Growing up, emotions were impossible for me to understand.  I had no friends growing up and was bullied because I had basically no social intelligence.  I didn't understand why people would suddenly change from baseline to furiously pissed at the drop of a hat, and I could never understand why some things I said had such a profound effect on people.  My family also was very narcissistic and carries beliefs like everyone in our family is 'better' than 99% of other people, and the vast majority of people are irredeemably stupid, which made me act superior and gross for a lot of my early life.  I've done my hardest to re-wire this part of my upbringing and understand that I'm not 'special' or any better than anyone else.  I don't deserve special treatment just because of a test result or the family that I was born into.

I've been pretty 'sick' my entire life, but it's always been chalked up to 'chemical imbalances', depression, or bipolar, neither of which seemed to fit, and treatment never helped.  I always felt like I was on the outside, and took everything at face value.  I knew I was missing core knowledge about relationships and emotions, and was (and still am) very angry that it feels like an entire world is closed off to me no matter what I do.

I watched people's conversations completely mystified at how natural they seemed.  For the longest time I thought I was autistic/asperger's because I couldn't pick up social signals.  I wouldn't be surprised if I still fell on the spectrum as it is though.

In school, I fell into a crowd that experimented with weed and shrooms, which I had never done before as I was raised extremely strictly growing up to never drink or do drugs.  So, I tried shrooms with that group, and it literally felt like a new part of my brain had opened up, for better or worse.

I remember very vividly 'entering' the mind of my roommate, and living as him through his middle school years, watching him being teased and bullied, but experiencing it as if it was me.  He was very quiet, and we never really got along.  He didn't share a lot about himself, but it was clear he had some baggage like me.  It was the most extreme version of living in someone else's shoes that you could imagine, all condensed into a hour long (?) period of actually being someone else.  As I started coming down, I literally started ugly crying from the surge of emotion I felt from it.  People asked if I was ok, and I just looked at my roommate and asked if HE was ok - it was so intense and felt like it changed the wiring of my brain.

Suddenly, I could 'read' people.  Things like micro-expressions, body language, tone, all of it suddenly made sense.  My disorder and terrible self-esteem unfortunately cause me to notice all these things, yet turn them all into worst-case scenarios, so now I'm hyper-aware of things like someone checking their watch, looking at the door, and assume it's because they don't like me.

My point of all this - my belief is that BPD is caused by unhealthy emotional coping mechanisms that we never learned in our lives.  I went through 18 years of being completely unaware of others' emotions or thoughts and one single experience with psilocybin completely changed my entire thought process.  Is there any possibility that psilocybin can be a 'reset' button on our upbringing and help put all this into place?