I'm a social worker and also a recovering borderline (emphasis on recovering, not "cured"). It can be a struggle working in social work and being in the "crazy closet", pretending that I have my shit together and there isn't a raging storm inside my head, or that I don't struggle with the same things  as the clients I'm helping.

The first half of my 20s we're a trainwreck and I lost a ton of friends, some I would go as far to say as best friends. I'm 27 now, and things have stabilized-ish in my friendships, but from 22-24, I was losing people left and right. Many people just stopped talking to me and straight up ghosted.

Flash forward to present day. I just started a new job (case manager) and come to discover that not one but TWO of my new coworkers are good friends (one a roommate) with an ex-best friend who dumped me 3 years ago. They talk about her a lot, what they did on the weekends, how close they're becoming...all the while I pretend that I don't know her and her husband, that I wasn't in their wedding, that these people are just strangers I'm hearing about for the first time. It's painful, I used to BE that person in their lives. It's triggering the hell out of me.

Not to mention that I'm being assigned a lot of clients who suffer from BPD, and I get to hear what my coworkers think of these "difficult" clients...lol....being the fly on the wall is really something...

 Will my ex-friend OUT me, in a profession where keeping my diagnosis under wraps is imperative? I also feel triggered as this is drudging up past abandonment wounds and self-hatred over how many friends I lost over those years, that woman in particular. I know there's nothing I can do to change the past. I want to know...

I would like to get close/have a good relationship with these new coworkers, but feel I can't because the ex-friend could reveal how awful I was back then. Part of me is always afraid that awfulness never changed.

Do you work in a professional job? How do you deal with imposter syndrome?

How have you moved past the pain of abandonment by friends? 