Borderline Personality Disorder

My name is Julie and I have a very real and moving story I would like to share with you. I was born in Toronto in 1983 and taken by CAS at 3 months old. The details surrounding this are sketchy for me but basically my mother got arrested and she got my aunt to watch me who then gave me to a lady she met on the street. I had a very bad cough, and the lady took me to the hospital who called CAS because apparently, I had bruises.

I spent 10 months in foster care and was then adopted. I had psychological problems from the start and would destroy and rip everything apart. I think it’s because I never had normal bonding or was traumatised. I spent my youth very bullied, and I would usually just walk around by myself all recess watching the other kids play. I liked to be alone and at 11 I was taken to a psychiatrist because I became so reclusive and stopped wanting to even eat.

I started cutting myself at 14 and smoking weed and cigarettes. I got sent to a psychiatric ward the summer after grade 9 and would never live with my adoptive parents again. I got passed through such facilities as Youthdale, Whitby psyc, Thistletown in Etobicoke and Crossroads run by Kinark. In the hospitals I was frequently left alone in restraints tying me to a bed and given so many drugs my personality was gone. My adoptive parents didn’t even know me anymore when they visited.

At Whitby I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder by a team of psychiatrists. I frequently would run away from the group home crossroads and once in a fit of rage I climbed the fire escape and threw myself off the roof. An ambulance arrived and put me on a board. I had hairline fractured my lower back.

Shortly after this I ran away from there for good and met up with a 25-year-old man named Andrew. I was 16 at the time. He was homeless, and I stuck to him like glue as he showed me how to live on the street. He had a terrible temper and would beat me especially when he was drunk.

I spent 11 months with him living on the street and for a short time in an apartment in Bradford they we got through a worker. The police would get called to the apartment because people would hear me screaming from him hitting me. I was abusing cocaine and would use anything I could to get high.

After we left there, we stayed on the street again and one night around 2am Andrew was drunk, and he was literally beating me to death. He was sitting on me and just going at it. The thought came into my mind to yell at him and desperate I started yelling at him to get away from me. To my astonishment he actually walked away from me yelling at me. I got up and ran pausing for moment to gaze a my reflection in a store window. My face was all swollen and just black from bruises. I ran behind a mall and found a man making deliveries who called mall security who called the police.

I got placed in a group home in Newmarket called Heritage Lodge. I met a 26-year-old drug dealer and started dating him. He got me into using needles shooting cocaine and oxycitin. I would abuse any pills to get high such as Gravol. He would also hit me, and I got kicked in the head by him 2 times in a row with shoes on so hard I blacked out for a moment. He got arrested for this and then I went back to him about 6 months later. I had no feelings of self-worth or real love.

When I was 18, I took an overdose of pills and went to the hospital and told them I was suicidal. They put me in a small room to wait and see someone. The room had a framed picture on the wall and sadly I broke the glass in the frame, and I slit my wrists so badly up and down my forearm that my arm is disfigured by scars for the rest of my life. Thick, ropey scars.

At 19 I got pregnant by the man who kicked me in the head and went with the baby to a woman’s shelter when the baby was around 3 months old. We went to Rosalie Hall in Scarborough and Sandgate womans shelter. I recieved emergency housing and was given a one-bedroom apartment in a co-op. So now it was just me and my baby. My adoptive parents lent me a small black and white tv and a sleeping bag and I would camp out on the floor snuggling my baby until I got furniture.

After about a year I felt this urgency to find out the truth in life. I went to a used bookstore called Random Books to see what I could find. I found a book called “There’s A New World Coming.” The title sparked my interest, so I bought it. I took it home and read it right through. It was all about Bible prophecy. At the end of the book was a prayer to receive Jesus as your Saviour. I recognized that I was a terrible sinner and jumped at the chance to have a Saviour. I prayed for Jesus to be my Saviour and to forgive my sins. I confessed my faith in Him.

Then I tell you the truth I felt God’s indescribable, powerful love washing over me like gentle ocean waves. I spent like a week crying and praying. Confessing my sins. You see having borderline disorder the only thing I had ever felt was desperation. Desperation to be loved but I had no idea what love was, nor could I express it. I had felt rage, I had felt pain like there was a giant hole in my chest.

In that moment God filled that hole with His love and peace. He gave me His Holy Spirit and great faith. He forgave me for all my wretched sins because of His great mercy. I have never been the same.

I began distributing Bible tracts and going to church. I got baptised on June 12, 2005, and my baptism certificate sits by my bed. Instead of self-destruction and self-hatred I can by the power of the Holy Spirit feel love and compassion for others. I will help anyone and am moved to express love for others in whatever way I can.

God has led me to have great compassion for the homeless as I know what it is like to sit panhandling. This new creation He has made in me prepares packages with Bible tracts and gift cards and treats and now I go seek out the broken and the lost on the streets of Toronto every two months.

This Christmas the Holy Spirit moved me to prepare gifts for the homeless and I set out with a hockey bag filled with wrapped packages of pot of gold chocolates, gift cards, handmade cards filled with Scriptures about hope and belonging. No Greater Love Than Jesus is what the covers read. God uses me to bring His love to them. God’s love and compassion are the most beautiful things I have ever felt, and He fills my heart in an indescribable way. This is just one example of what God has done in my life.

I devote myself to street evangelism, sharing the Gospel with people I see. So, when people dont believe in God, I can tell them without a doubt that God is real. He has done a miracle in me. Everything in the Bible is true. God is good. He is pure in every way. He is light and He sent His Son Jesus to destroy the works of the devil. The devil devours kids like I was but the Lord rescues them. He saves them.

My name is Julie, and I am a living testimony that God is mighty to save and with His Spirit, He can transform even the most broken, hopeless person. It’s all about having faith in Jesus and surrendering to His Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. The works of the flesh (me without Jesus) were all destructive and led to death. Here is my poem called broken that I wrote 12 years ago during the first week I was saved. It poured from me like water.

The Full Story

My honest testimony as best I can remember it:

Where to start? I was born in Toronto in 1983 and taken by CAS at about 3 months old. The details surrounding this are sketchy for me but basically my mother got arrested and she got my aunt to watch me who then gave me to a lady she met on the street. I had a very bad cough, and the lady took me to the hospital who called CAS because apparently, I had bruises.

I spent 10 months in foster care and was then adopted. I had psychological problems from the start and would destroy and rip everything apart. I think it’s because I never had normal bonding or was traumatised or fetal alcohol effects.

I spent my youth very bullied (the kids called me butt chin because of my dimple) and I would usually just walk around by myself all recess watching the other kids play. I liked to be alone and at 11, I was taken to a psychiatrist because I became so reclusive and stopped wanting to even eat. I would just listen to my Michael Jackson tapes over and over on my Walkman with my face buried in the couch. I developed an unhealthy obsession with my adoptive dad’s horror movies like The Good Son and Scream I was watching very violent movies like Toy Soldiers and Seven. There was like this drawer of VHS tapes, and I’d sit and watch them.

I started cutting myself at 14 and smoking weed and cigarettes. I got sent to a psychiatric ward the summer after grade 9 and would never live with my adoptive parents again. I got passed through such facilities as Youthdale, Whitby psyc, Thistletown in Etobicoke and Crossroads run by Kinark.

In the hospitals I was frequently left alone in restraints tying me to a bed and given so many drugs my personality was gone. In the Whitby hospital I got to try a Nintendo 64 for the first time which was cool. My favorite game was Wave Race. I remember two boys named Richard from this time. One was a teen in Whitby and he’d make grunting noises every night and one night I just yelled shut up!

I was 14. He was in my room like a flash screaming at me and he pulled me out of bed by my hair. He tore a handful out and the nurses heard the commotion and came and got him off me. They put the handful of hair into a baggie for my adoptive parents.

The other Richard I remember was in the Etobicoke group home. We ran away together. I had turned 15 in this home. We took the subway to a mall and Richard set one of those cardboard lotto ticket displays on fire. I remember getting chased out by security. We wound up calling the group home to come get us.

While i was in the next group home in Newmarket i remember id run away with a boy named Mike and we’d go to this abandoned building. The local kids told us a guy had hung himself in there, but we didn’t believe them. The main floor was dirt and then upstairs there was a couch and old barber chair. The piping had a concave under it in the dirt where apparently, they removed the guy’s body.

Mike started hanging off the piping like doing monkey bars and I started jumping up and down in the concave. Then we went upstairs, and Mike sat on the couch, and I was standing talking to him. Suddenly the room felt cold, and we heard banging on the walls around us going bang, bang, bang, then I felt a hand on my shoulder like pressing in. I could feel the fingers, but I looked there was nothing there. I felt the hand reach down into me and it felt like it clenched something inside me then I felt something else rise up through me and literally start shoving it up and out. I know this sounds crazy, but it was like what I experienced.

I’ve been really in love only once in my life to a man and he nearly beat me to death. I was 16 and had grown accustomed to living on the street while I was 15 running away from my group home and living in stairwells and under the bridge and abandoned buildings. Or sometimes I’d just walk alone all-night listening to Green Day. My adoptive parents had bought me all their cds before I got sent to the mental hospital in Whitby at 14 for cutting. My adoptive dad told me at some point while I was 16 that they would move away and I’d never be able to find them, they’d leave the province he said, so I was having trouble in those relationships.

I was on and off the psych ward all the time there was a locked side and an unlocked side that I alternated between. My favorite patient I met on the ward would play guitar and sing me Beatles songs like “Lucy in the Sky,” while we sat and smoked cigs together.

Another guy I met there named Daniel who thought he was a wizard introduced me to Andrew McDonald. He was a 25 year old from Kewsick. He was very handsome with big brown eyes and muscular. He was building a shack in the Fairy Lake woods in Newmarket using materials he stole from the municipal building being built.

I got my stuff from the group home and moved into the shack with him. I had just thrown myself off the group home 2nd story roof prior to this and been in hospital for a week, I was very mentally ill. I taped my Korn cut out posters onto the wood ceiling.

He went to the food bank and loaded the shack with cans of food. He told me we were going to go butt collecting and I had no idea what he meant. Then he took me to the Tannery mall and we collected cigarette butts from the ashtrays and brought them back. We’d walk along the train tracks, hed take his tshirt off and tie it on his head like a bandana. He showed me to remove the tobacco and roll it into a zig zag rolling paper.

Daniel had gotten us to watch his dog in the shack and the dog attacked Andrew biting his arm badly. Andrew told me about how when he was in grade school he told the teacher he wanted a chair to do a slam dunk and he took it and hit another kid with it who was bullying him. He got arrested for a warrant and was in jail for about a month during which I lived in the shack alone.

One time we were walking down main street, and this huge biker dude came out and grabbed Andrew, pulling him into the tattoo parlor. I went in after him. He punched Andrew in the face very hard and began dragging him to the back room. I leapt onto the biker grabbing onto his shirt and he was so shocked he let go of Andrew who ran out the door. The biker stared at me with blue eyes and told me get out of here or I’ll kill you too bi***.

So I took Andrew to the abandoned building I knew about I’d been staying in at 15 with other kids. Then in the night I wanted to leave because I kept hearing a male voice saying, hey you, to me while Andrew was sleeping. So we left with Andrew yelling at whatever upset me. We snuck into the basement of a senior home called Marianne house to sleep but got caught by a nun. She said I could stay but Andrew had to go so I said no, and we left.

Andrew and I walked to North York and began living on the street there. In winter we lived in bank machine entrances and abandonded houses. In the summer we lived under the train bridge near Yonge and Steeles.

The first time Andrew hit me was when we were huffing glue in an alley and I wouldn’t share the bag. My head exploded into red and it took me a few moments to figure out he had hit me. We got an apartment from a youth worker in Bradford above the thrift store and he got a job at the lube place. I would ride my bike to bring him his lunch, and the other guys would tease him because of the weird stuff I’d bring. People would call the police up to the apartment because they would hear me screaming from the street, he’d beat me so bad. The officer told me during one of those calls that one of these days they’d take me out of there in a body bag.

I remember Andrew smashing every dish in the kitchen. He took a stereo apart and cut the cord then separated the wires and plugged it in touching the bare wires to the circuits which made them explode. He showed me to bend a wire coat hanger and put it on the burner to make toast. I recall a nightmare I had where Andrew was sitting on a chair and in my dream, he told me there’s something under the chair and I knelt down to look and whatever I saw made me scream so loud I woke myself and him up. He thought someone had broken in.

One night Andrew brought home a baggie of coc**** and we walked around all night doing lines. If the baggie ran out he’d get another. He kept talking and talking. We’d climb out the window and sit on the roof and drink at the apartment we had. Some of his friends came over and for some reason he beat this one man named Raymond so severely until the other guys said he’d had enough.

Then we started living on the street again we took the bus back to North York and we sat in the back and Andrew held my hand. I remember I liked looking at his ring. We made friends with another homeless couple named Brian and Donna and we were living behind an arena all together that was infested with ear wigs. We’d buy bottles of cheap beer like colt 45 or old English and Andrew would always pour a bit out and say, for the boys that don’t have.

Brian was on odsp and he’d get $500 as a homeless person. He used it to take a cab to his dealer and get cra** which we smoked together under an overpass. We’d go to the church and get vouchers for a free breakfast at a local diner and I’d go down to the bathroom and wash up. Andrew kept amethyst stones in his duffelbag and when the moon was full he’d put them in the moonlight. They were his favorite thing. I got kicked out of Centerpoint mall for panhandling. I was always panhandling at Finch station.

One time I’d gotten a lot of change, and a man said he’d sell me weed but I was too stupid to know what it looked like, so I bought a baggie of bush clippings. Andrew was so mad trying to find him. There was another older man who’d sit in front of the escalator, and he was always threatening to kidnap me and so Andrew was always making threatening gestures to him. One time in the winter I got so sick when we were living in abandoned houses, I remember we went to the store to try and get some medicine and I had to go back outside because I was hacking couching so much and the man gave Andrew a bottle of Buckleys and I was drinking big gulps of it trying to get better.

The winter was harsh, and I developed deep lines in my feet from them always being wet. The street outreach van would pull up behind finch station and give out supplies. We’d also go to the out of the cold program and once they wanted to do a survey and we got paid $20 each to be in it.

Andrew would push me around in a shopping cart sometimes and that was my happiest times with him. He loved Irish cream coffee, and we’d get them at Finch station. We’d also use the change I collected to buy hot dogs at the hot dog stand. We’d crawl in the clothing bins and throw the bags out to go through and get new jeans. Our favorite thing to wear was black dress pants that were cut off at the knees, so the threads were hanging. One time we had just enough change and we got a loaf of bread a pack of bologna and a bag of onion ring chips and made sandwiches, bologna and onion ring chip sandwiches lol. The last night I ever saw Andrew was when he got drunk and nearly beat me to death in a park.

He was sitting on top of me and just punching me and punching me in the face. He put his hand in my mouth trying to break my jaw. He was really hurting me and I saw in his eyes like he was gone. I heard in my mind the words clearly, Yell at him so I started yelling at him to get away from me. And he did he got off me and walked away and I got up and ran out of the park. I went behind Centerpoint mall and the security brought me inside.

The police took me to the overpass to go down and get my bag and then they took me to my adoptive parent’s house in Richmond Hill. In the morning, they called an ambulance because I was crying so much, and I got put back in the psych ward and place in another group home. Things just got worse from there I wound up on street again with a more dangerous 26-year-old who kicked me in the head twice when I tried to leave him and I got into doing needles. I slit my wrist badly at 18.

Now I’m 42 I’m not any sort of addict. Totally clean. Jesus sure turned my life around. I try to share the Good News with people because I know the power of God in my life. He is absolutely real. Absolutely.

The group home after Andrew was run by a couple who said they are witches. The group home manager had a white streak in her hair and would try to get me to read the Celestine prophecy and she take me to witchcraft stores and healers. But I wasn’t into it. I started dating a dealer on main street and he got hired to paint the smoke room of the group home. He had shot himself in the head and there was a soft spot where the skull was missing.

One of the fellow patients named Henrietta had a favorite chair and I’d sit in it just to make her mad. A man staying in the group home had me be lookout one night while he broke into the kitchen into the meds cupboard. He took all the bottles then we sat in the living room and he kept just giving me pills to take and I’d take them. I was very self destructive. He wound up riding his bike into a parked car after i was told and I don’t remember anything after sitting in the chair and swallowing these cocktails of pills but apparently, I came to breakfast in the morning and started spreading jam on my arm then face planted on the table.

I started running away from that group home all the time and staying in an abandoned house on Mulock drive in Newmarket. Doug, the new bf who had the head injury began staying with me there. I remember drinking vodka straight until I blacked out several times. One time I filled a takeout cup with vodka and started drinking until I blacked out in a parking lot.

I woke up to a cruiser and I got put in the drunk tank. Doug wanted to hitch hike to Tobermory because his parents lived on Manitoulin Island, and he wanted to visit them, so we started out hitchhiking. Doug was violent and he punched me in the head now and then. One time blood gushed from my mouth. We managed to hitchhike to Owen sound.

I remember I won $50 on a Nevada ticket, and I used it to buy a pair of orange Modrobes pants that were my favorite. We’d take turns lifting a pant leg hitchhiking just joking around. In Owen sound we were at the soup kitchen and we met a couple named Rose and Julie. They offered to let us stay in their house. So we stayed there awhile. I don’t remember much except they had the hellraiser movies I watched on vhs and the lady was really into Alanis morrisette so I listened to her cds.

One time Doug and Julie had gone out fishing and Rose wanted to get some old bottles out if the crawl space under the closet. This was a really really old house and the crawlspace went up to her waist. She lowered herself into it so she was standing inside and we both heard running feet loudly coming from the hole and running up the staircase and all around upstairs. I started yelling at her, get out! Get out! And she did and immediately it stopped.

When Julie and Doug got back, they didn’t believe us. After a while staying there, we moved on when we were staying in Collingwood, we met a lady probably in her 40s and she was really kind. She let us stay with her. But I wound up disclosing to her that Doug was hitting me and she wanted to call the police, so we had to leave.

Doug was furious at me for telling her. We eventually went made it to Tobermory and his sister took us to the ferry to Manitoulin Island. Doug had a nice visit, and I got to try their atv but I cranked the throttle, and Doug was running after me yelling.

On the way back we were hitchhiking through Tiverton area, and we got picked up by a guy in his 50s who asked us if we smoke hooch and that meant weed. So we started living in his house and Doug was working in his car lot. This lasted awhile. I had a Playstation at that house and I enjoyed playing racing games. I really liked the song alive by pearl jam I tried to cope with my life by listening to rock music but it didn’t help much.

We helped him do roofing on his car lot like replacing shingles. At one point Doug smashed a lamp all over the pool table in the basement of Toms house and Tom came over when we were out and found it and he left an angry note on the dryer. Doug got mad that he had entered without permission so he called the police. After the officer came and left checking things out Doug went out to the payphone outside, and I followed him. He called Tom and said,

“Julie called the police I couldn’t stop her.”

This upset me because it was solely his idea to call police and so I went inside the house and locked the front door, and I was knelt on the dining room floor throwing my clothes into my backpack because I was going to leave. Then I heard the sound of him kicking the front door in.

Once he was in he came up to me and grabbed me and threw me to the floor. Then he kicked me in the head so hard everything went black for a moment then slowly went red. Then he kicked me again. The third time I finally got the sense to move my head away and he pulled my clothes off and made me sit there naked while he called me down. He told me my mom thinks I’m a pig I remember. He was drinking heavily then he stared scratching his wrist to make it bleed and eventually he passed out drunk.

He had hidden my shoes, but I found one in the dryer and I don’t remember now where other shoe was, but I got dressed and went out to payphone and called police. I had two black eyes really bad I do have a photo of it. Then police took him away and I got taken to shelter. The guy Tom came to shelter to see me and because I literally didn’t know anybody else I started staying with him in his car lot and he started making sexual advances at me and took advantage of me.

Then my adoptive mom contacted an agency called operation child go home and I got brought back to Richmond hill in a van full of people. I wound up pregnant by Doug after meeting up with him again in Newmarket after a while and I was then in more shelters because I left him taking the baby with me because he would hold the baby above his head so I couldn’t feed it.

While I was pregnant, he also shoved my face down into a sofa chair holding my arm behind my back, so it was nearly breaking. I ran out of the place I was like 6 months pregnant, and he ran up behind me and shoved me down on the road so hard. Then pulled me back inside by my hair. I saw the people who lived above us watching from the window like it was a tv show.

I got emergency housing while in the shelter and it was there in my own apartment with my baby that I started wondering about the truth in life and I gave my life to Jesus. I wrote a poem called Broken about it I will include at the end.

Now I’m clean and I like to get good news cards to give out to people. This story is missing a tremendous amount of drug use such as abusing gravol pills to get so high I couldn’t walk. Like it was real bad the shape I was in. I have a spot on my vein on my hand where the needle tattooed me because it was too hot. It’s now a reminder as are these scars of how far I’ve come thanks to Jesus.

About the scars I had done a pill OD and I went to the hospital in Newmarket where I was at the time and told them I was suicidal. I was 18 and had just gotten involved with Doug again. They put me in a room by myself that had a couch and I was to wait there to see a psychiatrist but seeing the glass picture on the wall I went over and punched it and I did a number on myself. My wrist and forearm was all black stitched after. Getting stitched hurt more than doing it. Please if you’re reading this don’t ever feel like that’s the answer. Jesus cares about you He actually does. God bless you all.

BROKEN
I look at my wrists, I see the scars
I search my soul, I know my shame
I’ve been led by the blind and beaten down by sin
I should have died, but You wouldn’t let them win
I see Your hands, the holes in Your palms
I know your glory has overcome all pain
I turn to You Lord, in my broken suffering
A love unimaginable, how can this be
In all my wretchedness, You reached out to save me
A soul so pure, my hero, Your truth
The word of God that whispered to my heart and set me free
As I tripped over trials, in this deathly darkness
I looked for the way
Your light opened my soul and my eyes lit up with hope
You showed me a path that I can now take
Thanks to Your selfless sacrifice
This sheep will never fade away
I toddle like a baby, into Your strong hands
I am Yours, You have made me new again
Paralyzed with tears, my repentance shakes my being
Then You kiss my tears away and I am no longer unclean
Thank you Father, my cross I’ll bear
‘Till the day I go home, when You shout from the sky
All Your sheep will run to You with a happy cry
And there I’ll be, tucked safely under Your wing
As we fly away, this life will have seemed like a dream
I will never forget how You gave Yourself for me
I love you Lord Jesus

To learn more about my story visit https://mentalhealthtalk.info/bpd