I think I have BPD. My fiancee just broke up with me.

I have been struggling with mental illness for a long time, but only recently acknowledged that it actually is mental illness. My family has a strong denialist tendency - my mother categorically refused any mental health screening, even when she attacked and screamed at my dad for minimal discernible reason. Over the last two years, I have gradually grown to accept that I have genuinely serious emotional problems, in large part due to my now-ex-fiancee's experience with mental illness and insistence on me considering the reasons for my behavior. I have nothing but gratitude for her support in me dealing with my problems, but I now see that she was also indulging her codependent tendencies in a way that was not good for her, and that my issues - which a therapist recently suggested to me might be BPD, and I must say I'm fairly convinced after some research - are currently too serious for it to be fair for me to ask anyone to deal with in an intimate setting.

My mother died in January, and I have been a horrible unstable wreck since then. My relationship with her was a terrible, unhealthy one, and for a long time the frequency of my angry, blaming, rageful episodes was closely linked to the proximity I had with my mother. I would go from being in a controlled, stable place where I could take accountability for my actions to an incredibly vindictive one just by having a phone conversation with her, and I would invariably take it out entirely on my fiancee. I ascribe this to several things: my desperate, unhealthy need for validation from my mother, her extreme dislike for my fiancee (which she always tried to deny and justify, going so far as to say it was perfectly fine to compare her unfavorably to the one other person I've dated, who was an incredibly manipulative and abusive person), and the fact that I only felt comfortable expressing any negative emotions toward my fiancee due to having issues with intimacy, boundaries, and seeing her as a caretaker.

After my mother died, the rages became constant; I had no way to shut them off. Realistically, my fiancee probably should have left or a least withdrawn then, with the level of abuse and manipulation I poured onto her over those months, but she didn't due to her codependency and the fact that, in every way but the emotional problems and conflict dynamics spawned by each of our issues, our relationship was an incredibly loving, positive thing. I checked myself into an intensive outpatient program, which I think I chose poorly - the program also handled addiction, and their rigid 12-step worldview pushed them to say some very unkind things about our relationship, which ended up with my persuading myself that she was making me crazy and that I had to break up with her. I spent months agonizing over it, and in the process made the very questionable decision to move across the country to somewhere I'd never been for grad school. For a variety of reasons, we reached an impasse which ended up with her turning down her own grad school offer and moving with me to a place where she had no prospects whatsoever. A month later, I finally convinced myself that I had to break up with her. We spent several weeks apart, but talking constantly, and I ended up turning around and driving 8 hours back from my transcontinental road trip to pick her up and bring her with me.

Over the summer, it seemed like things were improving - we were chasing the dream of domesticity, found a place to live and made it our own, adopted three cats, and settled into a pleasant but probably unhealthy regimen of spending 100% of our time together in our apartment isolated from everyone else. I started new medication after a suicide attempt that came on due to an awful conflict (in fact, I have attempted suicide a number of times now - all in the context of conflict in this relationship), and suddenly was able to step back from conflict and try to listen and resolve things. I started planning our wedding, after our first attempt to do so had fallen apart due to my breaking up with her. I bought her tons of thoughtful gifts for her birthday. We translated poems together. It seemed like our life was finally getting on track.

Then grad school orientation started and immediately everything went to hell. I am in a program where my field of study is a decidedly minor concern, and the orientation was an overscheduled mess of activities that didn't really pertain to me but that I was still expected to be at for ten hours a day for a week. The stress started to eat me up, and it hasn't abated at all. I really wasn't ready to start school, much less to teach at the same time. I ended up spending long days away and coming home emotionally exhausted, while my fiancee spent her time alone with the cats. Needless to say, this put extreme strain on our relationship. It was a victory when I went a weekend without yelling at her and locking myself in the bathroom with a knife, and zero weeks went by without me talking about dropping out of my program. We were coasting on not really talking about feelings or engaging in serious intimacy, but we still tried to push things through - we planned a whole wedding and honeymoon. Then things hit a breaking point, we had a massive fight about my anger problems, and she decided she had to get some space. She waited about a week and then drove back across the country. We talked extensively, but two weeks later - one week ago - she called me to tell me it was too hard and she couldn't come back. I understand why, and I can see that maybe it's the best for her, but it's completely broken my heart.

Now I have no idea what to do. I miss her 90% of the time. I'm living in an apartment filled with the things we accumulated together, which I haven't had the emotional energy to go through at all. I'm taking care of three cats who I feel very ill-at-ease toward due to them being our cats. I'm trying to scrape by in a program I'm not happy in and for which I can barely motivate myself to do the work. I know no one here outside of my department - a group of people who are acquaintances at best. I have to figure out how the hell to deal with the expensive tickets to and from Europe that are probably non-refundable and the nice hotel we booked in one of our honeymoon spots. I am filing a request for a medical leave for next semester, because I think my best option is to go live with my dad and start DBT treatment, and I honestly have very little interest in returning. I just feel like my entire life has collapsed in on itself, and now I have to try to rebuild without my strongest support agent, with a more severe diagnosis than I'd thought, and with the additional burden of having to account for three young cats.

I don't know what the conclusion here is - any advice would be wonderful, or really any thoughts. Even just related stories would help me feel less alone. Sorry for the excessive length of this post, I just needed to put this out there.