What makes it a disorder rather than just your personality?

A difficulty with Borderline Personality Disorder is that it is characterised by a set of symptoms which if all scaled down, most of the population probably experience. These being: antisocial behavior, compulsive behavior, hostility, impulsivity, irritability, risky behavior, self-destructive behavior, self-harm, social isolation, or lack of restraint, anger, anxiety, general discontent, guilt, inability to feel pleasure, loneliness, mood swings, or sadness, distorted self-image, fear, grandiosity, or narcissism, persistent thoughts of suicide.
Every person I know can tick a few off that list, yet they don’t have a disorder, it is genuinely just their personality. So what makes mine a disorder? The issue is that I have the entire list, and that the problematic side never goes away. At any time of the day I would say I have at least 5 of these happening, all the time, day and night. If I am at the ‘happier’ and of the mood spectrum I am also incredibly impulsive and obsessive, with almost no restraint, compulsive, self-destructive and feel guilty. When I am at the ‘sad’ end of the spectrum I get deeply depressed, feel no pleasure doing the things I usually love, have persistent suicidal thoughts, an very antisocial, highly likely to be self-destructive, incredibly lonely and with such a distorted view of myself that I often believe I don’t deserve basic needs, like drinking water. Along the way, between these moods, I have entire ranges of pain from anxiety and panic attacks or total dissociation to severe attacks of paranoia or hallucinations.

Those things are not my personality; I still have a personality aside from my disorder, but the unrelenting and persistently changing nature of these symptoms is what makes Borderline Personality Disorder such a problem. It isn’t how I was born, it was developed more like a disease or virus, inside my brain. One day I will have a life without these symptoms, but until then I will have to keep fighting to not be the 1 in 10 people with BPD who dies by suicide. 1 in 10 who die because of this disorder.

So if you read a summary of my symptoms and think ‘yeah I’ve had a few of them before, it isn’t a disorder, it’s just being angry sometimes’, then no. No, no, no. Please respect that the list above isn’t what sometimes happens, it has been unrelenting for the last 7 years of my life. I am desperate from a break but just like any long term illness, I am going to have to recover, slowly, patiently, and with a lot of hard work, until I get that break. BPD is not a life sentence, but for the years of my life that I suffer from it, it is every minute of every day. There is no such thing as a break from a personality disorder, and that is why it is a disorder.