Clareprupoetry
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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. My brain refutes one kind of love, and fiercely accepts the other, I love my son with all my heart.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How the brain adapts to survive when childhood feels like a battlefield.
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.
A poem where I try to imagine how someone without BPD differs from me with BPD.
‘A Story’ is a raw, personal reflection on living with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) rooted in past childhood trauma.
No one ever understands me but maybe reading this might help.
