What fades quickly, and what stays

The same sixteen-year study counted twenty-four features of BPD separately. Ten years on, half of them remained in fewer than one person in seven.

The loudest go first: self-harm, attempts, making demands of others. Exactly the things this diagnosis gets recognised by from the outside.

The quiet ones stay longest: anger, loneliness, emptiness, not being able to bear your own company, the habit of leaning on nobody. Nobody sees those, and those are what you go on living with.

This inverts the ordinary expectation, and it is worth knowing in advance: when the loud things go and the quiet ones stay, it is easy to decide nothing changed. Something did — just not the part visible from outside.