#borderlinebrilliance returns for BPD Awareness Month!
Hello everyone, I apologize for the lateness of this announcement but as some of you may know, May is BPD Awareness Month and we are going to celebrate it much like we did last year, with a series of #borderlinebrilliance events every Sunday in the month of May, starting this weekend on May 1st!
What is #borderlinebrilliance?
#Borderlinebrilliance is an annual series of events in the month of May for the BPD community to celebrate BPD Awareness Month! The name is inspired by the selfie blog brilliantborderlines which posts selfies of people with BPD. We believe that we as a community should celebrate all the ways that we are brilliant as people, both as a way to feel good about ourselves and as a way to breakdown the stigma against BPD. It’s a way to say “we are more than our disorder” and also a way to say that having BPD does not make us any less wonderful or worthy of love and respect and celebration.
BPD Awareness Month in the past has been fairly negative, an event geared towards educating neurotypical individuals and non-borderlines about the harsh realities of living with borderline personality disorder. While awareness is important for people who don’t know much about BPD, it’s just as important, perhaps more so, to encourage acceptance of the disorder and we who have it. We already know how horrible this illness can be–we talk about the realities of living with BPD all the time. So this time we want to talk about the fact that we are worthy and deserving of love and acceptance and respect, and a huge part of that is finding a way to believe that about ourselves. We want BPD Awareness Month to be for borderlines as much as it is about borderlines, and here at SBD we are in a position to celebrate our community, to celebrate each other and our achievements, to support each other, and have fun.
One of the most radical things that so many of us are trying to learn on our personal journeys through life with BPD is self-love. Self-love is the most crucial and most difficult thing to learn and to accept on the path of recovery. Since many of us may never fully recover from BPD, we have to learn how to love ourselves, BPD and all. That means finding a way to conceptualize this disorder so that it is more than solely a source of self-hatred. It’s a way of helping our community find the hope that things can get better and that we do have things worth celebrating, that we are worth celebrating. So on every Sunday for the month of May we’ve planned an event where members of our community celebrate and support our brilliant members.
The #borderlinebrilliance Schedule:
Every Sunday during May we are going to have a photo event where you are encouraged to post a photo (or two, or three, or however many you’d like!) that connects to that day’s theme/prompt. The themes are going to be similar to last year’s. They are:
May 1st - Selfie Day! Post a selfie, ideally one that you feel particularly good about.
May 8th - Identity! Post a photo of something that you feel expresses your identity or a component of your identity. This could be artwork, a character you deeply relate to, a poem, a place or an event that is significant to who you are, etc. We want this month to be about self-love, so try to focus on a part of yourself that you like, that you’re proud of, that you respect, etc.
May 15th - Mirrors! Post a photo of something that you feel expresses how you relate to the phenomenon of mirroring. This could include traits or characteristics of another person or character that you’ve adopted (even temporarily) into your own identity, a trait/characteristic/mannerism you’re prone to mirror while in the presence of another person, or a trait/characteristic of another person or character that you want to be able to mirror.
May 22nd - Black and White! Post a photo that you feel expresses the concept of Black and White. This could be a black and white photo, a selfie of you wearing black and white, or something more abstract that expresses black and white thinking or extremes.
May 29th - Self-Care! We’ll be posting some guides for how to create a Self-Soothe Kit or a Comfort Box, and we’d like people to share photosets of their creations! Practicing self-care is an important part of working towards self-love, so celebrate the ways that you take care of yourself and the things that help you feel better.
When you post your photos or your prompt responses, remember to tag them with #borderlinebrilliance! We’ll be tracking the tag and will reblog tagged posts to this blog so that the community can see them and celebrate them, and encourage each other.
EDIT: For all the members of our community who feel uncomfortable posting photos of themselves for various reasons, that is absolutely valid! I’ve tried to make the prompts (except for the selfie day) things that you don’t necessarily have to take a picture of yourself in order to participate in, and you don’t have to commit to participating in every event so you’re more than welcome to skip the selfie day if that makes you uncomfortable, but we are also totally on board with the people who would rather post artwork or written responses to the prompts instead of photos!
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