At its extreme, it may mean having to turn to others for cues in order to know when to eat or drink, work or rest, or even laugh or cry. It may mean intensely embracing a person, idea, or thing one day, and having no use at all for it the next. This lack of a constant picture of one's self, one's values, or one's passions is at the heart of the borderline personality. Imagine floating randomly through space without a sense of up or down and without a map to show you either your origin or your destination. To be borderline means to lack grounding emotionally and to exist from moment to moment without any sense of continuity, predicatability, or meaning.
Life is experienced in fragments, more like a series of snapshots than a moving picture.
If you are borderline, your desperate search for substance and meaning can end with treatment. When it gets too painful to stand, I just go away,' explained Julie. Julie was a young woman who had been horribly abused as a child. She had developed the ability to retreat into a world of fantasy whenever painful things happened to her body. She would also 'go away', when she felt attacked emotionally.