Why there's no stand-up about BPD—and the premise that helped me move forward
For the last 18 months or so, I've been studying 📝Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Not as a clinician, but as someone desperately trying to understand an intense, destabilizing relationship with a person who I believe fits the criteria for the disorder. I’ve read all the usual books: 📝I Hate You, Don't Leave Me, 📝Stop Walking on Eggshells, Loving Someone with BPD, plus a bunch of academic papers and clinical literature. I even built an AI that synthesizes the content from those books to help me see and understand patterns, decode and draft textual communications, and regulate my own behavior in real time.
Eventually, I built a second AI agent, 📝Dialogue Dojo (agent)—a kind of 📝Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) sparring partner—to help me practice skills in the moment and reduce the chances of unintentionally triggering them. All of that was part of a system I put together to survive, disentangle, heal, and thrive beyond a relationship with someone who is BPD. That’s not the point of this post though.
This is about what happened in the calm after the crisis.
After I’d processed enough of the trauma to start laughing again, I found myself looking for stand-up comedy about BPD. I figured maybe someone else had mined this particular brand of chaos for humor. But what I found was... nothing. Jokes about 📝Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and 📝Bipolar Disorder were easy to find, but there was a comedic desert when it came to borderline.
That gap got me thinking. Why?
Eventually, I remembered a Chris Rock interview where he talks about a moment early in his career when he bombed opening for Seinfeld. Afterward, Seinfeld reasoned to him: “If the audience doesn’t understand the premise, they can’t laugh at the joke.” In this context, I started thinking about how to explain BPD to an audience to set up a joke and... it proved difficult.
- Source: 📝How Louis CK Tells A Joke
The reason we don’t see stand-up about BPD isn’t just because it’s taboo or stigmatized (though it absolutely is). It’s because there’s no widely understood 📝premise. You can explain narcissism in a sentence: “someone obsessed with their own importance.” You can explain bipolar the same way: one person cycling between two extreme states, manic and depressive.
But BPD? It’s slipperier.
There’s no clean one-liner. That slipperiness is part of what makes it so hard to diagnose. Borderline Personality Disorder exists in the borderlands between psychosis and neurosis. It’s a pattern of instability across identity, emotions, relationships, and behavior—but that instability often mimics other conditions like PTSD, bipolar, or complex trauma. Many clinicians hesitate to diagnose it because the label itself is stigmatized, controversial, and, in some circles, seen as untreatable—even though evidence-based therapies like DBT have radically changed the prognosis.
Eventually, I landed on something that helped me, and might help others:
To people with BPD, YOU can be two different people—someone to be idealized and cherished or someone to be devalued and undermined. Their perspective can shift in an instant, and the one they've adopted can last a few hours to a few days.
The switch between idealization and devaluation isn’t always conscious, but it’s real. One minute you’re the safest person they know. The next you’re a threat. There’s rarely a bridge between those states. Just a chasm you fall into, often without warning. That lens shift distorts everything—your intentions, your words, even your face. And if you’ve been in it, you know how destabilizing it is to be rendered a stranger to someone who once saw you as their whole world.
Obviously that's not the whole picture of BPD. There are overlapping co-morbidities with NPD, ADHD, neurodivergence, C-PTSD, and others. Many people with BPD are survivors of profound trauma, and not all are abusive or chaotic. But this framing—this lens-switch—has already begun to help me contextualize my experience in everyday conversation.
Instead of unpacking years of eggshells and rupture, I can now say something like: “It was a dynamic where I was one of two people in their eyes—someone to be idealized or someone to be devalued—and I never knew who they’d see.” That lands with people. It gives them a graspable metaphor. And it spares me from having to re-live it every time.
Anyway, just wanted to share this in case anyone else has struggled with how to explain what they went through. Or wanted to find some dark humor in the aftermath and realized, yeah—without a premise, there is no punchline.
And if you’ve found a better way to explain it to others, I’d love to hear it.