Mental Illness in Journal

Recently I watched someone describe what acting out borderline personality disorder was like.
I call it acting out… Because like most of these psychological disorders, it always seems to never happen when they don’t want it to. It’s under their voluntary control, in other words. The particular person I was listening to was a man, who is in the depths of trying to figure out reality from fantasy. He consistently made categorical errors like saying “I felt like a woman” or “I am ego-less, like a monk. Monks are just practiced in being grounded.” While also, asserting that as a man, he has never felt like a man. feeling like a man is not an experience he’s ever had. He just is a man. The failure to apply this reality to the fallacy of “I felt like a woman” can only be the result of selective application of the principle. While identifying the ability of a monk to remain indifferent in the face of great personal distress is just the identification of a skill he wishes he had- and so it is idealized as ” good” and placed on a pedestal. In reality the monk is not ego-less; he is merely dissociated, and has a trained catatonic response.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that his mental illness is the result of choices. He chooses not to be objective or universal in his descriptions. He refuses to question the conclusion of his false premise- to believe that “I feel like a woman” is a true statement but that “I feel like a man” is not. Why is this painfully obvious contradiction held so fluently in his mind? I have several ideas but, it’s not really that important.
Borderline personality disorder, he says, is like being addicted to trying on new identities. He picks them up, becomes them; immersion, obsession, idealization, and then discards them in a used, soiled sock fashion. In a way, he is right that this behavior isn’t much different than a monk; they are both profoundly dissociated. It’s just that the monk turns his ego to inward activity and is disciplined in restraining acting out. It’s kind of the same idea that everyone will tend to make a virtue out of their circumstances. Such as the slaves claiming the greatest virtue is humility and submission. While tyrants claim the greatest virtue is truth and power. So the borderline idealizes the dissociative capacity of the monk and thinks of this as a high achievement, instead of as the result of brutal moral trauma.
But again that perspective is a choice… Certainly I have had my fair share of encounters with the temptation of turning my circumstance or my proclivity into a virtue. It is easier in the moment, and provides a great deal of self satisfaction. But it doesn’t last. Which is probably why the BPD person is addicted to finding a new identity.
The BPD acting out is just a symptom of the dissociation. The dissociation is the choice to remain… Oh man, how did Nathaniel Branden word it? It is an analogue to unaware, but different, because we are forever aware of all things that are in our consciousnesses. It is the act of forgetting, suppressing or repressing that awareness. Dissociation is the attempt to keep those horrible traumas repressed.