About Jansen Vee and Her Book — Watching Myself Be Borderline

Jansen Vee - Oregon borderline personality disorder author and speaker - 3I8A0096.jpg — About Jansen Vee, *Author*

I came to have borderline personality disorder as a result of a childhood spent in a family that had no significant nurturing. Being a highly sensitive person, this lack of nurturing had a more profound effect on me that it might have had on someone else. My brain did not develop normally. I don’t have the structure of the brain for human connection. This is the essence of borderline personality disorder for me — I do not make normal connections with human beings.

My life is a life of intense suffering.
I do not have good days.
I don’t experience pleasure.

When I hear people talk about something that is amazing to them, for example, “Isn’t it amazing how our bodies heal themselves,” I have no frame of reference for understanding what they are saying.

Nothing has ever seemed amazing or wonderful to me. That kind of pleasure is something I know nothing about.

Jansen Vee - Borderline personality disorder memoir3I8A0127.jpg — Do you think it might be helpful to read my story?

Might it be helpful to gain some insight into…

the life of a little girl who ended up with a terrible and painful mental illness?
Could this help you understand your own suffering?
the life of a woman who finds every day to be a burden?
Could this help you understand someone you care about who is suffering?
the life of the fine mathematician who is by no means stupid but whose intelligence cannot save her from mental illness?
Could this help you understand that mental illness is not a thinking problem?

Mine is a story of being borderline and watching myself be borderline at the same time. I can see my mental illness behaviors unfolding in front of me, yet I cannot do anything to stop them.

Understanding that I’m mentally ill does not stop me from being mentally ill.

Still, there is some benefit from understanding mental illness.

If you are interested in knowing a little more about me:

I am a woman with a very mathematical and analytical mind; I live in Portland, Oregon. Retired from a 20-year teaching career, I especially enjoyed the terms during which I got to teach college students about Turing machines, conceptual machines that model computation.

Now I am spending my time growing as a human person, making my homeowners’ association a kinder and gentler organization, writing about issues close to my heart and doing the many boring things required to keep my skin and lungs happy. I am a life-long liberal Christian and am 60 years old.