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Running a business with Borderline Disorder

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Running a business with Borderline Disorder

Postby FesEssential » Sun Apr 09, 2023 4:50 am

Hey, does anyone here have experience running and managing a business with Borderline Personality Disorder?

If so:

How do you find dealing with customers and difficult peoples?

How do you control strong negative emotions and feelings at work?

How do you stay positive?

I run my own cleaning company and would appreciate some advice and am curious to here peoples experiences.
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Re: Running a business with Borderline Disorder

Postby CatastropheJuice » Wed Jun 12, 2024 10:34 pm

I have been trying this for years. I last worked for a salaried job in 2010. I'll sum up my experience for you - it's constant failure and not much else. But to be fair I'm also diagnosed with ADHD, and I think a lot of it comes from that.

But I cannot deal with customers. The fear of insulting them accidentally or selling a flawed product means that my every interaction is a mild panic attack. I always assume I've done wrong even if the customer has zero complaints.

I also can't do books or taxes or even just hang onto receipts, but I think that has more to do with ADHD. However, I also cannot hire people to help me (not even an accountant to do my taxes) due to my fear of being stuck in some kind of uncomfortable situation. So I try to do everything myself and fail on much of it, the rest (including some extremely important things) just doesn't get done.

I also go through cycles of work and collapse. I spent the last week of May working my butt off. But then something minor happened and I emotionally collapsed afterwards and have spent the past 2 weeks basically sleeping all day in a rut of severe depression. I've literally done no work at all for 2 weeks. This is a super common cycle for me and it means that I earn about $5k/year or less.

So basically I just have a joke of a "business" that I run, and I'm humiliated to even tell people about it because of what a massive failure I am. Of course it doesn't help that I was in all the smart classes in high school and college so virtually every single person I grew up with now has million dollar houses and spend months going on luxurious vacations with their beautiful families while at the age of 50 I sit in my narcissistic mother's spare bedroom being berated by her like I'm a 7 year old boy. And of course every once in a while I get on Instagram and am reminded of these facts.

So I also cut off every friend I've ever had, because I'm so ashamed of the massive loser I turned out to be. I never post on social media, I only have the one account anyway. If someone messages me I ignore it because I do not want anyone to know my situation or what a P.O.S. I turned into over the years.
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