Before I became ill, I had started working as a secretary to an executive vice president at a mid-sized advertising agency in Manhattan. After 18 months he promoted me to an assistant to a woman they hired to run the Consumer Promotion Department (pre-Internet that was coupons in Sunday newspaper inserts). From that job I worked my way up to Consumer Promotion Development Manager at Lever Brothers, part of Unilever, one of the largest packaged goods companies in the world.

When I became ill with anorexia for the second time and was hospitalized for an extended period, they let me go. (This was before the Americans with Disabilities Act.) I was bereft. I’d worked so hard to get to where I’d been. In 1990, I attempted suicide for the second time and was diagnosed with BPD.

My old consumer promotion manager from the advertising agency called me at some point and offered me a job at Kraft, another huge, packaged goods company. Taking this job was a mistake. I was still in the throes of my BPD diagnosis, as well as the anorexia and depression. Consumer promotion was transitioning to using computers and I couldn’t keep up. I lasted a year, only because my manager urged me to hang in there, but I ended up quitting, feeling inadequate and ashamed.

I earned my master’s degree in social work in 2000 and immediately landed a job at........

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