Well I'm not entirely "self" diagnosed. I tried to join the Navy back in 2014, but got separated two weeks into boot camp for mental health reasons. they never got the chance to fully diagnose me because I was in SEPS for such a short period of time, but I did remember BPD being brought up, so I googled it and found that I fit almost all the criteria. I just don't have any actual medical documents saying I have it. Hell, my mom even agrees with me and is trying to get me a psychiatric appointment, but it's hard when my dad does "believe" in mental illness, despite being bipolar himself.
As for Lawrence, I know he has a lot of the same issues I have with getting medical documents that say I have it. Parents, money, lack of transportation, and a lot of other things can prevent someone from getting a professional diagnosis, but I'd imagine he did the same thing I did basically, just rather than hearing it from some shit doctors at a shit place, he heard of it from friends or something.
tl;dr: We heard about it in our own ways, looked up the symptoms online (the DSM-5 is readily available in PDF form so it's not that hard), and saw that it matched us, but because of multiple difficult situations can't get a doctor to say "yes you have this".
You're welcome!! It is a cute little image honestly.
Well the first time I ever heard of him or whatever was in a fictionkin tag long ago, I mean, before I even went to boot camp I think, but I was too shy to even follow him because I looked up to him so much.
We didn't start talking until we both joined a fictionkin network together, for people kin with characters from the Mystery Skulls Animated video. I didn't even realize who he was until long after we started dating, but i really did like him from the get go. He was fun to talk to you know? And he shared some of my interests that others in the group didn't. So I guess my first impressions were, "holy heck this person is cool and I don't even deserve to have their presence on my dashboard goodbye" and then, "wow another Lewis! They're really nice and like things that I like! Cool!!"