So,  because I have no filter,  and because I believe in living without apology,  (even though much of the time I feel like I need to apologize for my existence,) and because I believe that the most vital activism is personal,  and often a little dangerous,  I want to talk about something that happened today in therapy: I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.  
I'm only beginning to learn exactly what that means. 
I know that there are a lot of stigma and assumptions around it,  and that many of them are completely wrong.  I know that it's inextricably tied to having survived years of violent and sometimes deadly abuse at the hands of ignorant,  intolerant,  queerbashing bigots, and two sexual assaults that happened to occur during seminal periods of my life when I should have been building a sense of self.  I know,  thanks to a wonderful friend of mine who also lives with BPD and has an amazing blog on the subject,  that my extremely heightened sense of empathy,  something I developed as a survival mechanism,  is a part of BPD.  

Being diagnosed with something that carries such a stigma is scary,  but having a name for why I spend so much of my life feeling disconnected from others and empty inside,  or why I've dealt with suicidality since I was 8 years old,  or why I have such an intense fear of abandonment, feels oddly hopeful;  I know I'm not the only one in the world anymore, and for that,  I'm thankful.