Such a beautiful read, and so very important. Thank you for your unflinching self-awareness, and your courage to share your journey so honestly with everyone else. I'm sure your story and your compassion will help many.

A somewhat different kind of experience, but I've never been diagnosed with a personality disorder, but I remember spending ages 14 to 26 in a dysthymic funk. To the point that I think people assumed it was innate to how I functioned. A couple of people even recommended medication. But I had a hunch that I did not need medication for what I was feeling — and lo and behold, suddenly, one day, I started to realize I'd been waking up happy and hopeful every single day... for weeks. More importantly, I had a gut feeling that this was my norm. Happiness suddenly stopped feeling like an "event" to me; I finally understood it as a state of being. It's been over a decade since then. And indeed, the dysthymic moods have been only an occasional fleeting visitor since.

In other words: yes yes yes. Everything changes when we start learning how to make healthier choices for ourselves and to choose healthier connections. Thank you for spreading this message. I very much agree that a lot of mental illnesses — perhaps even most mental illnesses — are circumstantial rather than innate.