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Best for:

Readers living with borderline personality disorder (BPD), Friends, partners, and family members wanting to better understand splitting, & People interested in mental health through poetry

The Essence:

Read time: 🕰️ 2 to 3 minutes |Weight: 🥊 Heavy | Mood: 🗝️Vulnerable & introspective |

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The Vault:

• An exploration of splitting in borderline personality disorder
• Black-and-white thinking through the metaphor of color
• The impact of fear & emotional permanence
• Self-awareness without self-condemnation
• A personal perspective rather than a universal experience

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BPD Meets Poetry:

Mental health diagnoses are often explained with clinical language, but clinical language rarely comes close to capturing what they feel like from the inside. One symptom commonly associated with borderline personality disorder is called splitting.

Splitting is the tendency, often under stress or perceived rejection, to swing between extremes in how a person, situation, or even yourself is perceived. It isn’t a conscious choice. It can happen so quickly that someone who felt completely safe moments ago suddenly feels dangerous, distant, or impossible to trust.

This poem doesn’t attempt to define BPD. It simply describes one moment of living inside it.

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Colors:

An Original Poem by: Axton N. O. Mitchell.

Supposedly, people like me living on the borderline
see situations in hues of black and white,
alone.

Quick replies that, for a moment,
slow their pace
feel like betrayal
to me,
typically.

Consider my job for a moment.
One small mistake
can leave me more than prepared
to be walked to the door.

A new friendship begins,
leaving me amazed by them
until
triggered reactions
paint them as cruel
in my point of view.

Life for me
is often yellow and blue,
both capable of making happiness
painful.

Until

I

Split.

Yellow now resembles
toxic gas,
poisonous,
dense.

Blue transforms
into a numb,
impenetrable
nothingness.

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Splitting:

One of the hardest things about splitting is that it doesn’t usually announce its arrival. It feels like clarity when it’s happening, even if hindsight time reveals something different.

Understanding the mechanism doesn’t always stop it. Naming it doesn’t always ease it. Sometimes all you can do is recognize that your world has suddenly changed hues and wait until you’re able to see the full picture again.

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TLDR:

This poem explores splitting, a symptom many people with borderline personality disorder experience, through the changing symbolism of color.

It reflects how quickly perception can shift after a trigger, transforming connection into fear and certainty into emotional isolation, while offering readers a glimpse into one lived experience rather than defining the disorder itself.

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