Something that I am becoming passionate about, equally as much as I am passionate about paleo, is dialectical behavior therapy. It is an equally important part of my health.

Dialectical behavior therapy is the only clincally proven way to cure borderline personality disorder. It involves a variety of journaling practices and thought exercises that are designed to teach you how to keep your emotions in a moderate happy medium, how to put fear in its proper box of context, and how to function in life. It involves learning how to be more assertive, when appropriate. It involves learning how to improve your physical health. It involves learning how to master new skills and hobbies that help you build your sense of yourself as a full, complete person. It involves things that probably come naturally to neurotyical people but that people with BPD need to explicitly be told and taught and need to practice.

I am making so much progress in therapy. The differences in conduct and character from the start of this month, when I was so sad I literally couldn't get out of bed, to today, when I was able to play lacrosse with some degree of spirit and vigor and when I was able to step back into my CrossFit gym, feels very rewarding. I still have a long way to go in terms of my self-development, but today was a very good sign that things are improving and getting better.

This article may be one of the hardest for me to write. Partly because I am tired, and partly because I have never really felt comfortable talking about this. So let's see how far I get before I zonk out and crash for the night.

So, my absolutely biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest failure in life is getting fired from Cornell University, which happened in 2015. Cornell was my very first job right out of college. I was supposed to graduate from college and then go be an assistant to the professors at a summer course on black studies and black art history at Cornell University. Then I was going to move to New Jersey with this kid Sammy, one of my best friends from high school, and start a grad school program in fashion studies at Parsons--The New School for Design. That plan kind of got thrown to the wind when, barely week into training for Cornell, I got fired.

It's been two years almost to the day exactly since the firing, and my life has honestly been a mess, an experience of aporia and anomia, since then. I have really struggled to know how to define myself, how to function and socialize, how to get up in the morning, how to really live since then. I have at times tried putting the Cornell experience on my resume, and I have at times tried the approach of taking it off my resume and hiding it. I have been so utterly confused and bewildered, not knowing what to do. Feeling very numb. Dissociating from reality. That means pretending that what is around you is not real, is not there. It's sad because I really spent most of 2016 honestly just hiding in bed and wishing I was not alive. It's only recently that I have started therapy and have started on a path toward reclaiming a healthier, more integrated self.

The essence of BPD, or borderline personality disorder, is that you had a fucked-up childhood experience, which I did, were chronically mishandled by your parents, which I was, and therefore have trouble socializing in a normal way as an adult, which I do. People with this condition have trouble finding the happy medium in friendships and relationships. We are either too intense, outpouring all of our emotions at once in a way that can be overwhelming for the other individual, or too internally dead and emotionally vacuous, devastated by experiences of rejection or perhaps closing ourselves off from other people for fear of being hurt again. I have been misdiagnosed as other things from time to time, but I am fairly certain that I have BPD.

I was fired from Cornell during one of my intense emotional outpouring phases. I remember feeling a lot of anger and having explosive outbursts that were upsetting to my coworkers and that definitely were not appropriate for someone who wanted to be in a role model/ leadership position like becoming a Cornell staffer/ junior faculty member. I consider this firing experience one of my biggest failures in life. It just wasn't part of the plan, and I don't fully know how to recover from it. Since the firing, I have transitioned from pursuing a career in fashion and art history to pursuing a career in finance. I am definitely on a path to earning way more money than I ever would have earned if I had continued on the path I was on before. I have gotten into one of the best universities in the world for graduate school. I have met new friends whom I am so grateful to have met. Yet I still have trouble accepting my life since Cornell as okay, as anything more than a cosmic freak accident.

BPD can be successfully treated and completely cured, that is the good news. The treatment for BPD is called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. I have a great therapist who is kind of walking me through the steps that are involved in DBT. One day Cornell will be a distant memory in the past. For now, though, yeah, it's one of my biggest failures and tragedies in life.