of addiction and trauma. How the body remembers what the intellect has already left behind, and the phantom weight of a war that was won years ago.
Bound To One Another…
My BPD and my OCD. We are bound forever. I am nothing without their armour and they are nothing without my mind to protect.
Wonder Why…
One of my very first poems ever written. For anyone who has ever stood in a crowded room and felt like a ghost, or spent their whole life trying to force a jagged edge to fit a shape it was never meant to be.
My Enemies And My Friends…
They are the storm that fractures the ground beneath me, yet the very walls that kept me standing through it all. This is the heavy, complicated truth of living between the damage and the shield—my BPD and my OCD.
Who Is Studying Who?…
You see my disorders and think it’s interesting to catch a glimpse inside my head. But while you’re busy studying a specimen, all the time I’m studying you right back. Because you are as foreign to me as I am to you.
When It Doesn’t Fit…
For anyone who has ever sat in a clinical office, been handed a generic label because it’s easier than looking at the actual machinery underneath. This is for the misdiagnosed, the dismissed, and the ones who had to do the work themselves.
I Don’t Want Your Pity…
What the outside world calls a ‘disorder’ or a passing trend, I call the architecture of my survival. It is the difference between a flaw and a weapon.
This isn’t a plea for sympathy, it’s a declaration of strength.
A Day Inside My Mind..
Inside my brain is a relentless operating system running millions of lines of code just to keep the floor from giving way. No pause button. No safety net. Just code, compulsions, and the heavy machinery of a mind working overtime to hold it all together.
*This is just a glimpse, if I genuinely added every OCD ritual I do daily, this poem would be ten pages long.
You Can’t Understand Me…
Some people are handed a script for how to exist. I had to write my own survival manual in the dark. This is the raw mechanics of living inside a mind that doesn’t know how to rest.
My Family…
Some maps aren’t drawn on paper. They’re etched into the wiring of a child who learned early on that safety is a performance, survival has a cost, and the mind has to shatter just to hold the weight.
OCD Rules…
Living with two disorders that pull in opposite directions is a constant clash. They are polar opposites in every way, yet they meet at the exact same point: dissociation. This poem is about the one that takes the wheel—the absolute ruler, OCD.
The Girl I Should Have Been…
Two parallel lives carved out of the same years—one consumed by the brutal work of survival, resulting in BPD and OCD, the other unfolding in the effortless grace of safety. This is a look at the ghost of a childhood stolen, and the stranger who got to live it instead. In my dreams this girl was me. She got the life I would have killed for once upon a time.
The Ghost In The Glass…
When trauma shuts the system down, survival comes at a heavy cost. Derealisation strips the emotion from my past, turning even my happiest memories into fake, distant echoes. I am left living entirely in a hollow present, reaching for a life that feels like it belongs to someone else. My memories are all there, boxed and stacked. I can look at them but I can’t ever feel them. This is how it all began, with the one memory that stays awfully real.
What You Can’t See…
It always gets me how invisible disabilities and disorders are not believed because they can’t be seen. If people can’t see it then they don’t believe it, and if they don’t believe it, how can they try to understand it?
Dear Me…
My childhood was hard—I’m not going to lie. My OCD began around the age of four, which shows how traumatic those years were. I was reaching for anything to help me survive, and my brain settled on counting, prayers and rules. It brought me through, but those compulsions never let go and remain with me to this day. My BPD didn’t surface until I was around eleven. So this piece is for my OCD.
Am I A Monster?…
My childhood taught me that love is dangerous. Between a violent alcoholic father and a mother who refused to leave, my child’s brain simply cut the wires to survive. I don’t love, and I don’t want to be loved. It’s just how I am and I don’t miss something I’ve never had. But I am not a monster. I am just different.
Just Say No…
They teach you to say no to drugs when you’re a child but they don’t tell you what happens when your own mind is the place you are running from. When the past is a house on fire, you don’t hesitate at the door, you take whatever will burn the ghosts away just to get some quiet. Unfortunately a child doesn’t know that the quiet comes at a terrible cost. And the adult pays for it when those lost memories return.
Am I Real?…
Dissociation and emotional amnesia make my life feel like a movie playing for an empty room. I wrote this while sitting on the other side of the glass, viewing a life I’m supposed to live but mostly just watch pass me by.
I carry…
Carrying the weight of my intensely strong and fast emotions. Trying to explain how very deep they feel when you have BPD. You don’t just feel the emotions, you become them. In that moment you are nothing but your emotions and learning to control them is so hard.
What Do You See?…
I hide my disorders. At least I try my damned hardest. I hope no one sees me as ‘just’ my disorders. The only time I talk freely of them and my struggles is here in my poetry. The real me is right here in my poems where no one but you will see.
Gifted…
I write poetry on the devastating effects of having mental disorders but sometimes we should also look at them from the other perspective and show the absolute strength they gave us to survive.
Part Two: The Beginning of The Three…
From childhood trauma and the birth of ritualised protection, through the blur of addiction, erasing the traumatic memories, to their devastating return brought on by motherhood—where fragmented pieces must finally gather to guard the whole.
Part One: The Three; OCD, BPD & Me…
I do not have split personalities but my mind has three distinct forces. There is Me, my OCD-who I call the Professor, and my BPD-who I call the Aggressor. I’d love to say we’ve learned to live in harmony but that’s not how this story goes.
Different…
I joined BPD groups for like minded people but soon realised that although they were so very similar, in other ways they were worlds apart. Also having OCD makes me different. For them triggers and splits pass, for me, my whole life is dictated that way. We share symptoms but where theirs are temporary storms, mine form the entire foundation of how I exist day to day. They have a moment of black or white. I live that way 24/7. We share the same label but not the same reality.
The Blueprint…
You have to respect the one thing that made your survival through an awful childhood possible. That one thing was my clever brain. Having OCD and BPD have made my life hard, I won’t ever say they haven’t, but they also helped me to survive and I have to be grateful for that.
Grateful Mind…
As much as having BPD and OCD has hindered me all of my life, they have also very much helped me. I never doubt, I logically plan and I create so much. I don’t even know ‘who’ I would be without them now.
OCD meet BPD…
I’ve lived with OCD for as long as I can remember. When BPD joined forces, the two found a chaotic way to coexist in my brain. They sometimes work together but often don’t. This poem is about how they meet: one setting the fire, and the other desperately trying to clean up the mess.
Battlefield…
How the brain adapts to survive when childhood feels like a battlefield.
Clever BPD brain…
You live your life blaming your disorders for everything and hating them for it but one day you start to realise how clever your brain was as a child, to adapt in so many ways, just to keep you surviving and alive.
Imagine…
A poem where I try to imagine how someone without BPD differs from me with BPD.
A story…
‘A Story’ is a raw, personal reflection on living with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) rooted in past childhood trauma.
When…
No one ever understands me but maybe reading this might help. One half of my disorders. BPD. If these words resonated with you, consider liking or subscribing to follow along with future poems.