I read somewhere that a true sign of someone living with the Borderline Personality Disorder is to take a look at their resume. Countless changes of both location and career are really not that unusual within this disorder. The reasons could be something as small as a bad vibe from a coworker to a massive desire to change their life may be at the helm of their logic. The problem is it gets to become a habit of when something bad appears to just pack your bags and leave instead of seeing the situation through to determine whether or not the change is warranted.
Below is a history of both where I lived and where I have worked with some of the main specifics left out to protect my privacy. Keep in mind I am thirty four.
House One – moved when I was sixteen
House Two – moved when I was nineteen
House Three – moved when I was twenty
House Four – moved when I was twenty
House Five – moved when I was twenty
House Six – moved when I was twenty one
House Seven – moved when I was twenty one
House Eight – moved when I was twenty one
House Nine – moved when I was twenty two
House Ten – moved when I was twenty three
House Eleven – moved when I was twenty four
House Twelve – moved when I was twenty five
House Thirteen – moved when I was twenty six
House Fourteen – Moved when I was twenty eight
House Fifteen – Moved when I was twenty nine
House Sixteen – Will be moving in the next ten days
- A total of six different cities/towns
Employment –
Job 1 – 15 to 16
Job 2 – 16 to 17
Job 3 – 17 to 19
Job 4 – 21 to 21
Job 5 – 21 to 23
Job 6 – 23 to 24
Job 7 – 24 to 27
Job 8 – 27 to 28
Job 9 – 29 to 32
School/Education (each grade section is a new school)
K to Grade 6
Grade 7 to Grade 8
Grade 9
Grade 10 to Grade 11
Grade 11 to Grade 12
College 1 – management
College 2 – computers
College 3 – social work
Lots of changes and at one time I could explain each and every one with what seemed to me as a valid reason at the time. Now looking back most of them are hard to justify and were the result of black and white thinking. It is difficult to lead a stable healthy life when most of it is in a state of chaos. Take care.
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Interesting. Though, I assume anything that happened before you turned 16 you didn’t have too much control over, right?
I always want to move more for some reason…Perhaps it’s just restlessness. Then there were times when I so desperately WANTED to move but couldn’t. There were years when I was just plain stuck. That was just as bad and unhealthy for me.
My family lived in the same house for fourteen years until we moved to a different province when I was sixteen. Once I hit my twenties I just couldn’t stay still and when the inclination arose to move that is what I did. If my son was not part of the question I would have left where I am a long time ago. Take care.
i did not know whether to laugh or cry when i read this.
i’ve moved about 32 times since leaving home at 16. (i am now 50)
while i am almost always in a good job, i’ve never stayed with one 3 years.
i went to 8 different colleges and changed majors 6 different times. i did finally manage a degree, but in an area that allows me to continually re-invent what i do.
in the last year i have had three jobs. i just started a new one, one that is highly responsible and COULD be a good position over time, but i am scared spittless that i will never manage to hold on to anythng good.
yeah, bpd is a very complicated way to live.
I agree with this. I too have changed many jobs and schools and majors in college. I go from one thing to another without much thought as to what this will do to my CV/resume.
I’ve gotten to a point that I really don’t care about it. Before I did but I can’t change this part of me.
I feel the urge every two years, like clockwork. I get bored and restless
This really resonates with me! Although my primary diagnoses is Bipolar II, I have side orders of BP, ADHD, OCD and WTF(!). We moved a lot when I was a child; by the age of ten, we left the fourth house I’d lived in to move to Belgium. Within the first year, I was sent to a British boarding school, which has not two, but three terms.
At 14, I moved here, leaving home at 16 to come to college. From then on, until I moved into the house I bought with my best friend in ’99, I moved at least once a year.
I looked at my security deposit as a fee I payed the landlord for all the crap that I couldn’t or wouldn’t move. It was a great way to feel like I was getting a fresh start, but I was always there when the honeymoon was over!
I kept a bartending job for almost a decade, because in a way, the job changed nightly. The same is true of my four year bike messenger stint. As a scenic artist, working for theatres,cruises and eventually movies, the work varied tremendously.
The only thing that was truly constant in my life was being a painter….I even had to quit drinking, my other passion!
I applaud you for knowing that you need to pay attention to what your body needs and when to take a break. I’m 42 now, and I have only just learned this aspect of remaining balanced.
I do hope that you have the best move possible. We’ll miss you while you’re gone, but know that it’s for a good reason.
Dano.
P.S. I really appreciate your including my blog in your directory.
hi there. your blog is so important to me. my mom died a few years ago, but having been raised by her, i continue weeding through what was ok and what was bpd-skewed in the adulthood model i was raised with. while not borderline myself, i had a lot of those traits to start out with. the longer i was away from home and on my own, the more they fell away and were replaced with other coping mechanisms and healthier internal assumptions about the nature of reality and how human relationships should work. i guess i had to separate out what was emulated to me by my authority figures and what was “real”, if that makes any sense. my mom was such a good person, she really was. she loved me and her granddaughters and i honestly believe she worked really hard to do the best she could. her heart was in the right place, although her brain often led her astray.
when i was a kid, i changed schools 2-3 times every single year, as my mom and her husband du jour moved around. my initial thought was the same as the first post – that you didn’t have any control over that part of it, until you were an adult or left home, and that the school changes were more a reflection of what you were raised in rather than your own internal issues. but if the family stayed put, how did all those changes happen? just curious.
when i first left home, i definitely did the thing where i would try to “overhaul” my life frequently when things got into a tangled mess by just packing up and leaving, starting over somewhere else. this stopped when i had my first child, i was determined not to move her around like i had been moved around. however, the urge to pack up and leave has never left me. 15 years later, about once a year i go through the mental exercise of packing everything i own into boxes, researching housing costs and job listings in a new place, all of that. used to scare my husband to death, but now he knows i’m just indulging the mental tic and won’t act on it. i was at my last job for 10 years and have been self-employed for 5 years so far. before that, when i was younger, most jobs only lasted a year or two.
i often wonder if i will spend the rest of my life untangling the bpd glitches in my head from the stuff that is really “me”. i used to get angry about it, resenting that i had to do all this work to get rid of this stuff that wasn’t even mine. now i just feel empathy for my mom, who could not separate out the disease from herself enough to ever have happiness in her life for very long. such a waste.
thank you for putting this here. it helps me constantly, you have no idea. i have so many a-ha moments that help me heal things.