At age 15, I was already seeing a therapist and at first they diagnosed me with moderate depression. I’d never heard of borderline personality disorder until I went into the hospital at age 27 and was diagnosed with it. I’m 34 now.
All my life I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I thought I was crazy. All these labels that didn’t quite seem to fit. Depression. Someone said ADHD. Someone else said bipolar. Then finally I went to the hospital and started reading the criteria, these nine symptoms, of borderline personality disorder, and I’m like, oh my god, this is like my autobiography. I remember it being the first time I ever heard of it. How come I’ve never heard of this before?
It was a complete relief. Now I knew! Before I was just thinking, oh, I’m crazy, because I couldn’t figure it out. But now I had a label with it and even a plan that I could use to help me treat it. That was the best. The diagnosis pretty much saved my life, I believe. Without it I would still be struggling.
After being diagnosed, I knew I wanted to do something empowering. First, in 2007, I did this bicycle charity ride from San Francisco to L.A. in seven days. It was a great experience, but I never wanted to see a bicycle after that!
So I was like, what else can I do? Sometimes cycling can be lonely if you’re not with a group, especially when you’re training, so I wanted to do something that was more interactive. I guess it was 2008, or 2009, when I used to go to a boxing club. Just for fitness. It was only when we decided to make a film that I decided to train for a competition.
My first ever fight was scary.
The initial idea was to follow my training and also my therapy and my treatment, to see if there were any parallels between that and the fight. The fight for boxing and the fight for mental illness, and what happens internally. I’m a shy person by nature, but I knew that the message I wanted to share was more important than my shyness: whatever you want to set out to do, even if you have a mental disorder, it’s still doable. It might be harder than for other people, but it’s still a worthy pursuit to try for.
Boxing has definitely been a great metaphor for me to apply myself in other avenues. Every time I learn something new in boxing, I feel like I can apply it to how to cope or how to deal with BPD – and BPD is something that adds meaning to my life because I can speak about it.
My first ever fight was scary. And I was hungry. You have to make your weight, to be in your weight class. I saw my opponent – and of course she was in my same weight class – but she was a lot shorter than me, and, oh my god, she looks like a pit bull and I looked like this rescue greyhound, so tall and skinny… Basically I said, OK, I just gotta do what I’ve gotta do. And luckily I etched out a win.
Throughout my competitive career I had five fights and I won four. So not too bad. You reach a certain age, though, when you can’t compete anymore. So now I’m just doing it for fitness again, and training. I still spar and stuff like that but I don’t compete anymore. I retired already from boxing.