I sort of felt that I like had it for a while, but I feel like I had a lot of internalized ableism that prevented me from actually looking into it. So I went to /r/bpd and holyshit. I was honestly in shock for at least a minute at how much I immediately and deeply empathized with most of the posters. A huge amount of things throughout my life just instantly clicked. Like, this year I ended getting super attached to this guy I met on a discord. It's really obvious in hind sight how bad I just wanted to be around this guy and how that should have thrown up some red flags for me. Now, we'd had a rough patch at one point where I had a hard time not messaging them . It came with with all of the bpd fixings of paranoia about how my "favorite person" (that is what other people with bpd were using to describe the person that obsess over so I'll use it too) secretly hated me and desperately trying to fix problems that either don't exist or that I'm blatantly causing by trying to fix the phantom problems (causing a death spiral), etc. We were able to work our way through that particular though, and we decided to meet up in real life. We had a good time, and I honestly don't think I could have felt as good as I did in that moment, just a mountain of unnoticed red flags. I was being impulsive and a bit flirty and i pushed they're boundaries. I never noticed what I was actually doing, because I was basically high on just being near this person, and they were too scared to really tell me that i was being the weird asshole I was. They spoke with me the next day and laid it out to me. I felt so intensely guilty that I had a pretty sever panic attack. I don't even remember most of our interaction after that beyond being completely stiff (basically in actual shock) and random snippets of cringey shit I was saying to either try to fix things and hope that things would just continue as if things didn't happen. They had to drive me home where I continued to cry for hours with my only conversation being with a mutual friend who didn't really understand what was happening (to be fair I didn't at the time either) was basically treating me like some sort of predator because I had hurt our friend (they had their own trauma that made the whole thing a big deal rather than a simple faux pa it would have been in a vacuum). I didn't eat for days, and basically only ate once a day, at most, for months. I lost 40 lbs, because felt that I didn't deserve to eat. I started having suicidal thoughts, but only ever in the context that maybe I died that my fp would care about me again. It was truly vile, but I never told anyone about my anorexia or my suicidal thoughts. I felt so intensely ashamed and guilty and just KNEW (I didn't know, but yeah) that, even I was legitimately trying to seek help, our mutual friends would crucify me if I reached out to anyone to talk about my mental health in dms. I basically only knew that I needed to stay away from my fp and never speak to them. The problem was that I really needed support just to not have panic attacks every day or two (even if I could never bring myself to actually explain why I suddenly felt the way I did), and they only friends i had were tied to the server both me and my fp had met. The place meant a lot to both of us (it was a small tight knit group of leftists), and we basically became each other's trigger when we were both around. I was so fucking dramatic to myself that just sat in vc on the server and tried soak up anything to distract myself and make sure that I was never alone long enough to get into some really dark lines of thought. I ended up driving my fp away from a server they needed too. Things came to a head when they went to the mods to get more space for months after our falling out, but the mods decided that I should be removed instead which caused a lot of drama and broke the friend group apart. I went from awful back to basically catatonic again, and the people who defending me ended saying some awful shit in anger against fp and the people who'd remained (which I confronted them later, and most of them realized what they'd done, but it was too late to really change anything). So I got the full BPD nightmare of having things you'd never talk about burst out in the open and then end up losing most of your friends and not really feeling safe around the ones that remained. More anorexia and more dark thoughts. This whole time I didn't really understand why I was acting the way I was until I found out about bpd and even didn't really hit me until I found others who had it. It made me realize that this entire situation with my fp had happened before almost a dozen times, it's just that those times were unrequited so I was just a distant weirdo who'd gotten attached, because someone gave me attention at some point. The massive mood swings, the starvation, the guilty thoughts and anger (I basically only felt angry towards myself which is apparently a "quiet" bpd thing) turned inward to the point of self flagellation, betting my life on a single person because they were kind to me, paranoia about whether my negative feelings are actually real (and not something I made up to get back my someone), emotional "amnesia" (I'd forget how I felt the instant I was around my fp or think about them whether negative or positive idk how to describe it), and feeling like I'm a fake person (disassociating and just having a "plastic" personality unless your around your fp) because of how much I mask how I feel (I'm autistic too which adds to the fire). I've had a rough Christmas, but I'm also really fucking glad that I now know how to describe how I feel, because other people suffer as I do.

To end it, until I fully accepted what I was feeling I didn't realize how extraordinarily ableist people are towards people with BPD. I feel this has a lot to do with sexism, and how BPD is associated with teenager girls and crazy ex girlfriends (you know how that goes in society). I honestly admit that maybe there was some sort of unintentional sexist ableism in myself that caused to doubt my self about how I was feeling for so long. God this a long post for me.